UK housing market: Autumn Statement 2023 reaction
The government’s ability to boost housing delivery is limited as higher mortgage rates curb demand.
3 minutes to read
The government has successfully halved inflation, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt said in his Autumn Statement this week.
It will also unlock tens of thousands of new homes by investing in the planning system, he added in his hour-long address to Parliament.
Both appear to be good news for the UK housing market but the government’s role in delivering either is debatable.
The fall in inflation was inevitable as global energy prices dropped and we have previously questioned the logic of reforming the planning system to unleash waves of housebuilding.
It’s an awkward truth for politicians who are elected to fix things, but housing delivery is more closely tied to economic than political cycles.
Housebuilders have cut jobs in recent months and the number of projects granted planning permission in Q2 fell to the lowest level since records began in 2006. This was due to falling demand and higher mortgage rates more than the planning system.
Tougher water pollution rules are also a problem for developers but, in such a demand-led market, will mitigating them “unlock 40,000 homes over the next five years” as Hunt suggested this week?
As the general election approaches, expect politicians to ignore such nuances in favour of more easily-digestible soundbites.
A day before the Autumn Statement, the Home Builders Federation published a ten-point plan called Firmer Foundations, designed to increase housing supply. It suggested using a percentage uplift method for growing housing stock within a local authority rather than the more intangible method of household projections.
“It might not look like it, but this document could mark a fundamental shift in future policy debates in reference to housing,” said Philip Barnes, group land director at Barratt, on LinkedIn.
Overall, the Autumn Statement was short on eye-catching measures for the UK housing market. Many hope they will come in 2024 and there will inevitably be speculation mixed with a healthy dose of wishful thinking around a stamp duty cut.
The Chancellor did extend the mortgage guarantee scheme, which sends a positive message to borrowers without being transformational, and he earmarked £3 million to improve the home buying process through greater digitisation.
The Autumn Statement also included a proposal to make splitting a house into two flats easier under the planning system. On the basis that two flats are generally worth more than one house, could this be the first bit of good news for landlords in a while?
OBR breakdown
Alongside the statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted that house prices will rise by 0.9% this year before falling 4.7% next year.
However, the numbers only add to the confusing picture surrounding property prices. The low number of transactions could be skewing the data, as suggested by the ONS recently when it warned its house price index would be subject to more revisions than normal in coming months due to volumes that were “considerably lower” than historical levels.
We instead forecast that house price declines will become shallower as the mortgage market stabilises.
The OBR also forecast that housing transactions will fall by 25% this fiscal year to 967,000, with stamp duty receipts declining by 22% to £13 billion. These declines have been the real story of this current slowdown, as we explored here.
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