JULY saw two major new announcements on housing from the Labour Party. But the announcements, from Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and the new Labour Growth Group of MPs, propose very different things.

Rayner wrote an Observer article saying Labour must deal with the housing crisis because it blights people who need decent homes. Rayner said she wanted to help “families struggling to cover soaring rents and meet mounting mortgage costs,” and “tenants paying through the nose for damp, cramped and unsafe conditions.”

Rayner promised Labour would push for “the biggest wave of social and affordable housing in a generation.”

If you look at the actual figures, this wave is sadly not very big. Labour says it will get 1.5 million new homes built in its first five-year term.

Currently, housebuilding is at around 200,000 a year, so Labour is actually suggesting they will get 100,000 extra new houses built a year: that’s a 50 per cent increase in housebuilding, so not nothing.

But 500,000 extra houses in five years a relatively small number when you consider the existing housing stock is some 25 million “dwellings.” By themselves, these extra houses will not bring down house prices. Maybe an extra 2 per cent of housing stock will stop prices rising so quickly.

Each council or “social rent” house built directly reduces the rent for their tenants. Done right, they can also be more decent than dangerous dwellings. So how many of the new houses will be council or “housing association” houses?

Rayner says that “delivering social and affordable houses at scale” is her “number one priority.” But there is no number for council houses, while “affordable” is a euphemism including many homes that cost much more than “social rents,” as they are only slightly below expensive market rates,

Labour’s housebuilding plans rest heavily on making it easier for private developers to get planning permission and subsidising their new estates by servicing them with publicly funded “infrastructure” like roads. Developers will be asked to build a few social houses in return.

But even if they could be persuaded to make 25 per cent of their new estates “social housing,” we are talking about less than 150,000 new “social” homes in five years. Again, that is not nothing but doesn’t really dent the council house waiting lists of around 1.2 million.

Nor is it a big enough number to shift the private rental rates down. Any council houses built directly, rather than as a bonus in private developments, would depend on direct grants and loans from the government, which may be in short supply.

We got a clue to the size of Rayner’s ambition when her aides pointed to the record of the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown governments, which oversaw the building of 363,000 new social rent homes from 1997 to 2010.

This suggests Rayner would be happy with around 28,000 new social rent homes built per year — again implying around 150,000 new social homes built under the next government.

Blair was not a big enthusiast for social homes, but his government had favourable economic winds; frankly, I think Rayner might struggle to get this many new social homes built when her strategy relies so heavily on “gains” from private developers.

To get a sense of the limitations of these ambitions, between 1945 and 1979 councils typically built between 100,00 and 250,000 council houses each year.

When Thatcher was elected, councils stopped building them and started selling off their stock. The lack of council housing is what lies beneath the current crisis of high rents for grim private housing and ever-rising prices for house sales.

Rayner has ambition for social housing, even if she doesn’t have the means to deliver as much as she wants.

But the other intervention on housing suggests a substantial slice of Labour don’t care about social housing at all.

Fifty-four Labour MPs formed a new group, the Labour Growth Group, to back Labour’s plans to promote housebuilding. But the new group’s launch letter made no mention at all of council housing, or social housing, or even “affordable housing.”

Unlike Rayner, these MPs don’t appear to care about social housing. Nor did their 14-paragraph letter make any mention of renters. They made a brief mention of “the dream of home ownership” — but even that was a poor second to “growth.”

The Growth Group said: “Growing the economy will be the way in which we can unlock Britain’s untapped potential, better fund our vital public services and make people better off in every part of the country … This absolutely has to start with the sweeping planning reforms to get Britain building again.”

This group doesn’t discuss housebuilding in terms of supplying homes. Rather, it hopes that by loosening planning and giving developers what they want, including subsidies via publicly funded infrastructure, Britain will become more “prosperous.”

There are two big problems here. First, if housebuilding is seen as essential to get the economy moving, the government will not press housebuilding companies hard about how many “social homes” they provide — they won’t want to put limits on their “engine of growth.”

This will undermine Rayner’s mission. Second, if the government’s main method of getting the economy going is deregulating planning and hoping Taylor Wimpey, Persimmons et al will deliver a “boom,” it could well be in for a disappointment.

It’s too narrow a base for growth. Those housebuilding firms are already very profitable building smaller numbers of houses for higher prices. They might not easily be persuaded to do more.

Relying on deregulation and gifts to housing developers to both fix the housing crisis and revive the economy could mean neither happens.

It is an open secret the Growth Group is backed by Keir Starmer. In July, Patrick Maguire reported in the Times that “Starmer’s strategists” planned a back-bench group “devoted to growth policy.”

Unlike better-known back-bench groups it would “not be run by rebels but with the tacit licence of the leadership, with the aim of diverting the political focus of the new backbenchers to the government’s overriding priority — and, more prosaically, giving them something to do.”

That “something to do” seems to include rejecting and undermining deputy leader Rayner’s already limited council housing plan.

Follow Solomon on X @SolHughesWriter.