Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham are treating us like mugs. But they won’t fool us for long.
Angela Rayner needs more than a hard hat and high-vis jacket to get this job done (Image: Getty)
Keir Starmer may have gone, but Labour is still serving up the same fantasy politics. And when it comes to housing, Angela Rayner is still the minister spouting nonsense, repeatedly promising to hit building targets that simply cannot be achieved. Now she’s gone into overdrive, and it will only make her and Andy Burnham look more ridiculous when reality strikes. Which won’t take long.
Under Starmer,, Labour pledged to “get Britain building again”. It promised 1.5million new homes over the full Parliament, an average of 300,000 a year. What Starmer didn’t tell us was how he’d do it, aside from getting Rayner to pose in a hard hat and high-vis jacket. I confidently predicted he would fail at the time, for a simple reason. Housebuilders simply didn’t have the capacity to build that many homes. And nobody else was going to do it.
In the real world, rather than Labour’s fantasy version, builders were cutting back as inflation drove up wages and materials, and rising mortgage rates hit demand. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s disastrous £25billion “jobs tax” squeezed profit margins further, while Rayner’s Employment Rights Bill piled on more pressure. Furious builders were in no mood to bail Starmer out.
Now Rayner is back in charge of housing and boasting that she’ll “tackle the housing crisis”. It’s still nonsense on stilts. Developers still won’t build if they can’t make their sums add up.
By June this year, just 392,400 homes had been added during Labour’s term, around 100,000 a year fewer than promised. Worse, half of this has been wiped out by new demand created by immigration.
Rayner just admitted that building 1.5million homes is a “really difficult stretch target”. Incredibly, she claims it hasn’t been abandoned. What’s the point of a target when you’ve already admitted you can’t hit it?
Last year, Rayner said there were “no excuses” for falling short. Now the excuses have begun. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook is blaming the Iran war for driving up costs.
Iran is only a tiny part of the story. Building each new home now costs £76,000 more than in 2020. Of that, more than £23,000 of that is down to government taxes and regulation, the Home Builders Federation calculates.
Andy Burnham has doubled down on Labour’s fantasy house building drive by promising the biggest council housebuilding programme in England since after the Second World War. That’s nonsense too.
His £39billion spending commitment has been torn to shreds, as it may only deliver at most just 15,494 homes per year. That’s if Chancellor John Healey can find the money.
Rayner and Burnham won’t come anywhere near hitting those targets, because those targets are pure fantasy. By expecting us to believe otherwise, they’re taking us for fools. We know who the real mugs are. The only things their planning reforms will build are more illegal traveller sites.