Raab: It’s Time To Break Big Business’s Grip On The Building Industry

The “vice-like grip” of huge companies on Britain’s building industry needs to be broken to increase the supply of affordable homes, the housing minister has said. Dominic Raab pledged action to boost competition in the construction industry because small building firms have been “eviscerated”, to tackle the practice of major developers refusing to built on plots until prices rise and to champion the development of factory-made houses. In an interview with i , he insisted the UK was beginning to see the “light at the end of the tunnel” in the housing crisis and vowed to tackle the “stigma” often faced by tenants in social housing. Read more on the I newspaper website.

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/dominic-raab-house-building/

Labour Plans To Make Landowners Sell To State For Fraction Of Value

Labour is considering forcing landowners to give up sites for a fraction of their current price in an effort to slash the cost of council house building. The proposal has been drawn up by John Healey, the shadow housing secretary, and would see a Jeremy Corbyn-led government change the law so landowners would have to sell sites to the state at knockdown prices. Landowners currently sell at a price that factors in the dramatic increase in value when planning consent is granted. It means a hectare of agricultural land worth around £20,000 can sell for closer to £2m if it is zoned for housing. Read more on the Guardian website.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/feb/01/labour-plans-landowners-sell-state-fraction-value

Housing White Paper To Include Review Of Section 106 Deals

Crest Nicholson chief executive Stephen Stone has revealed the government plans to review section 106 and the community infrastructure levy in the forthcoming housing white paper. The white paper is due to be published in January, with measures included which the government hopes will help it hit its target of building one million homes by 2020. Stone revealed he had dinner last week with communities secretary Sajid Javid and said he believes the Tories are planning to “re-open” section 106 and the community infrastructure levy (CIL). But he criticised the planned measure and said: “It will create chaos again when you want to get planning and want to get building.” Read more on the Building website.

Government to Set up Body to Support Council House Building

The government will be working with Keith House and Natalie Elphicke to implement a Housing Finance Institute, as recommended by their review of the role of local authorities in housing supply, in conjunction with the Local Government Association and business. Funded privately, this new body will address the skills and knowledge gap in delivering local authority housing identified as one of the key recommendations of their recent report into local authority housing. This will enable the provision of dedicated support in areas such as setting up and managing public private sector joint ventures or developing capacity and skills in areas such as land assembly or developing investment vehicles. Read more on the CLG website.

Government to Re-Open £100m Green Deal Fund

The government has re-launched its £100m Green Deal incentive scheme after an earlier version was forced to close. Only £30m of new £100m cash back fund will be available in the first wave. This will be split into two pots £24m for solid wall insulation and £6m for other measures. Households can claim up to £1,000 for installing two of the measures from an approved list recommended by their Green Deal assessor and up to £4,000 for installing solid wall insulation. A second pot of £30m will be released in February. Applications for the first pot are being taken from 10 December. Read more on the Building website.

Housing Market Boom 'Biggest Risk' To Recovery

Britain’s booming housing market represents the “biggest risk” to the economic recovery, Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned. Carney said he was concerned about the dangers of a “big debt overhang” building up as approvals for large mortgages increase. He said the Bank was monitoring the situation but there was little it could do about the “deep, deep structure problems” in the housing market, with demand outstripping supply. Carney noted that in his native Canada there were half as many people as in the UK, yet twice as many houses are built every year. Read more on the Building website.

Clegg to Promise 45,000 Homes across Three Garden Cities

The government will pledge to build up to three new garden cities with at least 15,000 homes each. Councils will be invited to bid to build the developments from an existing £2.4bn government fund, made available up to 2020.  Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg will unveil the policy and publish a prospectus inviting bids from councils. Government officials said the developments would not be imposed on communities and must have local support, full backing from councils, good transport links and be commercially viable. The government plans to work with the two or three areas that submit the strongest expressions of interest to help them develop their proposals, including with planning and design. Read more on the Building website.

Interview: Emma Reynolds

Housing is shaping up to be a key election battleground for Labour, and new shadow minister Emma Reynolds will be leading the charge. She tells Joey Gardiner why she is not afraid to take on the big housebuilders.

Emma Reynolds is excited. Labour’s new shadow housing minister, replacing the more sober veteran campaigner Jack Dromey, seems to be doing her best, at 36, to inject a touch of youthful enthusiasm into the role. “I LOVE it!” she beams, when asked about the move from her last job as shadow Europe minister. “I mean I’m passionate about Europe too but the agenda was so dominated by the right [wing], and anti-Europeans. It was very hard to be heard. But every issue impacts upon housing.” Read the full interview on the Building website.

Councils Ready to Give Go Ahead to Green Belt Developments

Research by the National Trust finds half of councils likely to allow green belt development, while brownfield sites left untouched. Councils in England are increasingly likely to authorise development on green belt land while brownfield sites are spared from development, according to research commissioned by the National Trust. A survey by the Local Government Information Unit found that 51% of 59 councils with green belts that responded to the survey were either likely or very likely to authorise development on green belt land. The suvey also found that over half of the 147 councils that responded said they had brownfield sites, but they were not considered viable for development. Read more on the Building website.

Green Deal Benefits Overstated, Study Claims

The system used to calculate energy savings under the Green Deal, which is critical to the flagship energy efficiency programme’s success, is unreliable and inflates the savings a householder can expect to achieve from retrofit work to their home by as much as 77%, a study has found.  Social housing provider Affinity Sutton, which produced the study, monitored the effect of retrofit work carried out by contractor Keepmoat on 102 homes over the course of a year.  The data, analysed by consultants Verco, Baily Garner and Parity Projects, found that the SAP model, which is used to calculate building performance, on average predicted that tenants would save 77% more on their energy bills than they actually did.  Read more on the Building website.

Only Five Homes Sign Up For Green Deal

Only five households have had a Green Deal assessment since they became available in October last year.  While the government’s flagship Green Deal scheme doesn’t formally launch until 28 January the legal framework came into place in October 2012 making it possible for consumers to receive Green Deal assessments ahead of the scheme’s launch. However, only five have been completed and entered onto the government’s register of Green Deal assessments.  Read more on the Building website.

Green Deal Credit Checks Could Stymie Demand

Industry experts have expressed fears moves by the Green Deal Finance Company (GDFC) to credit check customers could increase costs and suppress demand for the government’s flagship scheme.  It has never been clear whether credit checks of customers would be required under the Green Deal because of the unique way that the schemes loans are tied to the property not the occupier.  However, the Office of Fair Trading has advised the GDFC it will need to conduct them to comply with financial regulations.  Read more on the Building website.

NewBuy to Deliver 25,000 Not 100,000 Homes

Housebuilders will only be able to deliver up to 25,000 homes for sale through the government’s flagship NewBuy mortgage guarantee scheme, rather than the 100,000 homes ministers have previously claimed.  Launched by the prime minister in March, NewBuy was designed to help first-time buyers afford new-build homes.  David Cameron said it would kickstart housebuilding by enabling up to 100,000 extra homes to be built - a figure consistently repeated by ministers.  But it has now emerged the Home Builder’s Federation, which runs the scheme, expects an upper limit of 25,000 homes to be sold. Housebuilders have claimed demand for NewBuy mortgages has been limited by lenders’ high interest rates of about 6%.  The news comes after the first official figures for the scheme showed for the period from 12 March to 30 June just 250 homes had been sold.  Read more on the Building website.

Is Localism Dead and Buried?

In the end all the talk of the government ripping up the Green Belt was, if you forgive the colourful mix of metaphors, a red herring.  However, the far-reaching package of housing and planning reforms, which the government claims will deliver 70,000 homes and 140,000 new jobs, may have signalled something far more significant. Because many of the basket of 15 or more separate measures echoed a common - unstated - theme: the re-taking of power from local authorities by a government that just two years ago ripped up the planning system to introduce localism. The reason for the change in direction can be seen clearly in the last Home Builders Federation data, which shows the granting of residential planning permissions in England at a three-year low of just 24,872. Housing starts have also fallen by about 20% in the first half of 2012, according to the latest government data.  The changes which could be seen to fall under a shift away from localism are manifold. Pickles revealed that the government will legislate to allow the planning inspectorate (PINS) to take over planning decisions from local authorities that have “consistently poor performance” in the speed or quality of decisions. It will also allow PINS to penalise councils that turn applications down knowing this will be overturned on appeal - by awarding costs against them. And more types of applications will be diverted to the National Infrastructure Planning branch of PINS, away from local councils. In general the measures outlined start to introduce real penalties if local authorities don’t behave how the centre - the government - wants them to.  Read more on the Building website.

Cameron in Urgent Bid to Save Green Deal

David Cameron has stepped in to rescue the Green Deal by commissioning the Cabinet Office to put together an urgent briefing on how the scheme can be modified to avoid a collapse in insulation installations.  The move comes just weeks after the success of the flagship energy efficiency policy was put at risk by the prime minister’s intervention to block the so-called ‘conservatory tax’ that was touted by ministers as key to driving take-up of the Green Deal. The Cabinet Office has interviewed senior figures in the sector to establish what must be done to make the scheme viable amid increasing concern that it will prove a damp squib when it launches in October this year.  Read more on the Building website.

HCA Invites Bids for £5bn Worth Of Work

The Homes and Communities Agency has opened bidding for a £5bn series of housing frameworks in advance of a new strategy for the sale of public sector land.  The HCA has decided to re-tender rather than extend its Delivery Partner Panel (DPP), which was set up in January 2010 and due to run out at the start of 2013, through which plans for around 24,000 homes have been procured.  Richard Hill, director of investment at the HCA, said the decision had been taken to re-procure the framework because of the government’s focus on using surplus public sector land to help boost housebuilding.  The Pre-qualification Questionnaire comes in advance of the HCA’s publication of a revised land disposal strategy, expected in April, which is set to identify the public sector sites due to be sold to developers in the next 12 months.  It will also highlight sites earmarked for sale to developers in 2013/14 and 2014/15. The government has pledged to see 100,000 homes built on public sector land over the next four years, with the HCA given a role specifically to sell former regional development agency sites.  Read more on the Building website.

Public Land for 83,500 Homes Identified

The government has now identified plots for 83,500 homes on government–owned land. The government has committed itself to getting departments and quangos to identify publicly-owned land that can be used for housing, in order to kick-start development, and said it had identified plots for 50,000 homes at the time of the Tory party conference in October. “Coalition insiders” now say the figure has now risen to 83,500. The figure will form part of the expected 29 November announcement of a housing strategy and infrastructure plan to boost growth in the British economy. Weekend reports said the combined package, to be launched alongside the chancellor’s autumn statement, will be worth £50bn, but with most of the money coming from the private sector. Read more on the Building website.

Home Builders Federation Warns Of 'House Building Ice Age'

The Home Builders Federation (HBF) has warned the government that it must press on with its planning reforms, or risk a “house building ice age”. HBF executive chairman Stewart Baseley said the “complete and utter nonsense” of the anti-development lobby must be dismissed or a generation of people will be unable to access the housing market. Lobbyists and environmental charities have called for the final version of the National Planning and Policy Framework (NPPF) to exclude a presumption in favour of sustainable development, saying it should be delayed until local authorities have suitable housing plans in place. In a speech to the Housing Market Intelligence conference, Baseley pointed out that councils have had since 2004 to ready their plans, yet under a third have done so. Read more on the Building website.

New Shadow Housing Secretary Vows to Put Council Housing 'Centre Stage'

Labour’s new shadow housing minister has said the party would restore regional planning if put in power at the next election. Jack Dromey, who has been confirmed as shadow to housing minister Grant Shapps, told Building that he had been asked by Labour leader Ed Miliband to put “housing centre stage” as Labour looks to rebuild support. Dromey also said that Labour would put a new era of council house building at the centre of his policies. Dromey said: “The government was absolutely crazy to abolish Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs) and Regional Development Agencies. We are now the only country in western Europe without effective regional and sub-regional planning. We need to address that.” Read more on the Building website.

Affordable Rent: A Numbers Crisis

The government hopes that allowing housing associations to charge higher rents will lead to more new homes built with less subsidy. But many in the sector think it will have exactly the opposite effect. Buried in last week’s construction economy predictions from the Construction Products Association and Experian were some pretty scary numbers for those working in affordable housing. The CPA thinks just 65,100 publicly funded social homes will be built between 2011 and 2013, compared with about 100,000 in the last three years. According to Experian, the annual volume of business will fall by about 40%, to £2.6bn, a level lower than any since the middle of the last decade. This pessimism is a response to the 60% annual cut in funding for social housing, but is also a sign of how much the government will have to incentivise the private sector to supply affordable homes if it is to get close to its target of building up to 150,000 social homes between now and 2015. Some, though, think even the Experian and CPA forecasts - let alone the government’s predictions - are optimistic. Read more on the Building website.