Latest news with #HomeBuildersFederation
Telegraph
02-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Rayner's housebuilding pledge in crisis
Angela Rayner's pledge to build more than 1m new homes across the country is under threat after key housebuilding activity indicators suggested fewer houses were being built. The Home Builders Federation (HBF) said several different measures to track how many homes are on course to built in future have stalled over the past year, underlining the challenges the Government faces to hit its target of 1.5m new homes. Those indicators include the number of Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) issued for new homes, with numbers falling to 205,000 for the year to March 2025, down from 212,000 in the previous year. Records from the Government's council tax base also show 213,000 more homes were registered in England in the year to September 2024, down from 237,000 in the previous year. Meanwhile, planning approvals for homes in England have dropped to their lowest point in more than a decade, down 5pc year-on-year to around 234,000 in March 2025. The figures show the scale of the challenge ahead for housing ministers, who have set out to boost housebuilding rates through major changes in planning reform. Measures have included introducing a 'grey belt' designation to unlock lower-quality green belt land for housebuilding. 'Central to economic growth' Researchers at the HBF said that although ministers had taken 'bold' steps to speed up housebuilding through planning policy reforms, housing delivery was still dropping and would fall 'well short' of levels needed to meet its target to build 1.5m homes. The organisation said the overall outlook was 'deteriorating ' so long as other policy challenges, particularly on the demand side, stay unresolved. It estimated a further 100,000 homes could be unlocked if a first-time buyer support scheme was introduced. Neil Jefferson, HBF chief executive, said: 'Over the past year, the Government has made some bold and positive steps to fix the planning system, and these have been welcomed by the industry. 'But unless ministers act quickly to address the wider constraints blocking delivery, that early progress risks being wasted. 'From the growing backlog of affordable homes to the lack of demand-side support for buyers, urgent and coordinated action is now needed to get supply back on track. 'Housebuilding is central to economic growth, opportunity and social mobility, but that potential is not being realised. If Government is serious about hitting its housing target, it must match its ambition on planning with a more radical and joined-up response across the board.' The report comes as Ms Rayner promised this week to build 300,000 affordable homes by 2035 under her £39bn funding plan, with 60pc of these let at social rent. But the HBF's progress report, focusing on housing delivery since the general election a year ago, said her initiatives will do 'little in the short term'. It said more than 100,000 private homes and at least 17,000 affordable homes had stalled owing to a lack of bids from housing associations.
BBC News
17-06-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Agency staff spend puts Swale council £900k over planning budget
A shortage of planning professionals is one of the reasons a Kent council has overspent by £900,000 in the past year, a report has Borough Council, covering Sheppey, Sittingbourne and Faversham, spent £1.24m on planning in the past financial year, despite budgeting £337,000 for the told the council's policy and resources committee meeting on 12 June that the overspend was "largely driven" by the cost of agency staff paired with a drop in Angela Harrison said she was getting "déjà vu" over the high costs despite other departments "shaving to the bone". Local authorities receive money from developers when they submit planning applications but Swale council's head of place Joanne Johnson said it was "very hard to predict" planning councillors thought the issues were predictable and the authority should have planned properly for them, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.A shortage of planning professionals has caused issues for councils nationwide for some January, the Home Builders' Federation reported 80% of the 134 councils it asked were operating below full capacity."An estimated 2,200 planning officers are needed across England and Wales to address the gap," it said.A Swale council spokesman said its planning department should have 34.3 full-time equivalent roles and there were currently five reasons for the overspend included over-budget appeals process 2024-25, Swale set aside £23,600 for paying appeal costs, but overshot this by £139, Mike Baldock said: "Even though we have a very high success rate at appeal we can expect there to be a high level of appeal costs. Any appeal is going to cost a considerable amount of money."A Swale spokesman said in 2024-25 there were 45 appeals against council decisions, of which 31 were ruled in favour of the local authority.
Daily Mail
11-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Affordable housing plan boosts builders but Labour is still on track to miss election target of 1.5m homes
Shares in Britain's developers soared after Rachel Reeves put a £39billion affordable housing plan at the heart of her spending review. The Chancellor said it was the 'biggest cash injection in affordable and social housing in 50 years' but figures showed Labour is on track to miss its target of 1.5m homes by the next election. Just 39,170 homes won permission in England in the first three months of 2025, the lowest quarterly figure since records began, the Home Builders Federation said. Shares in Bovis owner Vistry, which specialises in affordable housing, rose 6 per cent. Crest Nicholson and Bellway gained 4.5 per cent and 2.6 per cent respectively. Persimmon was up 1.1 per cent, while Barratt Redrow, Taylor Wimpey and Berkeley Group rose 0.7 per cent. Alex Slater, at Rightmove, said the cash 'is a really positive boost'. But Emma Humphreys, at law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, said: 'Given the recent dip, there are serious concerns about an even tighter housing supply. 'Serious change is needed but it is unclear whether the spending will achieve that.'
The Guardian
08-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The cruel government trick that drives voters to Reform: calling new homes ‘affordable'
I have got used to a scene that has been repeated in wildly different places all over the UK. Close to the centre of a town or city, there will be a construction project, centred on the delivery of brand new apartments. The air will be filled with the loud clanking of machinery; a hastily finished show flat might offer a glimpse of what is to come. I have developed an unexpected addiction to these places, always photographing the hoardings that hide building work from passersby, which usually feature ecstatic thirtysomethings drinking coffee and relaxing in upmarket domestic environments (they are usually accompanied by slogans like 'live, work, relax, dream'). And I have come to expect a kind of encounter that goes straight to the heart of one of our biggest national problems. Up will walk a member of the public, looking sceptically at what is under way. Their words may vary but the basic message is always the same: 'Who's this for? Not me.' At the last count, 1.3m households in England were on local authority housing waiting lists, the highest figure since 2014. About 164,000 children live in temporary accommodation. Average rent increases in the private sector recently hit a record high of 9.2%. Figures just released by the Home Builders Federation show that the number of new homes given planning consent in England in the first quarter of 2025 was the lowest since 2012, something partly blamed on the absence of any government support scheme for first-time buyers. The market for homes people can buy remains a byword for exclusion and impossibility, which is why those new apartment blocks are always such a dependable symbol of fury and frustration. The same anger has long since seeped into our politics. Fifteen years ago, I can vividly recall reporting from the London borough of Barking and Dagenham about chronic housing problems caused by the mass sell-off of council houses, and the area's increasingly toxic politics. A 60-year-old owner of a bakery told me about her daughter, who lived with her four-year-old son in a privately rented flat full of pigeon droppings that had apparently made him chronically ill. They were on the council waiting list. 'But every time,' she told me, 'she's, like, number 200 or 300.' She and her husband, she said, were going to vote for the neo-fascist British National party. At the time, it felt as if what I was seeing still sat at the outer edge of politics. But these days, the same essential story has taken up residence at the heart of the national conversation: the BNP has been chased into irrelevance and protest votes now go en masse to Reform UK, and the connection between the housing crisis and the febrile state of the political mainstream is obvious. Certainly, it's impossible to grasp the salience of immigration without appreciating many people's visceral feelings about the scarcity of homes. In the inner circles of Keir Starmer's government, there must be voices keenly aware of the need to finally tackle all this. Some of the right instincts were evident in Labour's promise to oversee the building of 1.5m new homes in England by the end of this parliament. The chancellor has recently reiterated the aim of delivering the 'biggest boost in social and affordable housing in a generation'. But what that means and whether any such thing is on its way are still clouded in doubt. The clock is loudly ticking down to this week's spending review. Last weekend, the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, addressed an event put on by the progressive pressure group Compass, and said Rachel Reeves should 'unlock public land for mayors to use to build a new generation of council homes at pace – akin to the drive of the postwar Labour government'. Housing associations have pleaded with the chancellor to reclassify social homes as critical infrastructure (a category that covers such essentials as food, energy and 'data'), which would allow increased funding to fall within her fiscal rules. Meanwhile, Angela Rayner – the minister in charge of housing, who is said to be fiercely attached to the dream of a social housing renaissance – is seemingly locked in intense last-minute negotiations with the Treasury. Although the budget unveiled in March contained an extra £2bn for the government's affordable homes programme in 2026-27, its own publicity material said this was merely 'a down payment [sic] … ahead of more long-term investment in social and affordable housing planned this year'. Rayner is reportedly pushing the plain fact that the ever-more doubtful 1.5m target will be missed without much higher funding. We will see what happens on Wednesday, but housing seems to have fallen out of the government's messaging. Of late, it has seemed that Reeves and Starmer think investments in defence and public transport are a much higher priority than dependable shelter. There is a vital point at the core of this issue. Even if Starmer has often given the impression that the answer to the housing crisis lies in clearing away planning law and letting corporate developers do the work, their ring-road faux-Georgian cul-de-sacs will not provide anything like the entirety of the solution. Social housing – which, at the scale required, needs to be largely the responsibility of councils – is not just what millions of British people need as a matter of urgency; it will also have to be hugely revived if the government is to meet its aims: 1.5m homes in a single parliament equates to 300,000 a year. The last time such a feat materialised was in 1977, when about half of all new-builds were delivered by local authorities. A new version of that story will not be easy to realise. Threadbare councils are in no state to play the role in a housing revival that they need to. The UK is also faced with a dire construction skills crisis: despite the government's plans to train 60,000 new construction workers, industry insiders are adamant that we will only build what's required with the help of building workers from abroad. But failure should not be an option: it will not just deepen this country's social decay, but also boost malign forces on the hard right, and present a huge obstacle to Labour having any chance of winning the next election. In the midst of last year's contest, I went to Aldershot, the old garrison town at the centre of a constituency that Labour won from the Tories on a swing of 17 points. Grand buildings once used by generals and majors were full of luxury flats, and the town centre was scattered with empty shops. There, I came across a new development called Union Yard, which was on its way to completion. It contains 128 student 'units', 82 properties for private rent, and a mere 18 classified as 'affordable' (which, in keeping with one of the grimmest aspects of the politics of housing, means they will be let for no more than 80% of local market rent), set aside for people over the age of 55. Not long before, the waiting list for council homes in the surrounding county of Hampshire had hit 30,000. On a Tuesday afternoon, I sat facing the images of the high life that adorned the development's outer edges, and had a long conversation with a twentysomething woman who was full of a striking mixture of sadness and anger. I knew what she was going to say, and it came out pretty much verbatim: 'Who's that for? Not me.' John Harris is a Guardian columnist
Daily Mail
06-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Labour missing housebuilding target by 170,000 homes a year, report finds
Labour is on track to miss its housebuilding target after planning permission for new homes tumbled to a record low. A bleak report by the Home Builders Federation yesterday dealt a blow to the Government's vow to build 1.5million properties by 2029. Stark figures show Labour is falling short of its target by 170,000 homes a year. Industry leaders said the data was 'disastrous' and without urgent support from ministers there is 'little chance' of reaching the goal. Just 39,170 homes were given planning permission in England in the first three months of the year – the lowest quarterly figure since records began. That was a 55 per cent drop on the previous quarter and almost 32 per cent lower than a year earlier. The 225,067 units given approval in the 12 months to the end of March was the worst performance in 12 years. The federation said its data 'starkly illustrates the urgent need for Government to address the barriers to housing supply' if they are to get 'anywhere near the much-vaunted' target. A lack of support for first-time buyers, overstretched planning departments and high taxation has squeezed housing development, the trade association said. It also cited a problem with housing associations failing to buy tens of thousands of new homes designated for social and affordable rents. Chief executive Neil Jefferson said: 'The latest planning figures are disastrous for an industry and a government looking to increase housing supply over the coming years. 'Unless urgent interventions are made, there seems little chance of us building the homes we know are desperately needed.' Around 200,000 homes are being built each year, below the 370,000 target, the figures show. The number of new developments approved in the first quarter of 2025 was 2,018 – the worst quarterly figure in 20 years. The HBF called on ministers to introduce support for first-time buyers which could lead to the construction of an extra 100,000 homes. Investment in high-rise blocks has 'collapsed' due to delays at the Building Safety Regulator which 'has been unable to deal with its workload', the group said. There is also a shortfall of 2,000 local council planning officers, and new taxes have 'ballooned' since 2020, putting pressure on builders. A housing department spokesman said it is 'taking decisive action' to speed up the planning process and that its 'seismic reforms will help drive UK housebuilding to its highest level in over 40 years'. Meanwhile, builders could be required to install solar panels on the 'vast majority' of new homes in England, according to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband. It comes a month after No10 confirmed the panels should be installed on as many new properties as possible amid speculation that ministers will make them a mandatory requirement on new builds by 2027.
