New Labour's greatest shame. 95% of homes added to the housing stock were private rentals.

The graph above shows the number of homes added to the English housing stock from 2000 to 2010 by tenure.

In the last ten years of a New Labour government, we added 1.6 million homes to the Housing Stock in England. That, on the face of it, seems a reasonable achievement, but when you look underneath the bonnet the true picture is quite shameful. Of the 1.6 million homes added in the last decade under New Labour, 95% of those homes were private rental. For every 20 homes to come onto the market in the last decade, 19 of them were private rental. In that same time, private rental costs have boomed. It now, excluding energy costs, will cost you £8,700 a year just to rent an average UK property.  Is it any wonder that 41% of labour's private renting voters deserted us after 1997?

Of course, Labour's great shame is that we ceased to take a responsibility for social housing. The council house and social housing stock added, dwindled more than 320,000 during this era. The net result of this is that of the 8 million odd rental properties in the UK as of 2012, more than half of them are private rentals. The official data is only available to 2010 but as the graph above shows, the trend is clear.