Is there still a housing shortage?

"We're building less than half the homes we need to keep up with demand", according to the Labour party this morning. The number of homes built over the past year is "lower than every year under the last Labour government".

Figures out yesterday confirm these oft-repeated claims. Over the past year (that's from April 2013 to March this year), 113,000 homes were completed in England alone. That's lower than Labour's lowest tally: 120,000 in the year ending in March 2010.

But there are signs that the trends are going to head upwards again: 132,000 homes were started over the same period, the highest level since mid-2008. Houses take time to build, so this will only show up in the completions figures further down the line.

The case is similar taking the less up-to-date figures for the whole of the UK.

The government's latest household projections for England suggest there are likely to be around 221,000 more households each year right up to 2021. If all these need a separate 'dwelling', then the 113,000 homes built over the last year make up just over half of the total.

The party also repeated the claim that under this government, we've seen the lowest peacetime housebuilding since the 1920s. The only figures that go back that far are for England and Wales combined, and show that the calendar year 2010 saw the trough, with 112,000 completed that year.

Of course, the previous Labour government left office five months into that year, so it's not really possible to separate the influence of the two administrations straddling 2010. The bigger picture, though, is of a much longer-term decline as well.