Another London panel for our CEO Paul Campbell, this time at the ‘Saving Housebuilding’ event organised by Savills and Public First.
The event looked at the key issues key issues facing the sector, and Paul spoke on the ‘Saving Land Supply’ panel alongside Dawn Wylie from Taylor Wimpey, Patrick Moseley from Savills and host Phil Barnes.
Paul’s key points included:
- How the increased regulatory burden that has added £76k cost per plot over the last 6 years (according to a recent HBF report) is making it unviable for many Local Planning Authorities to deliver policy compliant schemes, in turn making it increasingly challenging to address the national housing crisis.
- It takes an average 2 years to get a decision on an outline planning application, which is nearly 3 times longer than in 2014 (according to Lichfields’ How Long is a Piece of String report). This doesn’t just delay the delivery of housing on those sites but prevents the redeployment of capital into new planning applications into the sector.
- The supply side reforms enacted by the Government are impressive. Demand side support is now needed to provide the cashflow for housebuilders to invest in the upcoming increase in permissions. Without it we risk creating the opposite problem caused by the previous Government where they introduced Help to Buy whilst simultaneously throttling supply. We need both demand and supply initiatives to work together to increase the volume of new homes to be delivered.
- Homes England should explore providing a debtor facility for the sector where deferred land payments can be accelerated and reinvested in additional planning applications and without it the housing crisis won’t be tackled.