What’s in store for the housing market in Labour’s November 2025 Budget?

Probably more promises built on sand and sold to us as stone. 

I keep hearing that this month’s budget will be the turning point, the moment Labour finally ‘gets Britain building again’ forgive me, but I’ve lost count of how many governments have promised to build Britain out of a crisis they helped create. 

Rachel Reeves will stand up, flash her red box like a magician’s hat, and declare a new era of fairness, growth, and opportunity. Cue applause. But unless that box contains an industrial-scale bulldozer, a reformed planning system, and the courage to annoy about half of southern England, I’m not buying it. 

Labour’s target of 1.5 million homes by 2030 sounds heroic, until you realise, we can’t even build 200,000 a year now. The maths doesn’t add up, not that it’s ever stopped Westminster’s grandiose promises they know they can’t fulfil, before. Every government sets a shiny target, throws a few grants around, and calls it transformation. The cranes, somehow, never appear. 

The ambition is tantamount to fantasy. You can’t conjure homes out of PowerPoint slides and polite press releases. You need planning reform, political will, and a willingness to sign off the push into greenbelt and allow ease of redevelopment on brownfield. That’s where governments go weak, the planning permission ordeal is wrapped in more red tape than a DHL parcel and this needs to radically change.  

The budget rumours don’t inspire much hope either. Talk of stamp duty tweaks, whispers about taxing higher value homes, it’s all classic treasury tinkering. They call it fairness; I call it fiscal feng shui: moving numbers around to make things feel balanced without fixing the structure. 

Stamp duty for example, is the housing equivalent of a traffic jam at rush hour, it slows everyone down, punishes movement, and clogs the system. Reeves could scrap it for downsizers or first-time buyers and get homes moving again, yet she won’t. The optics of helping the middle classes sell their homes are far less headline friendly, than making the rich pay their fair share. 

And then there’s the self-imposed straitjacket of fiscal discipline, Labour’s obsession with proving it’s not reckless may make bond markets purr, but it’s terrible for housebuilding. You can’t balance the books and rebuild the country on the same spreadsheet. If Labour really wants homes, it must spend and invest in building social housing, speeding through the planning debacle, infrastructure in tools and tradespeople that simply aren’t there.  

Let’s be honest, Britain’s housing system is a mess precisely because no one’s been brave enough to fix it. Every government has dodged the hard bits: reforming planning, taxing land hoarding properly, building affordable as well as social housing homes.  

Labour has the right instincts, build more, be fairer, incentive housebuilders to provide a higher percentage of affordable homes and make the system work, but instincts don’t lay bricks. Unless this budget comes with bulldozers, not buzzwords, we’ll be right back here next year, wondering why houses still cost ten times the average salary and why half the country can’t afford to rent, let alone buy.  

However, Labour are getting something right which is helping to see a ‘bounce back’ in stable market growth. They’ve done this by steadily dropping the BOE base rate even though inflation is still high, this is crucial to fix the destruction of the market from the conservatives 2022/3 BOE base rate rise which was to purposely increase mortgage rates and in turn flattened the market dead.   

If Reeves really wants to make history, she needs to do something politicians almost never do, tell the truth. Admit the market’s broken because governments broke it with il thought out policies, giving hardly any notion to the knock-on effect one positive policy has negatively somewhere else and care more about the optics of a press pleasing fixer policy that has no real substance. Admit fixing it will upset people: homeowners, councils, developers, donors, and then fix it anyway. 

 I suspect we’ll get something safer: a tax tweak here, a grant there, and a speech full of words like “stability” and “long-term plan.” In other words, the usual Westminster scaffolding all show, no structure. 

The foundations of Labour’s housing revolution? Still built on sand.