14 COMMENT


The housing target – out of practice?


Patrick Mooney Housing Consultant


Pressure is mounting on the construction sector, planners and policymakers to hit the Government’s housing targets. Patrick Mooney outlines what must change to achieve them, and who will be left behind if it doesn’t.


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WE ARE LIKELY TO BE WELCOMING BACK EURO TRADESPEOPLE – BUT ONLY IF POLITICIANS CAN PERSUADE THEM THAT IT’S WORTH THEIR WHILE


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n 10 years’ time the development process will look very different to how it does today, with far more use being made of modular building and AI in its various forms, including the use of robotics and algorithms, as well as a transformed planning system. Without such changes, it is diffi cult to see how we will get remotely close to delivering the Government’s target of 1.5 million new homes by 2029. In the meantime and to ensure we do not create a huge backlog in building, we face a series of fundamental problems, such as: have we got the bricklayers, the roofers, the onsite trades, the planners and other vital human resources needed to signifi cantly upscale our outputs from construction? The Spending Review is investing £39bn to deliver more social and affordable homes, an unexpectedly large shot in the arm to the housing sector, with bigger funding increases over the next decade than had been forecast. Across all parts of the housing sector, policy leaders and infl uencers were full of praise for Ministerial initiatives and new announcements.


In addition, hundreds of thousands of extra homes could be delivered through a Government-backed ‘housing bank’ that is projected to unlock billions of pounds of private sector investment to ‘turbocharge housebuilding’ according to Whitehall press releases.


The National Housing Bank, a subsidiary of Homes England, will be publicly owned and baced with bn of fi nancial capacity, on top of bn of existing fi nance to be allocated this Parliament, in order to accelerate housebuilding and leverage in £53bn of additional private investment, creating jobs and delivering over 500,000 new homes.


PROBLEMS TO SOLVE


The sums quoted above are eye-wateringly large, and they should provide an enormous stimulus, but as we all know, as important as new money is, on its own, it can’t build the new houses. And this conundrum is at the


root of the problem. What else needs to be put in place, and who is going to build what and where?


The construction sector has an older than average workforce with huge numbers due to retire in the next decade, adding further to the already lengthy lists of vacancies. This is not a new problem; it predates our departure from the European Union, when foreign workers helped to mask many structural problems in the labour market.


The Government plans to train 60,000 new construction worers to fi ll the gaps, but industry bosses are warning that this fi gure falls well short of what is needed, and we will only build the required number of homes by importing large numbers of skilled and semi- skilled construction workers from abroad. So, we are likely to be welcoming back European tradespeople, but only if the politicians can persuade them it is worth their while. In other parts of the workforce, we face similar diffi culties with a widespread shortage of skills and experience. One of the earliest announcements made after last year’s Election was the recruitment of hundreds of new planners by the end of 2026 and an overhaul of Local Plans. Research from the Home Builders Federation has found a shortfall of more than 2,000 planners in local authority departments, and the average time taken to agree a Section 106 agreement is regularly exceeding one year. And even the most optimistic estimates for the updating of Local Plans are predicting that these will take a minimum of two years, albeit that is signifi cantly down from the snail-like seven years currently being delivered.


Meanwhile, overstretched councils are already failing to spend infrastructure and community payments made by developers, with the combined running total of unspent Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy reaching a massive £8bn in 2024. This amply demonstrates that money alone is not the solution.


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