Nearly 500 new houses were built in Worcester in 2016-17.

But with planning permission having been granted for a further 690 homes, more were unbuilt than actually finished.

It means that the Worcester’s experience is similar to many other towns and cities across the UK, where the local authority grants permission for new houses but often they take months or even years to be actually constructed.

The national body representing councils The Local Government association wrote to the government and said the total number of unimplemented planning permissions in England and Wales for 2016-17 was 423,544.

Housing spokesman for the LGA, Martin Tett said: "These figures prove that the planning system is not a barrier to house building. In fact, the opposite is true. In the last year, councils and their communities granted twice as many planning permissions as the number of new homes that were completed.

"No-one can live in a planning permission. Councils need greater powers to act where housebuilding has stalled.

"To tackle the new homes backlog and to get the country building again, councils also need the freedom to borrow and invest in desperately-needed new homes."

In Worcester for the same year there were 692 houses with planning permission which had not been started by April 2017, and 219 under construction.

The city council’s monitoring report said: "The gross number of available dwellings totals 911, compared with 1034 in 2016-16 and 1405 in 2014-15."

It said: "This year there has been a sharp decline in the number of homes under construction, 219, compared to 598 in in 2015-16 and a significant increase in the number of approvals not yet under construction, compared to 436 in 2015-16."

Councillor Lucy Hodgson, chair of the city council’s Place and Economic Development sub-committee, said: "There have been a good number of houses built in Worcester, and there are more coming, and there’s a good mix, so I think the picture is a reasonably good one.

“There is a frustration that it takes a long time, and we’d all like more people to have a home to move into, but developers phase their building in line with funding."