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NEWS
Managing Editor James Parker
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predict that for fairly disappointing reasons of short-term political gain, construction – and more specifi cally, housebuilding – could be the key dominating issue of the next General Election campaign. We know that things like the ‘mutant algorithm’ have the power to lose Tories’ safe seats (such as Chesham and Amersham
in 2021), so there is no saying that similar seats won’t see planning aims held hostage while local MPs attempt to placate voters.
In the Telegraph recently, Matthew Pratt, chief executive of top 10 housebuilder Redrow bemoans the setting of local housing targets based on what he sees as national political priorities. He claims that this is working against local people’s needs and that the “person without a house doesn’t have a voice, whereas those with houses do.” This is a slight shift from the normal complaints about the slowness of the planning system, to a suggestion that the Government is directly sabotaging developments by listening too much to local people!
Michael Gove has aimed to create waves at the Department of Levelling Up and Housing, and as a result of his strong words for housebuilders, such as ‘cartel,’ Pratt believes that now the industry has “probably the worst relationship with the Government that it has had in my lifetime.” This does make you wonder just how cushy it was in the past, when housebuilders are reportedly to be let off their agreed requirements to achieve nutrient neutrality in new developments (on the back of several soft-pedal Government decisions in recent years, such as losing the Code for Sustainable Homes and removing the original zero carbon target).
Housebuilders simply are not policed effectively enough by a governance set up, beyond Building Control, in order to castigate them for not adhering to moral guidelines. They are driven by profi t, and the larger ones by shareholders, which means it’s not even in their interests to build until they have sold all the plots on a site. Asking them to do otherwise is foolish.
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The Government is probably the only means of creating a system whereby housebuilders will build in excess of their requirements, particularly when the market is dropping at a rate of knots. Which is why Redrow’s Pratt thinks that an independent body like the Migration Advisory Committee should decide on housing need in each area, not “a government committee.” And this should be done “on the basis of population growth, immigration and everything else.”
This won’t happen before the next election, so the battleground of housebuilding provision could be a bloody one for both Labour and the Tories, but particularly the latter. Perhaps architects will slowly begin to have a bigger role, as the bigger housebuilders struggle to fi nd the sites that are politically acceptable, and profi table.
James Parker, Editor
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HS2 OLD OAK COMMON
SUPER-HUB, LONDON Designed by WSP and WilkinsonEyre, the BREEAM Outstanding ‘Super-Hub’ for HS2 in west London looks to be the UK’s largest single station yet
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FROM THE EDITOR
ON THE COVER... HS2’s new ‘super-hub’ station in West London designed by WSP and WilkinsonEyre has been awarded BREEAM Outstanding.
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