Government 'will miss housing target' without planning reform

Labour will miss its manifesto target of building 1.5m homes in England before the end of this parliament without more radical reform to the planning system, the thinktank the Centre for Cities warns today.

- Heather Stewart

Keir Starmer put tackling housing affordability at the heart of his pitch to voters, promising to "get Britain building again".

But the thinktank says the actions the government has taken so far - including re-establishing local housing targets and boosting funding for social housing - do not go far enough.

In a report, the Centre for Cities analyses housebuilding data stretching back to 1947, when the Town and Country Planning Act was introduced, laying the groundwork for the system in place today.

It argues that even if private sector building matched its strongest performance in that 80-year period, the government is still set to fall 388,000 homes short of its target.

Andrew Carter, the chief executive of the Centre for Cities, called on the government to be "much more ambitious" in pursuing its goal. "We're in a productivity crisis. The UK's big cities are the jobs and productivity engines of the economy but our planning system doesn't allow - and has never allowed - them to build an adequate supply of homes for everyone that could work there," he said.