37,300 starts in Q4 2025. A 24% increase on the year before. Sounds impressive until you do the maths. That’s roughly 150,000 annualised. The target is 300,000 a year. So even with the rebound we are at half the rate needed.
Labour started 115,770 homes in their first year. That is 39% of the annual target. At what point does somebody admit this isn’t happening. Planning reforms mean nothing if the developers sit on permissions and drip feed supply to keep prices up. Which is exactly what they do.
Genuinely curious whether anyone here thinks 300k a year is even physically achievable given the state of the construction workforce. Where are the bricklayers coming from.
The workforce question is real but I’d argue it’s the second bottleneck, not the first. The first is planning departments themselves. Our local authority has lost something like a third of its planning officers since 2019 and the ones left are drowning in applications they can’t process quickly enough. A friend who put in a straightforward householder application in February was told eight weeks, realistic timescale fourteen. For major sites it’s worse.
You can reform the NPPF all you like, but if the local authorities don’t have the bodies to process applications the permissions just pile up. And then yes, as you say, the volume builders sit on them anyway because releasing too many plots at once drives down the price per unit. It’s a structural problem dressed up as a policy one.
The skills side is a whole other headache. I know two retired bricklayers from the allotment and neither of their sons went into the trade. Anecdotal, obviously, but I suspect it’s a pattern. 300,000 a year would need a construction workforce we simply don’t have and aren’t training for 
Planning departments are part of it but they’re not the main constraint. The main constraint is land banking. The big developers have planning permission for hundreds of thousands of homes already. They just don’t build them because releasing too many units at once would depress prices and hit their margins.
Barratt alone had something like 80,000 plots with planning as of their last annual report. They built about 17,000 that year. So 37,300 starts nationwide doesn’t tell you much about capacity. It tells you about how many the developers felt like building.
Planning reform is a distraction from this. Always has been.