The Government is today unveiling plans to boost mobility in social housing with the aim of introducing measures which would enable tenants to move to find jobs.

Defending the programme this morning, Housing Minister Grant Shapps suggested the scheme was a necessary step to tackle the housing crisis faced in the UK.

Full Fact decided to take a closer look at the figures he used.

The Claim

Speaking on the Today programme this morning, Mr Shapps was pressed on why the Government did not simply build more homes to solve the housing crisis.

In response, Mr Shapps pointed to the low levels of house building seen under the last Government.

 “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.”

So was house building under the last Labour government at its lowest level since the first Labour Government?

Analysis

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) publishes statistics for the number of houses completed annually dating back to 1946. These are broken down by tenure, to give a picture of the amount of both social and private accommodation built.

Looking at the UK wide figures, the most recent data available is for 2008 - but this was not the lowest annual house building level since 1924. In 2001, 2000 and 1992 there were a lower amount of completions than the 182,690 homes built in 2008.

Figures specifically for England do go up to 2009, and show a marked drop compared to 2008 – 118,010 compared with 142,400 the year before - suggesting that if 2009 data was available for the UK a figure much lower than the 2008 amount would be recorded.

But this is still not the lowest figure since 1924, because in 1946 only 49,250 homes were completed – far lower than 2009 levels.

We put these inconsistencies to the Department who clarified that Mr Shapps was referring to “peacetime house building” even though this had not been made clear in the interview.

The other issue is that the figures deal with all homes,  encompassing those built in both the private and social housing sectors.

Given Mr Shapps blamed the low building rates on the “top-down targets” it is worth taking a look at completion rates for both registered social landlords and local authority homes – areas more subject to Government targets.

As a spokesman for the National Housing Federation explained, in the last spending review funding was made available for housing associations to apply for grants, on the proviso that house building targets were met.  So a discussion of how social housing has fared seems relevant to Mr Shapps’ claim.

In 2009 in England, the combined figure of registered social landlord (RSL) and local authority (LA) housing completed was 25,550. In 1946 this figure was 20,500, but in 1999 it was just 4,090.

Such figures only deal with England, because data for the UK is much more limited. No data for Northern Ireland is available for 1946-8, nor is it available for Wales in 2009.

Even with this limited UK data, it can be seen that the lowest year for social housing completion was 2003, when 17,870 RSL and LA homes were built compared to 32,100 in 2008.

While social house building is still at relatively low levels compared to, say, the 1970s it has been increasing in recent years, and the drop in house building is also due to a sharp reduction in private construction caused by the recession.

As the National Housing Federation explained: “When you break down those figures for last few years, the number of social homes have increased while overall numbers of private homes has decreased, particularly during the recession.

“This is because housing associations were able to draw down grants from Government, and were also able to borrow money and finance homes through a variety of means, whereas in the private sector people weren’t buying houses, mortgages are drying up and almost overnight building work stopped.”

Conclusion

From the data available it seems that Mr Shapps facts were not 100 per cent accurate when he claimed house building was is at its lowest level since 1924.

Given the effects of the Second World War, it is perhaps unsurprising that less houses were completed in 1946 than 2009, so the clarification from the Department that he intended to refer to peacetime house building is welcome.

However, the failure to mention that the fall in house building was almost entirely in the private sector, and was at least in part affected by the recession, is a concern.

On this point, the Department simply directed us back to Mr Shapps’ remarks on the Today Programme, and the DCLG press release.

Yet Mr Shapps is correct to point to the low house building levels under Labour.  Earlier this year Full Fact backed a claim by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt that the last Conservative government built more social housing than Labour did.

By Patrick Casey