Interesting to see two different lines being put forward by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) concerning the impact of targets for house building.

Yesterday Housing Minister Grant Shapps claimed: “House building is at the lowest since 1924, under the old system which was a sort of top-down targets [approach] to build those homes.”

When Full Fact looked into the claim, we found that while overall house building in 2009 was indeed low, the bulk of this has been due to a sharp fall in private sector completion rates. Social housing, while low in historical terms, had actually held up during the recession.

It was explained to us that part of the reason for this was that funding has been maintained through the recession with targets for house building in place.

So it seems that the recession played as much if not more of a part of the in the low figures for 2009 than housing targets. True, the building of social housing was declining through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, but it had begun to pick up slightly by the time of economic crisis.

Yet there are further developments this morning. The Financial Times reports a group of planning and engineering groups as well as charities have written to DCLG, to warn over the effects of scrapping some of these targets for building.

Given the comments made by Mr Shapps yesterday it is worth looking at how the Department responded to the issues raised in the letter.

A spokesman for DCLG is quoted as saying: “The current top-down bureaucratic planning model has been very good at generating impressive-sounding numbers but built nothing but resentment.”

So in the space of a day ‘top-down’ targets have gone from producing the lowest house building levels in over 80 years to impressive sounding numbers.

Who to believe…?