Can Labour Deliver 100,000 Social Homes Annually Within Five Years?

This was the headline promise from the leaked version of Labour’s manifesto. How feasible is it? Labour seems to have stepped back from a much more ambitious target of delivering 500,000 affordable homes over a five-year parliament. The new pledge is still ambitious but appears much more realistic. It says ‘By the end of the next Parliament we will be building at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year for rent or sale’. Let’s have a closer look at what it would require. Labour’s peak output was 61,090 in 2010/11, and the coalition managed 66,700 in 2014/15. Output fell sharply in the following year, to only 32,630, because the end of the previous financial year had been the cut-off date for the previous Affordable Homes Programme. Read more on the Red Brick blog.