The government’s housing plan is too little, too late – even its own MPs aren’t convinced

Editorial: The country’s housing crisis has many causes but essentially just one symptom – that millions upon millions of people can’t afford to live in one

Michael Gove paints an attractive picture about redeveloping British cities, but he stops extremely short of a plan of how to get there (Yui Mok/PA)

Michael Gove thinks of himself as a doer, not merely a talker, but reforming housing is a lot harder than reforming education or even the criminal justice system. It requires not just new policies, but actual bricks and mortar, in extremely large quantities.

He will surely know himself that his plan for housing is certainly too late, and almost certainly too little. A year before an election is no time to start delivering a radical agenda on a policy area so crucial. It will not build many houses, but it will make politics.

There are, to begin with, some contentious numbers. The new plan for housing begins with the government praising itself for delivering on its manifesto commitment of building a million new homes. But it falls far short of meeting its clearer target of 300,000 new homes a year, a figure that is the commonly agreed bare minimum to make any progress at all on the UK’s shocking housing crisis.