Sometimes when life delivers you lemons, you just need to make lemonade. Not the great wisdom of Cicero or a towering political luminary like Winston Churchill. No, this homespun advice came from Beyoncé after she released her platinum-selling album Lemonade, which reputedly chronicled the infidelity of her husband. She may have been handed lemons in life, but she ended up using them to make lemonade.
Apparently the one-time Secretary of State for housing, Angela Rayner, now appears to be adopting the same philosophy following the implosion of her career over the summer. Having been dumped with nothing but lemons having lost one of the most powerful roles in government, she now appears to be making the political equivalent of lemonade.
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Last month a private letter from the Home Builders Federation (HBF) to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) warned that Labour’s housing target would only be achievable if “the government provided help for first-time buyers to stimulate demand and reduced planned taxes on new homes that were making many sites unviable.”
The industry body points out that to hit the 1.5 million target, private house-building would have to expand faster than at any time in the last half-century alongside a huge expansion in social housing.
Capital challenge
In London, the challenge is acute. The HBF’s “Mind the Gap” report shows only 30,000 homes were completed in the year to June 2025 in the capital, down 12% year-on-year, at levels not seen in a decade. Planning permissions are also at record lows, with only 966 new projects in the 12 months to June 2025. The milestone set for London is 88,000 homes per annum for the next decade so output would need to more than double just in the capital to be on track.
Another bell-weather indicator, the Mineral Products Association (MPA), representing construction materials producers, reports that ready-mixed concrete volumes fell by 11.5% in Q2 2025 (to just 2.7 million m³) - the lowest on record since 1963. If contractors aren’t ordering cement, they’re not building.
This matters not just for homes, but for the wider economy: as Chancellor Rachel Reeves approaches her much-touted November budget, the OBR’s hopes for a productivity uptick (cited at +0.2 % by 2029/30, +0.4 % by 2033/34) from planning reform and boosted housing output may well be revised down. The implication is that if the housing targets are unrealistic, so too might be the growth forecasts that rest upon them.
The housing department remains upbeat: “On top of the major planning changes we have already introduced… and our huge £3bn investment in social and affordable housing, we are going further and faster.” All well and good, but despite these positive intentions, we’re already 18 months into the programme and nowhere near the required pace of build to reach 1.5m.
This government has never been slow to don a hi-viz or model a hard hat. The trouble being that in the built environment you need a financial incentive to build houses not just a slogan. Altruism motivates neither shareholders nor board rooms, profit does. Today margins are not big enough to incentivise developers to build in todays riskier markets, whilst land values are insufficient to encourage the owners to sell for residential development.
Cynically, one political observer noted that Angela Rayner has already returned to the Commons, sitting on the backbenches and appears to be biding her time for a comeback. The fact that she no longer has to defend the housing portfolio is something of a relief. Perhaps she can quietly sip her lemonade rather than force down the bitter lemon that is on offer for her successors. She can watch from the sidelines dodging blame for the failure of an unrealistic housing policy she helped launch but no longer owns.
Richard Steer FCIOB is chair of Gleeds Worldwide.
