10 INDUSTRY NEWS
Pidgley says “criminal” red tape is stopping builders tackle crisis
Berkeley Homes’ chairman Tony Pidgley fiercely criticised planning ‘red tape’ which was preventing housebuilders delivering the homes needed to address the housing crisis as “ridiculous” and a “crime.” He told a conference audience at
Ecobuild: “Government bogging us down in red tape once planning has been decided needs to be challenged. We are talking about affordability and place-making, and to spend anything between one and three years signing a 106 agreement is a crime when we have a housing crisis.” Pidgley challenged the Government, in
the wake of its Housing White Paper: “Let’s deal with the red tape and the bureaucracy, and put the onus back on the industry. Why do we need 800 planning conditions for the one [firm] that misbehaves?” He added: “I’d like to see them put more
planning officers and more technical people in so that we can get on with the jobs, after we have had the debate about where we will build. Once that planning permission is given, the industry should be forced to get on with it.” Pidgley was responding to a challenge
from the chair of a session at Ecobuild, UK- GBC’s Julia Hirigoyen, on whether there was a “dichotomy between the number of new homes required and the standard to
which they are built.” Pidgley refuted the idea that standards
were being compromised to deliver on the numbers and density of housebuilding required: “We are doubling on the densi- ties, and most of the homes we are building don’t really need heating.” He suggested that if a “cross-section” of
20 people across the industry who care about place-making was assembled you “could come up with a standard set of conditions.” He said that despite the existence of Building Regulations existed, it “didn’t stop planning departments adding hundreds of planning conditions, which they don’t have the staff to deal with.”
Modular housebuilding factory opens in Shoreham
A new state-of-the-art volumetric modular manufacturing facility, capable of creating over 1,000 new homes a year, has opened up at Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. Customers visiting the Futureform
factory will be able to pick a home “just as they would a car.” They can choose from a range of different house types, with life size show homes on display at the factory. The company plans to invest over £5m in
the new facility, along with two more assembly plants planned over the next two years. This is as part of its £450m develop- ment programme, creating more than 300 skilled jobs within the new off-site construction plants and roles, such as sales
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and support, engineering, architecture and design, planning, construction and logistics. Steven Barrett, CEO and managing
director at Futureform, commented that the opening of the facility comes at a “criti- cal point for housebuilding in the UK.” He said that while it’s clear the “UK needs more homes,” the company believes that the “way forward is the diversification of the housing market.” Steven continued: “We are delighted that
[the Government] have announced their intention to promote more modular volumetric and factory built homes. We hope that any new measures will assist in our partnerships with local authorities, and ultimately we hope that this will usher in a new era of affordable home ownership in this country.” The Futureform group is now a devel-
oper in its own right, and currently has a development programme of mixed devel- opment projects across the UK in its pipeline. The company is offering homes under the House Beautiful Homes brand, in partnership with the Hearst Group.
Enq. 103
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