The housing crisis is worse than any of the parties are prepared to admit

Even a million new homes over five years won't be enough. The UK needs 1.5 million just to meet need.

In recent months, all three of the main parties have sought to demonstrate that they are responding to the housing crisis. Labour has pledged to build 200,000 homes a year by 2020 through the creation of new towns and garden cities. The Lib Dems have called for councils to be allowed to pool their borrowing limits in order to fund a major expansion of social housing. The Tories have launched Help to Buy, which, they claim, will stimulate supply as well as demand.

But for some idea of the extent to which all parties are still underplaying the extent of the crisis, it’s worth reading today’s Policy Exchange report on the subject. As it notes, the UK needs a minimum of 1.5 million new homes from 2015 to 2020 simply to meet need, 300,000 a year. Around 221,000 new households are expected to be formed each year over this period and there is a significant backlog. Thus, even the target spoken of in Labour circles – a million in five years – falls short. As the report says, “1 million homes over five years, around 200,000 homes in England, is actually a failure to keep up with predicted housing need, which is itself likely to be an underestimate of housing demand. Indeed, such language is unhelpful in many respects, as both need and demand are to some extent arbitrary. A young person living at home with their parents but who wants to leave might be seen as having a ‘demand’ or ‘need’ for housing, depending on how this is defined. They are not homeless, but they want to move out.”

If this government and the next are to even come close to meeting need, they will need to enable a dramatic expansion of both private and social housing. This will require further planning reform, action against landbanking and the removal of the cap on council borrowing (something that George Osborne, for entirely ideological reasons, has refused to do).

But before solving the crisis, politicians will need to acknowledge its scale. In today’s Evening Standard, one finds Grant Shapps boasting that Help to Buy will give Londoners “the homes they need” on the same day that DCLG figures showed that the net supply of housing rose by just 124,270 in 2012-13, a fall of 8% since 2011-12 and the lowest number since the series began in 2000-01. Help to Buy, which seeks to inflate demand, rather than supply (“Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up”, George Osborne reportedly told the cabinet), will do almost nothing to change this. While in a better position than the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems are still showing little of the ambition required. If an even greater number of families are not to be denied the basic right to housing, that must change – and soon.