New homes target 'must increase by at least 270,000 a year'

The government should aim to increase its new homes target by at least 270,000 if it truly wants to resolve affordability problems across the UK, the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU) has said.

The independent advisory body has said that affordability will continue to deteriorate even if the government is successful in its aim of building three million new homes by 2020, and suggested that around 270,000 extra homes a year would need to be built to combat this.

The average home already costs seven times the average salary, but even when current targets are taken into account this is still forecast to rise to nine-and-a-half times the average by 2026, an NHPAU report has advised.

"If you'd like to put this sort of thing into perspective we built more than that number back in the 1930s in Britain when we had a considerably smaller population," professor Stephen Nickell, co-author of the report, told the BBC.

"And most other countries in the developed world, proportionately speaking, build houses at a faster rate than we do," Mr Nickell added.

The report comes soon after a separate study into the plans by the Social Market Foundation estimated that two million of the new homes would have to be built on greenfield or greenbelt sites.

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