TARGETS for building homes in the city are close to being met, new figures show.

Worcester City Council has hit, on average, 96 per cent of its house-building targets over the last ten years based on the decade's average.

Figures released as part of the BBC Shared Data Unit showed an average of 382 houses were built a year between 2007 and 2017 in Worcester.

The council’s annual target for house-building under the South Worcestershire Development Plan is currently 371 houses a year whilst the government has set the bar slightly higher with target of 396 homes.

A Worcester City Council spokesman said: “In terms of both the number of planning permissions being issue issued for new homes and the number of homes being physically built, Worcester is currently faring well and we don’t currently have any concerns about meeting housing targets.

“Of course, local councils only have so much control over this process – we can give planning permission, but it is then up to developers to actually build the homes.”

The council says government targets are just as important as locally set ones – with particular attention paid to the requirements set out as part of the local authority's ‘Five Year Housing Land Supply’.

In 2012, the government’s plan to tackle the country’s housing crisis was to get more homes built and it instructed council’s to set out what the need for new homes was and how it planned to meet that need as part of the five-year plan.

This pushed councils into accepting planning applications unless there was a significant justification for doing so. By rejecting housing plans, the council would effectively be making a rod for its own back in the appeal process.

Figures for the number of houses built per year in Worcester show a significant increase during the time the government announced it wanted to accelerate building.

In 2012/13, only 141 homes were built in the city – a 15-year low and down from 313 a year earlier.

In the year that followed, the number of homes built doubled to 282 in 2013/14 and rose to 462 in 2014/15. It reached a peak of 611 homes in 2015/16 before 472 were built in 2016/17.

Worcester City Council was not amongst the 48 per cent of local authorities that had recovered to pre-recession house-building levels – that is the number of homes being built returning to or going past the same level as 2007/8.