Just 1,220 sites for private housing were granted planning permission in the first three months of 2026, the weakest quarter in two decades, according to figures compiled by the Home Builders Federation and construction consultancy Glenigan.
That compares with 2,000 in the same period of 2022 and almost 3,000 in 2017.
The approvals equate to a green light for 54,000 new homes. For a government that swept to power in 2024 promising 1.5 million homes in England over the five-year parliament, the numbers make grim reading.
Big sites are the problem
Ministers have bet heavily on supply-side reform, chiefly cutting planning red tape to speed developments through the system. The HBF and Glenigan data suggests this is working for smaller schemes, which are securing approval more readily.
The trouble lies further up the scale. Only 408 sites of ten homes or more won consent in the first quarter of 2026, the lowest figure since 2006 and down 13 per cent on a year earlier. In southern England, approvals of large sites fell 18 per cent.
Larger sites do the heavy lifting on volume, so their decline drags hard on total output. Over the latest 12-month period, permission was granted for 216,141 new homes in England. That is just 58 per cent of the 370,000-home annual delivery benchmark published under the government’s own National Planning Policy Framework, the level it says is needed to achieve 300,000 net additions a year.
The shortfall chimes with earlier research warning that Labour will fall well short of its 1.5 million homes target, even before the latest pipeline data landed.
Viability, not just planning
Neil Jefferson, chief executive of the HBF, credited the government for reforming planning rules but warned that amid “challenging housing market conditions and the long-term assault on housing viability, the new and improved planning system is still not delivering”.
“These positive moves to boost housing supply are being thwarted by the growing level of taxation and cost of policy requirements that are making many sites simply unviable to develop,” he said. “If the government wants to see housing supply increase, it has got to look wider than planning and tackle the two major constraints of site viability and affordability. If it does, the industry stands ready to increase output and deliver more private and affordable homes, creating jobs and boosting growth.”
The full quarterly dataset sits within the HBF’s long-running Housing Pipeline report series, which tracks approvals across England.
Help to Buy edges back onto the table
With the supply levers misfiring, attention is shifting to demand. Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister, is understood to be pushing for the return of a Help to Buy mortgage scheme to help first-time buyers onto the ladder, an idea previously resisted by the Treasury when Rachel Reeves was chancellor.
Pennycook is conducting a review with the housing department, now led by Angela Rayner, which had been due to publish its findings earlier this year. Rayner’s planning overhaul has already opened the door to building on green belt land.
The industry is applying pressure of its own. Jason Honeyman, chief executive of FTSE 250 housebuilder Bellway, last week called for Help to Buy to return and for last year’s stamp duty increase on first-time buyers to be reversed.
The government said it has “provided significant support for people to get on the housing ladder, including through access to shared-ownership schemes through the Social and Affordable Homes Programme and through changes to the mortgage rules”. It added that “a robust evaluation of the Help to Buy scheme is ongoing and will be published later this year, as is normal for all major programmes”.
What this means for investors
A thinning consent pipeline today is a supply shortage in three years’ time, and that arithmetic favours owners of existing stock. Rental demand should stay firm, and well-located secondhand property gains scarcity value as fewer new schemes come through.
For investors in new build, weak demand from individual buyers, with off-plan sales already at a 12-year low, keeps the door open to discounted bulk deals from builders hungry for volume. And if Pennycook wins the argument on Help to Buy, expect a repricing of new-build exposure well before any scheme launches.
