Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if she will make an estimate of how long housing delivery of 300,000 per year would need to be sustained to result in a reduction in the ratio of wages to house prices to 1997 levels.

As the hon. Member is aware, the government has not set interim annual targets in respect of its ambitious Plan for Change milestone of delivering 1.5 million safe and decent homes in this Parliament. As such, we do not have an annual housing target of 300,000 homes. Due to the reduced levels of housing supply that we inherited from the previous government, we have been clear that rates of housebuilding will have to increase significantly in the later years of the Parliament.

House prices are influenced by a variety of economic factors, including but not limited to, the supply of new homes. For more information on the factors that influence house prices, I refer the hon. Member to the publication “Analysis of the Determinants of House Price Changes” (2018) which can be found here.

The effects of housing undersupply can be seen in affordability and rent pressures. Boosting the supply of homes of all tenures therefore must be at the heart of any strategy to improve housing affordability.

Through the revised National Planning Policy Framework published on 12 December 2024, the government implemented a new standard method for assessing housing needs to increase supply and better direct new homes to the areas where they are currently least affordable and therefore most needed.