The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has delivered the Government’s Spring Statement, providing an update on finances and changes to tax.
The Home Builders Federation (HBF) has described today’s Spring Statement as a missed opportunity to address both the supply and demand challenges facing the home building sector.
While the Government has reiterated its ambition to deliver 1.5 million homes during this Parliament and announced significant planning reforms, the Statement did not include the fiscal or market interventions needed to restore confidence and unlock delivery at scale.
Home builders continue to face worsening viability challenges due to rising cumulative policy costs, the incoming Building Safety Levy, significant pressures associated with Section 106 affordable housing requirements, and persistent delays caused by under-resourced planning departments. Together, these factors are constraining output at a time when the country urgently needs more homes.
Additionally, potential home buyers are facing an affordability crisis, which is impacting housing supply. Without measures to support demand, particularly among first-time buyers, delivery will remain under pressure.
To help address this, HBF is calling on the Government to introduce a new targeted equity loan scheme for first-time buyers purchasing new-build homes. The proposed scheme would provide an equity loan of up to 20%, funded through a combination of Government support and a developer fee, ensuring value for taxpayers.
By reducing deposit requirements and lowering loan-to-value ratios, the scheme would enable buyers to access more affordable mortgage products and re-enter the housing market at a time when home ownership is increasingly out of reach.
The proposed structure builds on the proven success of the previous Help to Buy programme, while improving affordability, encouraging lender participation and ensuring accessibility for smaller and regional home builders.
The Chancellor did reconfirm her commitment to a single major fiscal event a year, and that there would be no major policy changes in today’s Spring Statement, adding that the Government is ‘creating capacity in our economy through affordable housing’, and that the planning reforms to come into effect in the year ahead will further boost growth.
Alongside the Spring Statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) published the 2026 Spring Forecast. The outlook estimates that net additions for the United Kingdom will fall to a low of 220,000 in 2026-27 before rising to just over 305,000 by 2030-31. For the five-year period from 2025-26 to 2029-30, the OBR estimates that 1.3 million homes will be added to the UK’s housing stock, around 30,000 higher than forecast in November.
Neil Jefferson, Chief Executive of the Home Builders Federation (HBF) said: “Whilst the Government has made encouraging progress on planning policy, ministers need to acknowledge now the worsening viability and affordability constraints on the home building sector. This is quite clearly reflected in today’s OBR projection for home building that shows a huge undershoot on the Government’s 1.5m homes target.
The Spring Statement is a missed opportunity to address this. Home builders are struggling to meet the ambitious targets of housing delivery alongside the backdrop of worsening viability conditions for housing developments as a result of new taxes, levies and policy costs.
Alongside this, home builders are also facing demand-side challenges, as potential home buyers are, for the first time, without the support of a government-backed scheme to support first-time buyers' access to the housing market.
Our suggested equity loan scheme offers a real solution to this issue. A targeted first-time buyer equity loan scheme, part-funded by developers that would restore access to affordable mortgage finance, support new housing delivery, create jobs and growth.”