14 News
The Callcutt Review Visibility and Potential {Cont.}
16. The Government should commission an early review of relevant law and practice, in particular relating to covenants and leasehold, to ensure that it does not unnecessarily impede the delivery of regeneration and sustainability objectives to the community.
17. The Homes and Communities Agency should commission further work with the housebuilders and commercial developers, property management companies and local authorities, on how community management on new housing developments can act as a stimulus for regeneration of wider areas and communities.
Infrastructure and Planning Gain
18. The Government should consider how an attribution model for contributions to infrastructure provision from planning gain could fit within the Planning Charge.
Quality and Regulation
19. Government should announce that after two years it will cease dealings with any housebuilding firm which fails to achieve a predetermined standard of customer satisfaction. This policy should extend to all public agencies, in particular the Homes and Communities Agency. Special arrangements should be made to ensure that new entrants to housebuilding and small firms are not disadvantaged.
20.The annual customer satisfaction survey of house buyers should be commissioned and funded by Government and run independently of any industry interest.
21. There should be a single design review process for housebuilding, arranged and available nationwide. This process should allow for type approval of standardised designs, including those using MMC techniques. There should be a presumption that any development proposal which passed the assessment process would not be subject to any further objections or conditions in relation to quality imposed by the planning authority.
22.The Government’s planned “light-touch” review should consider CABE’s possible role in relation to the housebuilding design review process.
23.A new strong regime should be created to provide assurance of high standards in the construction of new homes, incorporating compliance with planning conditions, building regulations and warranty in a single scheme. The scheme should be overseen by a national body responsible for consistency of inspection standards and approach, including sanctions.
24. The Government should take an early opportunity to loosen the statute restricting the role of local authority building control officers, to allow them to check all aspects of the quality of new homes.
Skills
25. Local authorities should invest in multi-disciplinary strategic teams in their planning departments, who are able to enter into a productive dialogue with developers prior to the submission of schemes for formal planning approval. These teams should be supplemented by temporary secondments to and from the private sector, as part of a structured training programme.
26. When central and local government and their agencies, in particular the Homes and Communities Agency, dispose of land for housebuilding, the terms of sale should include stipulations on training by main and sub-contractors. Compliance should be monitored and should be an explicit consideration in future disposals.
27. The drive by Government, announced in the Housing Green Paper, to ensure that the skills are available to meet future demand should also aim to simplify the current patchwork of initiatives, so as to focus effort and ensure that the Government’s target of 240,000 new homes a year is reflected in them. This should also result in clear and comprehensive signposting of all organisations and initiatives so that they are easily accessible to industry.
28. ConstructionSkills should be asked to build on their existing work with the industry to prepare a specific sub sector skills agreement for housebuilding, to be reviewed and published on an annual basis, consistent with the national data for the whole of the construction industry.
29. ConstructionSkills, with relevant Government departments and the industry, should promote common definitions for skills and shortages on which all future research can be based, so as to increase its value to the industry and minimise apparently conflicting results.
Zero Carbon
30.The Government should continue to give a strong and sustained message that it is committed to regulate to achieve its target for zero carbon homes by 2016, and must not show any sign of wavering.
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