No. Even if they achieved it, which is very, very unlikely, it wouldn’t make a difference because the houses that got built would be the sort of houses in the sort of areas that make money for developers. You can’t expect developers to solve the housing crisis. They are private companies and need to make a profit. Their gross margins are often only circa 10% and many small developers go bust. As they are profit driven, they will try to wriggle out of their Section 106 obligations and their affordable housing targets. They will land bank and only build when it makes commercial sense and only sell restricted numbers of houses to keep prices high. Tinkering with the planning system won’t change the economics.
What is needed is a major public housing initiative e.g. give local authorities the money and powers to buy land and erect pre-fabricated/kit houses e.g timber framed which can be mass produced cheaply. CPO the land if necessary. Sell the houses and repeat the process. As a PP said, abolish the right to buy, including for housing associations who have been stymied by this and the commercial imperative put upon them.
However, these measures alone won’t solve the major systemic problems e.g. the huge and rapid population increase (10m in the last 20 years and ongoing), the labour and jobs immobility that result from high rates of home ownership (and use of house price appreciation/equity as a CGT exempt savings method) in the UK so the over-concentration of the economy in London and the south east is perpetuated. This is exacerbated by the appalling infrastructure in the regions and other UK nations which discourages businesses and people from relocating to areas where land and hence houses are cheaper. Also, construction skills and labour shortages, rising costs e.g. materials and supply chain problems are major issues.
These issues are not going to be solved without large sums of public money (there isn’t any), political commitment (ditto) and some very unpopular vote-losing measures. So no, Labour doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of solving the housing crisis. A cynic might say that giving Angela Rayner this job was deliberately setting her up to fail.