Why aren't we building more homes?
The New Housing Pipeline Report prepared by the Home Builders Federation (HBF) and Glenigan in April 2016 shows some encouraging trends - the number of residential homes approved during the final quarter of 2015 was 20% up on both the third quarter and a year ago. This brought the overall number of new homes granted planning permission in 2015 to 281,000, representing a 5% rise on the previous year.
While this is positive news, it is clear that we are still falling short of the annual requirement of 220 – 250,000 new homes being delivered on the ground. In 2015 the total number of new homes registered was just 156,000. While we can’t make a direct comparison between the number of homes granted planning permission and those delivered in any single year, as consents tend to take longer than a year to implement, we do need to understand why we are still failing to build enough homes in the UK.
