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Meeting housing demand.
The challenges facing the housing market have been well documented: too many people are living in expensive, unsuitable, poor quality homes. To address these complex challenges in the long term, it is necessary to increase housing supply now. The Government has set an ambitious target for 300,000 new homes per year (net additions) and one million new homes by 2024. We heard that even this target may not be enough to address future trends. We welcome this focus on housing supply but are concerned that it will not be met if the barriers to building new homes are not addressed. In this report, we call on the Government to take action and remove the administrative and other blockers which, at present, make increasing the number of homes built much more difficult. We recognise that these challenges play out differently across the country as a whole. London and the South East face different challenges to other regions, as do those at different ends of the affordability scale.