Background to Gove’s big announcement.

There is undeniably a housing crisis but it isn’t just a simple question of building for building’s sake.

We need the right sort of building in the right place.

From the Office for National Statistics:

There were 24,782,800 households in England and Wales on Census Day; the number of households increased by more than 1.4 million since 2011 (6.1%), when there were 23,366,044 households.

In 2021, there were 26.4 million dwellings in England and Wales, which has increased by 8.4% since 2011 (24.4 million dwellings) [an increase of 2.0 million]. This breaks down to 24.9 million dwellings in England and 1.5 million dwellings in Wales, which have increased from 23.0 million and 1.4 million dwellings respectively in 2011.