The organisation claims that the economic downturn has led to a 30% decline in house building over the past two years with only 122,000 new homes being built in the year to April 2010. This is the lowest figure in nearly 90 years if the war years are excluded.

The Federation says that the UK needs a million new homes to be built to make up the shortfall.

House-building peaked in the UK in 1964/65, when the industry put up 387,000 new homes but by 2007/08 that number had fallen to 176,000.

The Federation suggests that the immediate problem is not a shortage of potential sites but rather the lack of availability of mortgages, especially to first time buyers. On most new housing estates, developers build about 60% of homes for private buyers while 40% are made affordable or are sold in shared ownership schemes. But if they cannot sell the private houses, the public ones will not get built, meaning affordable loans are imperative.

Banks typically require a 20% or 25% deposit but for many first-time buyers this is simply beyond their reach (see earlier story)

The industry accepts that the government has put extra resources into house building including measures such as the Kickstart scheme [aimed at getting mothballed sites up and running again] and Homebuy Direct to support would-be buyers but they fear that the Department of Communities and Local Government [DCLG] will come under increasing pressure to reduce budgets next year.