Polly Billington introduced the event and began by introducing the panel. She began by stating that there had been a failure up until now to develop brownfield land. She added that the FMB primarily represents small to medium sized building companies, and that these were crucial to solving the national housing shortage.
Shaun Spiers from CPRE said of course the answer to the housing question of Greenfield or Brownfield is both. He said it was important that we don’t create endless ‘urban sprawl’ and people value that clear distinction between town and countryside.
He added: “Far too many people live in housing conditions that really shame us”.
Spiers criticised some housing targets for being unachievable: “Setting targets is easier than delivering them”.
He added that Oxfordshire for example had been set 100,000 new homes as a target with no plan for where to locate them. Councils also need to find five years’ worth of land for development or else the plans are unlikely to be achieved and will be challenged.
He cited a recent CPRE report which stated 72% of planning appeals had gone against local authorities due to shortage of supply of suitable brownfield sites. In short the current situation could be summed up as: “too much countryside lost and too few homes built”.
Spiers concluded by saying that the huge house building booms of the 1940s and 1950s under both the Attlee and Macmillan governments had been government led. Since 1945 the private sector has continued building homes at roughly the same rate, but it was the state which had cut back on house building.
Finally he said that the worrying trend is that that FMB now only represent one third of all homes being built, when it had previously represented two thirds. The majority of house building is now being completed by eight big firms who don’t want to sacrifice profits.
He concluded: “Let’s stop wasting brownfield sites in towns and stop eroding the countryside; after all we won’t get any more houses that way”.
Cllr Peter Box spoke on behalf of the LGA and is a member of the Labour National Policy Forum. He explained some of the key housing issues from his perspective as leader of a combined authority in West Yorkshire - Wakefield Metropolitan District Council.
Cllr Box agreed there was a tremendous amount of poor housing stock and that the cost to the NHS from people living in poor quality housing was £2.5 billion per year. He also discussed the potential social problems of the 3 million people aged between 20 and 34 in the UK who are still living with their parents.
This he said was largely due to house prices rising faster than wages with 1.7 million people on social housing waiting lists. They average first time buyer age is now 35, with more and more people renting because they can’t afford to buy or do not have sufficient job security.
Regarding construction of new homes, he said it was important for local authorities to have a local plan and that 75% now do. Where the housing goes should really be determined locally, but added that in his local authority, every single application for new housing attracts opposition.
He concluded by saying that there needed to be renewed incentives on local authorities to build new quality housing stock and that removing the ‘revenue borrowing cap’ would help local council get access to greater funding to enable building to go ahead.
Brian Berry, chief executive of FMB explained that he represented the largest trade body in the construction sector, with 9,500 members across the UK.
He added that 75% of construction firms employ 5 or fewer members of staff and that 93% of firms in the building sector were SMEs.
“Having a home is a basic human right” but Mr Berry then stated that 250,000 need to be built with only 115,000 completions in 2013. The last year that more than 200,000 houses were built was 1988.
Over the last twenty years he said the number of SME house builders has declined. This also affects local communities as it reduces apprenticeships offered to young people in the sector.
Mr Berry said he was broadly in support of building on brownfield sites first, but said that sometimes the sites are not in the right place to meet building needs. He also said that smaller building firms were building to demand and needed to sell properties on completion to release funds to go on to the next project.
Finally he made a plea for people to sign up to the FMB campaign to reduce VAT on housing repair and maintenance to 5%. The current 20% rate means it is often more cost effective for builders to knock down an existing property and rebuild which he argued “cannot be right”.
Roberta Blackman-Woods MP said that Labour had been clear it wanted to keep the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) set up by the current government and that it would keep the NPPF guidance, but that of course it wanted tweaks and improvements. She said that for example the government had ‘watered down’ the brownfield guidance and as a result construction on these sites had decreased from 73% to 50%.
Ms Blackman-Woods added:
“We can’t deliver all the new homes we need without using greenfield sites. We need to see an uplift from 100,000 to 200,000 by 2020”.
She added that the planning process needed to include ‘integrated neighbourhood planning, and that communities needed to be involved in the process of constructing new homes “right at the start”.
She said the housing crisis was about jobs and equality, but also about the quality of the built environment. She said that Labour had asked Michael Lyons to look at the housing crisis and to help formulate Labour’s policy response, including potentially including ‘use it or lose it’ to help prevent land being banked and not used by speculative developers.
Questions raised by the audience included improving and revisiting the Green deal; the issue of building homes and protecting existing homes on floodplains; forming a 30 year strategy to tackle the housing shortage and protecting ‘green-wedges’ between towns and villages to prevent urban sprawl.