England will build 167,500 homes a year to 2029. The regulatory framework was written for 300,000.
Savills June 2026 forecasts show completions dropping to 150,000 in 2026/27 and 2027/28 as planning supply and viability pressures deepen.
Savills' June 2026 completions forecast shows England averaging 167,500 new homes a year through to 2029/30, well under half the Government's 300,000 annual target. Output is expected to fall further before it recovers: completions are projected to drop to around 150,000 in both 2026/27 and 2027/28 as constrained planning supply and development viability continue to suppress starts.
What happened
Savills published its Completion Forecasts update in June 2026, drawing on data across planning consents, housing starts, and energy performance certificates issued for new homes. After an estimated 189,000 completions in 2025/26, output is expected to contract further over the next two years before recovering gradually through the remainder of the decade.
The supply indicators are consistently negative. Full planning consents for new homes fell 39% in three years to around 180,000 in 2025. Housing starts are down 31% from peak. EPCs issued for new homes dropped 16% in the three years to December 2025, signalling that the pipeline behind current completions has continued to narrow.
Viability is the structural constraint. Build costs rose 17.5% in the four years to February 2026. House prices rose 4.5% in the same period. That gap of more than 13 percentage points has made a significant portion of schemes economically marginal without land price adjustment or demand-side intervention. Savills estimates a first-time buyer support scheme could lift completions to around 198,000 a year by 2028/29, though that would still leave England more than 100,000 homes per year short of the Government's target.
Why it matters for developers
The 300,000 target was the baseline against which the current regulatory framework was calibrated. The mandatory New Homes Ombudsman takes effect in September 2026. The Building Safety Levy starts in October 2026. Awaab's Law Phase 2 extends to seven further hazard categories in October 2026. These obligations apply regardless of how many homes are actually being built.
For developers still active in the market, the volume squeeze concentrates reputational and commercial exposure. Each completed home carries more weight when output is constrained. A defect backlog or an ombudsman referral on a 50-unit scheme affects a much larger proportion of a developer's annual delivery than it would have at higher volumes. Customer care teams managing fewer completions have less bandwidth to absorb post-completion pressures while simultaneously preparing for the October 2026 compliance deadlines.
The viability gap compounds this. With build cost inflation running at more than three times the rate of house price growth since 2022, the margin available to absorb post-completion costs (defect resolution, aftercare management, DLP administration) is structurally thinner. This is not a short-cycle problem: Savills' central scenario has completions still below 200,000 a year through 2027/28.
What to watch
The October 2026 compliance cluster is fixed: the Building Safety Levy, Awaab's Law Phase 2, and the planning scheme of delegation all take effect within weeks of each other. Savills' analysis points clearly to viability, not planning timescales, as the binding constraint on delivery. Planning reform may shorten the consent process; it cannot close a 13-percentage-point gap between cost inflation and price growth. Until that gap narrows, delivery will remain well below target and the per-unit compliance burden will remain disproportionately high relative to scheme economics.
How Guided Home helps
When fewer homes are completing but the statutory compliance framework is expanding, the economics of poor handover performance shift. Defect backlogs, ombudsman referrals, and DLP overruns that were manageable at high volumes become proportionally more expensive on constrained output. Guided Home's Executive Dashboard gives leadership teams portfolio-level visibility of risk across active DLP periods: defect trends, aftercare escalation, and outstanding works are visible before they become commercial problems rather than after.
At site level, Guided Home's Inspections and Defects module structures defect logging from first inspection through to DLP close, with contractor routing and SLA tracking built in. This reduces the administrative cost of DLP management at a time when that cost is harder to absorb relative to squeezed scheme economics.
Completion documentation is the third variable. Under the mandatory New Homes Ombudsman framework, the handover record is the evidence base for any dispute. Guided Home's Document Assurance module validates completion documentation against compliance checklists before handover, so the record is complete and traceable when it matters, not assembled retrospectively under time pressure.
Sources
- Savills: "Housing delivery set to fall well below 300,000 target as supply squeeze deepens" (June 2026)
- Savills UK: Completion Forecasts, June 2026
- Mortgage Strategy: "New homes target to be missed by huge margin: Savills forecast" (June 2026)
- Estate Agent Today: "Savills says Labour housebuilding targets will be missed" (June 2026)