The Conservatives Housing Manifesto Speech yesterday
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Britain has been chronically under-building for decades,” Mr Cameron said.
“If we continue on this current trajectory then we will be building 200,000 homes a year – not by 2020, as Labour hope to achieve, but by 2017.”
This is npt evident from the statistics, so Grant Shapps must have written it
Lets look at the record of completions
2010 137.279
2011 141,900
2012 143, 940
2014 137,980
2015 (predicted from quarterly trends) 135, 480
Even the DCLG in leaker papers are predicting a 2015 fall
So he expects it to increase by 32,000 a year each year for two years, fantastic, unevidenced, spin.
Brandon Lewis on Mumsnet yesterday gave the game away
The pledge by Labour to build 200,000 by 2020 seems to miss the fact that our current plans and the starter homes scheme announced today mean that a Conservative government will be building 200,000 per year by 2017/18. Councils already have the power Emma refers to above, under the Localism Act and via local plans, and neighbourhood plans can go even further in giving local people a real say in planning.
So 200,000 homes over 4 years = 50,000 a year which is the gap. This assumes that they will achieve 50,000 a year net new. But as we have shown on this blog the poor design of the starter homes policy means that it only applies to sites which would have come forward for housing anyway – so net new = zero.
