The government’s 1.5 million homes target was always going to be a stretch. But the latest figures reveal something more specific than “behind schedule”: a widening gap between homes started and homes finished.
Housing starts in England rose 18% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, hitting nearly 34,000. On paper, that looks like momentum. But completions for the 2025-26 financial year came in at just over 143,000, the lowest level since 2015-16. More sites are breaking ground. Fewer of them are reaching the finish line on time.
For housebuilders, that gap is the real story. It’s not a planning problem or a land supply problem, not primarily. It’s a delivery problem. Somewhere between the first spade in the ground and the keys in a buyer’s hand, projects are losing pace. And the industry has seen this pattern before: activity looks healthy at the front end, then stalls in the messy middle of construction, where changes, snags, and compliance checks pile up faster than anyone planned for.
Where the pace gets lost
Ask any site manager where a build actually slows down and the answer is rarely “planning” or “groundworks.” It’s mid-project. It’s the variation that wasn’t logged properly. The RFI sitting in someone’s inbox for four days. The defect that gets flagged on-site but takes a week to reach the person who can action it. The design change that ripples through three trades before anyone catches it.
None of this shows up in a housing starts statistic. But multiply it across a housebuilder’s live site portfolio and it’s exactly the kind of friction that turns an 18% jump in starts into a completions figure that barely moves.
Add the Building Safety Act into the mix and the stakes go up again. Higher-risk buildings now face gateway checkpoints that can’t be rushed or fudged, and the Golden Thread requirement means every design decision, change, and inspection needs to be captured, traceable, and available on demand. Done on spreadsheets, email chains, and site diaries, that’s not just slow. It’s a compliance risk waiting to surface at handover, or worse, in a Building Safety Regulator review.
Why “more people” isn’t the answer
The instinctive response to a delivery bottleneck is to throw more resource at it: more site managers, more admin support, more meetings to chase progress. But the construction skills shortage makes that a non-starter for most housebuilders right now. There simply aren’t enough qualified people to hire your way out of this.
What’s actually needed is less time spent chasing information and more time spent building. That’s a process problem, not a headcount problem, and it’s why digital tools are moving from “nice to have” to genuinely operational infrastructure on housebuilding sites.
What good looks like in practice
The housebuilders keeping completions on track tend to share a few habits:
One place for site information. When defects, RFIs, and variations live in a single system instead of scattered across texts, emails, and paper forms, nothing sits waiting for someone to notice it. Issues get raised, assigned, and closed without three follow-up phone calls.
Compliance built into the workflow, not bolted on afterwards. Golden Thread documentation is far less painful when it’s a by-product of how the team already works on-site, rather than a separate admin task someone has to remember to do at the end of the week.
Visibility for the people managing the programme, not just the people on-site. When a site manager, a technical director, and a compliance lead are all looking at the same live data, mid-project changes get resolved in hours instead of days.
None of this requires reinventing how housebuilders work. It’s about closing the gap between when a problem is spotted and when it’s actually fixed, which is precisely where most delivery time gets lost.
The pace the industry needs now
The 1.5 million homes target isn’t going away, and neither is the pressure it puts on housebuilders to deliver faster without cutting corners on safety or quality. Getting more sites started is only half the job. The other half, keeping them moving through to completion, is where most of the current shortfall is coming from.
Platforms like PlanRadar won’t fix the skills shortage or speed up planning approvals. What they can do is take the friction out of the part of the process housebuilders actually control: how quickly information moves between site and office, how fast issues get resolved, and how easily compliance documentation comes together. In a market where completions need to catch up with starts, that’s not a minor efficiency gain. It’s the difference between hitting programme and falling further behind.
