Housebuilders started work on 9 per cent fewer homes during the first half of this year compared with the equivalent periods in 2005 and 2006.

Official figures reveal that the housebuilding industry is on a build-rate to start about 172,000 homes this year.

The figures, which have emerged from the Department for Communities and Local Government, which is responsible for housing, suggest the Government has a steep hill to climb if it wants to meet a new revised target set only last month of building 240,000 homes a year by 2016.

The sharp decline in home-starts will fuel suspicion that a spate of multi-billion-pound takeovers within the housebuilding sector over the past two years has triggered an underlying reduction in new home starts at some of newly enlarged groups.

The housebuilding industry, however, has blamed a creaking planning system for delays in opening new sales sites, claiming that for about five years they have been prevented from putting sufficient stock on the market to meet demand.

Persimmon, which accounts for roughly one in ten of all new homes sold in Britain, reported last month that completions fell to 8,002 units in the first half of this year, down from 8,226 the year before. Persimmon, which bought the smaller firm Westbury in January 2006, said planning delays prevented it opening more outlets.

Full-year figures out later this month from Barratt Developments, Britain’s second largest housebuilder by volume of homes built, will come under close scrutiny.

Barratt paid £2.2 billion for Wilson Bowden in the spring. At a trading up-date in July, Barratt reported that sales were ahead year-on-year for both its Barratt Homes and David Wilson Homes divisions, but analysts have questioned whether the enlarged company will continue the same combined volume of housebuilding.

The government-commissioned Barker report published over three years ago into Britain’s housing industry recommended that the country needed to build 200,000 homes a year just to keep pace with demand.

Gordon Brown last month raised the Government’s cumulative target of new homes by 2020 from 2.5 million to 3 million, prompting criticism from environmentalists that rural Britain was at risk of being paved over.

The housing industry maintains that the new targets are impossible without central government making good its promise for a more centralised system of planning.

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