Michael Gove stands by Tory plan to build 300,000 new homes a year
The Conservatives’ manifesto target of 300,000 new homes a year still stands, the Housing Secretary has claimed in an about-turn on Liz Truss’s planning policy.
Ms Truss had promised an end to “Whitehall-inspired Stalinist housing targets” and instead wanted to use a mix of tax cuts and deregulation to encourage firms to build more.
But Michael Gove confirmed on Sunday that Rishi Sunak’s Government still intended to hit the promise made by the Tories in 2019.
When asked if 300,000 houses a year by 2025 – up from the current figure of around 240,000 a year – remained the Government’s target, Mr Gove replied: “Yes.”
He told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “No one can deny that it’s going to be made more difficult because of the economic circumstances that we face.
“We need to build more homes – we need to build more homes for people to own, we also need to build more homes for social rent, we need to build more council houses, more housing association homes. We need to build the right homes in the right places.
“But as Rishi said, we need to be straight with people. The cost of materials has increased because of the problems with global supply chains and also a very tight labour market means that the capacity to build those homes at the rate we’d want is constrained.”
Mr Gove urged a “fair way” to allocate housing need that took into account population change, describing some previous calculations as “wrong”.
“What we critically need to do is to make sure that we have local communities consenting to development, and that means that homes need to be more beautiful, it means we need the infrastructure alongside them.
“But it – critically – also means that we need to make sure that the environment is protected as well.”
Falling home ownership
Mr Gove warned in May many of the voters who abandoned the Conservatives during the local elections, in which the party lost hundreds of seats, did so to punish the party for falling rates of home ownership.
Lee Rowley, the housing minister, said in the summer Ms Truss had wanted to abolish top-down targets, and a source in her administration had described the 300,000 objective as “dead in the water” during her seven weeks in office.
Mr Sunak pledged in the Conservative leadership campaign this summer to turn renters into buyers, telling a Sky News interview: “We are the standard bearers for capitalism.
“But we can't expect future generations to share our belief in capitalism if they can't get their hands on capital. That's why I'll do whatever it takes to build affordable, plentiful housing, building the next generation of Conservative voters.”
In 2020-21, the net increase in dwellings in the UK dropped by 11 per cent year-on-year as construction was disrupted by the Covid pandemic.
Labour and material shortages have also combined to threaten progress towards the target amid staff shortages among bricklayers and ground workers, falling brick sales, and a struggle to find the subcontractors needed for projects.
