1.5 million homes, the maths, and why permissions alone will not close the gap

The Government set itself a plain, countable promise: 1.5 million homes over the course of this Parliament. Countable promises are unkind, because you can check them. Full Fact keeps a running tracker of the figure, drawing on BCIS data, and the check does not flatter anyone. From July 2024 to March 2026 there were roughly 342,100 net additional dwellings. That is about 23 per cent of the target, on a clock that is a good deal more than 23 per cent run down. On the current trajectory the promise is not close.

It gets starker the nearer you look. Savills, in its English Housing Supply update for the first quarter of 2026, put completions for 2025-26 at 143,110, the lowest since 2015-16. The first quarter of 2026 alone managed just 32,560. So the shortfall is not a slow, historic drift. Supply is falling now, at the exact moment policy is leaning hardest on it to rise.

The interesting question is why the target will be missed, not whether, because the answer decides what actually helps. And the answer cuts against most of the stories told about it.

The permissions are not the problem

The instinct is to reach for the planning system. Grant more permissions, the thinking goes, and the homes follow. But the numbers do not behave that way, and Lichfields has done the arithmetic that shows why.

Their work puts planning permissions running at something like 233,000 homes a year. Set against a target of 300,000, that already looks short. But the permission is not the home. Once you account for the sites that lapse, along with those that get re-planned or never come forward at all, roughly 233,000 consents translate to only about 175,000 homes actually built. Lichfields’ further point is the one that should give everyone pause: to reliably deliver at the target rate, the system would need to be consenting on the order of 1.7 million homes’ worth of permissions, because so many leak away between the grant and the ground.

That is a pipeline problem, not a permission problem. You can pour more in at the top and still get a trickle at the bottom if the pipe leaks in the middle. Granting consents faster, on its own, largely fills a bucket with a hole in it.

Land banking is the wrong villain

If it is not the planners, the next name in the frame is usually the housebuilders, accused of sitting on permissions and drip-feeding homes to keep prices high. It is a satisfying story. It is mostly not what the data shows.

The Home Builders Federation has published figures that undercut the land-banking narrative directly. The stock of unimplemented permissions is not a warehouse of deliberately withheld homes. It is, in large part, the ordinary state of a slow pipeline: sites working through the many stages between an outline consent and a spade, discharging conditions, sorting infrastructure, reserved matters, phasing. A large-site permission is a starting gun, not a finished home, and the years between the two are mostly process rather than conspiracy.

This matters because if you misdiagnose the problem you prescribe the wrong medicine. Threaten builders with “use it or lose it” penalties and you punish the working of a pipeline that is already slow for structural reasons, rather than fixing the structure. There is a real question about build-out rates, the pace at which a single large site absorbs homes into a local market, and it is worth taking seriously. But that is a question about how sites deliver, not about landowners or builders hiding homes out of spite.

Which brings it back to where a landowner sits in all this. The bottleneck is not owners refusing to release land or developers hoarding paper. It is the long, leaky journey from a consent to a completion, and the quality and readiness of the sites that enter it.

What this means for the land that actually delivers

If the gap is in the pipeline, then the sites that help close it are the ones that flow through it cleanly. Well-located land, with a credible case, in a place that needs the homes and can absorb them, promoted so the permission that emerges is one a capable builder will actually implement rather than shelve. A consent that lapses helps no one, least of all the landowner whose land carried it.

This is the quiet argument for genuine alignment. A passive arrangement, land tied up and left, is content once a permission exists on paper, because the paper is often where the value is booked. But a permission is not a payday if it never becomes homes. A promoter whose interest is bound to the built outcome and to the highest-value result has every reason to care not just that consent is won, but that the site is one that delivers: the right land, shaped from the first walk of it and sold on to a builder who will build. That alignment is the difference between a landowner’s field becoming part of the 175,000 and becoming part of the leak.

None of this is a reason for gloom. The country needs the homes, and the case for building is beyond argument. The slippage in the target describes a broken pipeline, not a broken country. But it does reward clear eyes. The landowners who do well over the next few years will be the ones who understood that the value was never in the permission alone. It was in the home at the end of it.

If you want an honest first read on where your own land sits, our free Land Potential Check is the place to start.