Speaking at a fringe hosted by the
National Federation of Buildersand Federation of Master Builders last night, Housing Minister Mark Prisk said he is a passionate supporter of small businesses.
He pointed to action the Government is already taking to ensure public sector land being disposed of gets sold off in smaller chunks to allow small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to become involved.
“We have dysfunctional housing markets” Prisk stated, emphasising that there is not just one single housing market; there are a series of interlinking markets.
He argued that a more dynamic market should be created by using a range of partners involved.
The UK must make better use of the existing land and housing stock that already exists, he argued; “we must make better use of what we have developed and built.”
Reform of the national planning framework is crucial, he said, and raised the issue of how difficult it is currently for young people to get onto the housing ladder. The Minister pointed to the Government’s ‘help to buy’ scheme, saying it is “ramping up confidence”, which in turn would help supply.
He said Whitehall has been “too slow” in getting rid of surplus public sector land, and stressed the importance of ensuring adequate support exists for the private rented sector.
Brian Berry, Chief Executive of the Federation of Master Buildings (FMB), emphasised the need to focus on housing supply, stressing the need to better incentivise SMEs to become more involved in house building.
60% of FMB members cite access to finance as a major barrier for SME house builders, Berry explained, and suggested a separate lending scheme could be established to deal specifically with SMEs.
Tax was another key issue, Berry said, calling for minor developments, of ten or fewer houses, to be exempt from community infrastructure contributions.
“The government has got it right on the demand side, but we now need to look at the supply side.”
“The current Government has actually done quite a lot to promote house building” agreed the Chief Executive of the
National Federation of Builders, Julia Evans, but said more has to be done to encourage partnerships in the industry.
She called for the Government to lift the local authority borrowing cap and enhance prudent borrowing of councils.
Action must to be taken to focus on housing, she stressed, or the UK will find itself not just with an emergent crisis, but a “very real” existing crisis.
Anne Ashworth, Assistant Editor and Property Editor at The Times repeatedly expressed her frustration at what she saw as a stubbornly anti-development British public.
“Boxy, cramped, awful dwellings make it very easy to be NIMBYs” she said, and believed an assumption existed that that anything new being built will be of a poor standard.
“There is an assumption out there that a new build house is not going to be of good quality.”
Councillor Gary Porter, Leader of the South Holland District Council, Local Government Association Vice-Chairman and Leader of the Local Government Association Conservative Group, said the way the Treasury is “pitting district councils and county councils against eachother” is “bizarre”, particularly for a Conservative-led Government.
“We need to persuade Treasury that they need to take money for the Heseltine Review away from somebody else and not our new homes bonus” he said.
Question and answer session
Responding to a question from the audience, Prisk said he was a big fan of both self and custom builds. He pointed to community land trusts as very good ways to encourage this, but added that he is “open to suggestions” on the matter.
Evans agreed that many self-builds in the UK are great for the public and communities, but stressed the importance of increasingly using small integrated sites.
A Leeds City councillor argued that brown field sites need to be looked at first, because the larger developers are “eating up” green field sites:
“They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with what they are doing” he insisted.
“The brutal truth is that we need both” responded Prisk, “but we also need to make sure your local plans are clear.” Evans added that the cost of remediation “is phenomenal”.
Seán Woodward, Fareham Borough Council Leader, expressed his concerns about the changes to the new homes bonus. He believed some kind of partnership with Government is needed in order to bring forward some public funding.
Prisk acknowledged how top slicing can often be seen as detrimental, but stressed that the intention is to pool funding amongst neighbours with common infrastructure issues.
The lack of sufficient microsites coming to market needs to be addressed urgently, Berry said, as this will help SME house builders. “We want small settlements in every village and every town” rather than huge ones which only involve large developers, he said.
Developers gaining permission to build on a site, but either halting before completing the construction or not even beginning because the timing is wrong is also a major problem, a member of the audience said.
Ashworth said the amount of bureaucracy and the reasons not to build seemed to have proliferated, but Porter insisted this simply wasn’t the case, saying the site should simply be reallocated.
Berry said the system clearly isn’t working, as demonstrated by how few SME house builders there are now compared with when they made up two thirds of the market.
A number of audience members took exception to Ashworth’s assertion that all the British public are NIMBYs, and a suggestion came that control of all major developments might be taken out of local authority control altogether. Prisk however, argued that the principle decision making should remain at a local level.
A member of the audience suggested that social (and antisocial) behaviour is a key reason for the huge amount of empty housing. Prisk fully agreed that this is a real factor, believing the process of dealing with antisocial behaviour is too lengthy. He said he was speaking with Home Secretary Theresa May about the potential of implementing a ‘two strikes and you’re out’ scheme to attempt to deal with the issue.
A developer from Newcastle argued that there are simply not enough brown field sites around the country to satisfy the necessary demand. The greater organisation of large developers meant housing supply can never be met without using them, he said.
Berry noted that SMEs had a “proud tradition” of training apprentices in the industry, but that the recession had decreased these levels. This would slowly pick up as the economy recovered, he believed, but warned this would take time.