10 COMMENT Patrick Mooney


Soggy start to 2026 brings greater risk of missing housing delivery targets


Patrick Mooney examines how rising fl ood risk and record winter rainfall are undermining housebuilding targets, amid growing concern that new homes are being built in vulnerable locations.


T


RECORD LEVELS OF RAINFALL THROUGHOUT JANUARY AND FEBRUARY SEVERELY HINDERED THE PROGRESS BEING MADE


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he record breaking wet and windy start to the year was the last thing the construction sector needed as it attempts to recover from a housebuilding slump in 2025, during which completion rates barely hit 50% of the Government’s target. In fact, only 175,290 new homes were completed in England in the 15 months after Labour came to power and just 31,420 housing starts were made in the three months to September 2025, according to fi gures from the OS. But record levels of rainfall throughout January and February severely hindered progress being made at building sites across the country (especially in southern and central England) and focused our minds on the threat posed by fl ooding to the achievement of the Government’s 1.5 million new homes target despite a conveyor belt of planning reforms being introduced. The latest measures included default approval for building homes near train stations and looser environmental rules for smaller projects. At the same time, record levels of investment in new affordable homes have been promised. xperts at the et Offi ce estimate that at current levels of global warming, wet winters like this year’s have gone from being once in 80-year events to once in 20, and with further warming this could become even more frequent. They say that six of the 10 wettest winters since records began nearly 250 years ago have been this century. They are effectively telling us to get used to this sort of weather and the diffi cult conditions associated with it, to be more careful about where we build new houses, and to invest far more in fl ood mitigation measures.


WAKE UP CALL


As our news channels and screens were fi lled with pictures of fl ooded homes and communities, a report from one of the country’s biggest insurance companies has provided a similar ‘wake up call’ by suggesting that we have not been particularly careful about where we have been building new homes in recent times, and perhaps site selection has been too driven by a desire to meet politically imposed targets rather than using local knowledge of what happens in spells of heavy rainfall.


Flood risk has become one of the fastest growing threats to our built environment, as a growing number of new homes are being built in areas at risk of fl ooding, according to the insurer Aviva. Their recently released analysis has revealed that one in nine new homes in England built between 2022 and 2024 were constructed in areas that could now be at risk of fl ooding, up from one in  new homes built between 2013 and 2022, and unfortunately the trend is set to continue. Aviva’s data shows that by 2050, one in seven of the homes built between 2022 and 2024 will be at medium or high risk of fl ooding, and almost a third  will face some kind of fl ood risk, as more extreme rainfall is predicted as a result of climate change. Of the , new homes recorded by the Ordnance Survey in ngland between 2022 and 2024, some 43,937 of them are in areas of medium or high risk of fl ooding, while  of new homes have some risk of fl ooding. Emma Howard Boyd, former chair of the Environment Agency, who advises Aviva on climate policy, said the Government’s


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