David Fell, lead analyst at Hamptons, said: “In recent years housebuilders have been hit by a perfect storm of falling sales prices and rising build costs.
“Rising interest rates and the end of the Help to Buy scheme have cut buyer demand, while price rises for many building materials have been running at many multiples of general inflation.
“This means that many potential sites are not profitable even before the developer comes to pay for the land, making development unviable.
“Some development sites have either been mothballed until the sums stacks up or sold on and repurposed for more profitable uses.
“In the meantime, many housebuilders have focused on preserving cash, or at least returning it to investors in the form of share buy-backs.
“To get anywhere close to their 1.5 million new homes target, the government will need to radically change the arithmetic for housebuilders.
“Changes to the planning system, while welcome, tend to be slow, meaning they are longer-term measures unlikely to have an impact this Parliament.”
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