28/11/2025
🤯 Out of a £1.4 trillion Budget, just £3 billion of genuinely new, housing-relevant investment was announced (and most of it peripheral)!
The big housing capital, the £39bn 10-year programme and the National Housing Bank, was set months ago. Important, yes, but not a Budget response to a crisis. If housing really were being treated as a crisis, the government would be pulling every fiscal and regulatory lever it has.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals speak for themselves:
📈 UK households spend more of their budget on housing than most EU or OECD countries.
📊 1 in 5 people in England live in households spending over 40% of income on housing.
📈 Private renters spend around a third of disposable income on rent.
📊 Housing in the UK is 44% more expensive than the OECD norm.
We are drifting towards a system where housing wealth, particularly whether you can rely on grand/parental property coming your way, is becoming one of the strongest drivers of life chances. That is not a sustainable foundation for a productive, fair or mobile economy. 🫤
If we are serious about growth, housing delivery cannot be a DLUHC silo. It demands Treasury leadership and a cross-government mission to unlock supply at scale. The organisations we support are ready to deliver but they need clarity, consistency and an environment that enables building, not slows it down.
Would we have seen a more ambitious settlement for housing if Angela Rayner were still in post? 🤔
The UK is in the midst of a deep housing crisis, one that now underpins inequality, drives down productivity, constrains public finances and undermines generational opportunity. Yet the 2025 Budget, after months of preparation, did not meaningfully address it.
