Britain is building record numbers of castles in the air

There was some splendid news from the Government earlier this month.

Britain is building record levels of housing.

We know this because Anna Turley, the Border Security and Asylum Minister with no fear of crossing boundaries, told Times Radio Breakfast at the beginning of August. *

Replying to a surprise interview question about the Conservatives’ proposal to restrict access to social housing for foreign nationals, Turley dismissed the opposition’s ideas as “slapdash fag-paper policies” before confidently informing listeners:

“We’re building record levels of housing.”

Well, break out the bunting and uncork the Blue Nun!

Except there’s only one small problem.

It’s not true. Not even slightly.

According to the Government’s own figures, England added 208,600 net homes in 2024/25. That’s 6% fewer than the previous year and 16% below the most recent peak of 248,590 in 2019/20.

And it’s well below the (record) level of the late 1960s, when annual completions surpassed 300,000 properties over several years.

In fact, the latest completed year under Labour actually produced the lowest net build since 2015/16 (setting aside the pandemic-distorted 2020/21 period), and output has fallen for three consecutive years.

And if we look at houses actually built, the picture is even worse. New-build completions fell from 198,680 in 2023/24 to 190,600 in 2024/25.

So when the minister says we’re building housing at “record levels”, what she really means is housebuilding is at a ten-year low. It’s basically one of Labour’s quaint modern interpretations of familiar English words, rather like “fully costed”.

Perhaps this doesn’t seem important. Perhaps you think we’re over-reacting. We all know governments gloss over the truth.

But housing isn’t some minor policy area where a minister has got carried away with the figures. Britain has a serious housing crisis, and fixing it is one of the central planks of this Government’s programme – one of the few major national problems it has made an explicit, measurable promise to solve.

It insists it is on course to deliver 1.5 million homes. Yet at the same time, it is introducing legislation that actively crushes developments before they get off the ground – and in the midst of this mayhem, ministers blithely switch the cups around and tell us that housebuilding is already at “record levels”.

In that context, this isn’t harmless political embroidery – it follows a pattern almost as old as building itself.

Comrade, the houses are magnificent

The great communist dictatorships were very good at this sort of thing. No – don’t roll your eyes – bear with me.

Under Stalin, Soviet citizens were regularly informed that factories had performed miracles, production targets had been smashed and the first Five-Year Plan had been completed in four years and three months.

There were, admittedly, one or two awkward caveats.

Agriculture was in chaos.

Consumer production was in freefall.

Millions were starving.

But come on, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few million peasants.

Over to you, China

A few years later, Stalin’s chief rival in the murdering-your-own-people stakes, Mao Zedong, took the technique to new heights.

During the Great Leap Forward, Chinese communes began reporting agricultural yields so spectacular that the principal problem facing the People’s Republic would be where to store all the food. Officials competed to announce increasingly miraculous harvests – wheat apparently growing like Japanese knotweed – grain mountains visible from space.

There was just one snag. The grain wasn’t even visible if you were standing in the field.

China was starving.

But hey ho – at least the harvest figures were excellent.

Over in Romania, even Ceaușescu got in on the act, proudly announcing bumper harvests to starving Romanians queuing for bread. Wherever the great man walked, cameras followed to photograph fat, staggering donkeys heaved cornucopious carts.

But away from the cameras, the scenery fell over.

Meanwhile, back to the British Great Leap Forward

Okay – we’re getting carried away. Anna Turley is no Stalin. Keir Starmer isn’t even a Temu Mao. And Andy Burnham hasn’t yet ordered us to melt down our Le Creuset to meet the national steel-production target.

But let’s look closer at this approach to inconvenient facts:

If reality won’t support the policy, change the reality.

This seems to have become a governing principle of British politics, albeit delivered in the reassuring tones of somebody explaining a revised bin collection timetable. The Government isn’t merely planning more social housing. It’s overseeing a “generational increase”. Money isn’t just being allocated – there is “record investment”.

And as we know we’re already “building record levels of housing”.

The useful trick here is to blur the distinction between intention and achievement until nobody can remember which one you’re talking about.

The Government has nailed a target to the mast of delivering 1.5 million homes over the Parliament.

Fine. That’s a laudable ambition. But announcing that you intend to build 1.5 million houses isn’t the same as building 1.5 million houses. Especially when it’s a target that no British Government has ever met. Ever.

Meanwhile, I intend to lose a stone, become fluent in Japanese and sail round the Skerries in a teapot.

None of these achievements has yet appeared on my Wikipedia page.

Government communications are taking on a worrying pattern. An aspiration becomes a commitment. A commitment becomes an investment. An investment becomes a programme. A programme becomes delivery. And somewhere between the press release and the breakfast studio, a target becomes a record.

And no bricks have been inconvenienced during this process.

We’re going to need a bigger fag paper

What makes Turley’s remark particularly risible is that she was attacking Conservative proposals as “slapdash fag-paper policies” while making slapdash claims that contradicted her own Government’s website.

You don’t need access to classified Treasury documents to discover whether Britain is building houses at record levels – the Government publishes the disappointing numbers itself.

This tinpot totalitarianism makes our government look as inept as they are insincere. At least when Kim Jong Il scored 11 holes-in-one in his first round of golf, North Korea went to the trouble of rewriting the history books.

Anna Turley simply spreads misinformation while the truth sits in a spreadsheet on GOV.UK.

When the joke stops being funny

And this is where the joke wears thin – because there is a darker purpose to all this pound-shop Pravda.

It isn’t necessarily for the Government to persuade you that something so obviously untrue is true. It’s to establish the permitted version of reality.

Repeat a proposition often enough – through willing ministers, press releases, government departments, sympathetic commentators and broadcast interviews – and eventually it becomes universally established as a fact.

Not because anyone has proved it, but because you’ve heard it so many times that you stop wondering whether anyone ever did. The burden of proof shifts to anyone who questions it.

Meanwhile, the premise has quietly been smuggled past you.

The totalitarian regimes understood this very well. Their propaganda wasn’t always intended to convince citizens that the harvest really was magnificent when they could see the shops were empty – it just established the official reality.

The harvest was magnificent because the state said the harvest was magnificent. And what’s more, Horizon proves without doubt that postmasters were on the fiddle and Covid was caused by Chinese peasants eating bat soup. And all subsequent discussion is shut down by the state.

Orwell described this process very clearly:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

He called it Doublethink in the novel 1984. Doublethink allowed the Government to tell a lie and believe it; to basically deny reality while remaining sufficiently aware of that reality to manipulate it.

Sound familiar?

Okay, you can scoff. We know the British Government isn’t really using the old suppress-to-oppress strategy. Nobody is going to Siberia for pointing out that 190,600 is smaller than 198,680.

But perhaps that’s what makes the modern version so insidious.

They don’t need to suppress the evidence. It’s sitting there on GOV.UK for anyone to read.

It’s just that they know most of us won’t. While the Government publishes figures showing that housebuilding has fallen for three consecutive years, a minister can appear on national radio and announce that we’re building at “record levels”.

And the interview moves on.

Say it again next week. Put it in a press release. Have another minister repeat it on the Today programme. Let commentators accept it as the premise for the next argument and eventually something rather disturbing happens.

Not everyone believes it. But they don’t need to. It just becomes one of those things that “everybody knows”. “The science is settled”. And those that don’t believe become known as ‘Deniers’.

No need for a Ministry of Truth. No censorship. No midnight knock at the door.

The truth remains freely available throughout – but we willingly accept the opposite because it’s too much trouble not to.

Once you’ve repeated the fiction often enough, you don’t have to silence the person pointing to the evidence.

Everyone else will think he’s the one denying reality.

*Times radio Friday 7th August 2026 – 1:13:30

Anna Turley said “…we’re building record levels of housing”