This week’s UK Real Estate and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) was kicked off by a speech from Matthew Pennycook, the Housing and Planning Minister.
While the additional focus on planning capacity, SME developers and housing delivery that he highlighted is welcome, the bigger issue for me is whether any of it starts changing what people are actually seeing on the ground because that is ultimately what matters.
There is no question that many of the areas being discussed reflect things the industry has been raising for a long time and additional focus on planning capacity, SME developers and housing delivery is welcome.
The bigger issue for me, however, is whether any of it starts changing what people are actually seeing on the ground because that is ultimately what matters.
MEANINGFUL IMPROVEMENT
If we step back and look at housing delivery itself, I think there is still a fair question around where meaningful improvement is being seen.
The ambition to build 1.5 million homes is clearly significant against recent delivery levels, but the wider requirement itself is not new.
We’ve known for more than 20 years that around 300,000 homes a year were needed and yet here we are still discussing broadly the same requirement today despite population growth materially exceeding assumptions made at the time.
That should concern all of us because over that period we have seen reforms, interventions and policy initiatives come and go, yet many of the underlying barriers are still sitting in exactly the same place.
PRACTICAL REALITY
When I sit with developers, the conversation rarely starts with housing targets or policy announcements. It starts with sites, schemes and the practical reality of trying to move projects through a system which, for many, increasingly feels unpredictable and at times simply broken.
I hear stories regularly around applications taking significant time simply to register, planning officers changing midway through a process and different interpretations being applied to live schemes despite neither the application itself nor local planning policy having materially changed.
For years, the discussion around planning centred around delay and whilst delay has always been frustrating, people generally found ways to work around it because it could be built into programmes and viability assumptions.
Increasingly though, what you hear now is less about delay and more about predictability and there is an important difference between the two because uncertainty starts changing behaviour long before construction begins.
MORE SELECTIVE
The consequence is not simply delays to projects already underway. You begin to see developers becoming more selective around sites and taking longer over decisions that may previously have been made much more quickly and, in some cases, projects becoming slower to enter the system in the first place.
That is not because ambition suddenly disappears or because developers no longer want to build. Developers are generally very good at adapting to difficult markets. What becomes much harder is adapting to moving goalposts.
The reality is they are making long-term decisions whilst dealing with increasing labour costs, additional regulation and a growing number of things feeding extra time, cost and complexity into schemes.
Whilst many of these pressures are often described as market conditions, not all of them originate from the market itself and changes introduced into the system inevitably feed through into projects.
ACCESS TO FINANCE
Increasingly this feels less like an access to finance issue and more like a confidence issue because funding exists and developers can usually find capital for good schemes, but confidence becomes much harder to maintain when assumptions around timing, cost and delivery keep shifting.
That can become particularly difficult for SME developers because they are often bringing forward smaller sites and opportunities that larger developers may not pursue, yet those projects still form an important part of overall housing delivery.
If we genuinely want to improve delivery, then I think the conversation increasingly needs to move away from simply setting targets and towards creating the conditions that allow projects to progress with greater confidence and consistency.
Homes are ultimately delivered locally and that means planning teams having the resource, experience and continuity needed to make timely decisions and avoiding situations where schemes effectively keep being reinterpreted as they move through the process.
REDUCING UNCERTAINTY
It also means reducing uncertainty entering projects in the first place, improving areas such as pre-application discussions and discharging conditions and making sure the people delivering schemes every day are helping shape solutions rather than simply responding to them because by the time something starts showing up in national data, people on the ground have often been dealing with it for quite a while already.
The language around partnership with the private sector is important, but partnership also has to mean listening because many of the pressures affecting schemes become visible on the ground long before they appear within national statistics.
After more than 20 years of discussing many of the same themes, at some point we probably have to ask ourselves whether we are simply doing more of the same and then wondering why the result never really changes. I think most people in the sector already understand where many of these problems sit.
The question now is whether we are prepared to look at some of them differently because we cannot really keep discussing many of the same things twenty years later and then be surprised when the outcome stays broadly the same.
