Britain's biggest housebuilders have enough land to build nearly one million homes, but at the current rate it could take 14 years, a new study by Babelfish has revealed. The country's five largest developers are sitting on land for 869,000 homes – more than half of the Government's target of 1.5 million homes this Parliament.
A landbank occurs when developers buy up large plots of prime British land while pledging to build on it in the future. The largest private landbank belongs to Barratt Redrow, which owns or controls 253,698 potential plots through its short and long-term landbanks. Despite completing 16,565 homes last year – more than any other developer – it would still take the company more than 15 years to build out its current pipeline at that rate.
Taylor Wimpey's landbank could take over 20 years to build
Taylor Wimpey controls 209,772 plots, enough for more than 20 years' worth of construction based on last year's output of 10,735 homes. Babelfish founder Dale Vince OBE has urged Andy Burnham to help end the housing crisis, warning of a broken system that rewards land banking over home building.
He said: “In the midst of a housing crisis, Britain's five biggest developers have our housing market in a stranglehold. They’re sitting on vast reserves of land, and releasing it at a snail’s pace - that suits their business model, their profits (which are vast) rather than the country's needs. If Andy Burnham’s new government is serious about solving the housing crisis it should incentivise developers to stop land banking and to start building.”
Previous CMA investigation found no deliberate withholding
Last year, Barratt Redrow, Taylor Wimpey, Persimmon, Vistry, Bellway, together with Berkeley Group and Bloor Homes, agreed to pay £100 million towards affordable housing programmes to resolve a Competition and Markets Authority investigation into the sharing of commercially sensitive information. The companies made no admission of wrongdoing.
The Competition and Markets Authority concluded in 2024 that while developers were not deliberately withholding land beyond what the planning system required, landbanks were still larger than would be expected in a well-functioning market.
Industry response: No land banking, planning delays to blame
Responding, Steve Turner, Executive director at the Home Builders Federation said: “As repeated independent inquiries have concluded, house builders do not land bank and such claims show a basic lack of understanding of the development process. The vast majority of those plots will have no planning status whatsoever meaning builders cannot build on them even if they so wanted to. Getting a planning permission to the point where homes can legally be built takes many years. Land is a house builders’ raw material and with the planning process so unpredictable and slow, companies need a supply of it at different stages in the process. House builders only make money by building and selling homes and the industry is desperate to increase output.”
