Stark conjectured that for any $h\in \Bbb {N}$ , there are only finitely many CM-fields with class number h. Let $\mathcal {C}$ be the class of number fields L for which L has an almost normal subfield K such that $L/K$ has solvable Galois closure. We prove Stark’s conjecture for $L\in \mathcal {C}$ of degree greater than or equal to 6. Moreover, we show that the generalised Brauer–Siegel conjecture is true for asymptotically good towers of number fields $L\in \mathcal {C}$ and asymptotically bad families of $L\in \mathcal {C}$ .