‘Certainty and supply’ needed to grow housing market

Chris Calvert, Executive Director for national planning consultancy Pegasus Group who have offices in Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool comments on the Government’s recent Housing White Paper.

What is the Housing White Paper and why is it important?

The Housing White Paper is about introducing a step change in housing supply and delivery. How effective it will be will be is down to everyone in the process and the engagement of the key players. In particular local authorities in bringing about more certainty and speed in their planning and decision making and also developers in delivering supply into the market place.

Is the sector as “broken” as the Housing White paper makes out?

Fundamentally there are a large number of factors that form part of the sector. It is therefore impossible to pinpoint one element that is in fact ‘broken’. The White Paper takes a holistic approach and tries to catch all of the combinations of inputs.

Taking a strategic planning perspective, a developer’s natural instinct is to acquire and build new homes in the right locations, stimulate growth in other – but they crave certainty and they want to deliver.

The system needs to provide a speedier and more effective planning framework for this to happen. Too many times the system gets embroiled in political angst at a National and local level that slows and sometimes stalls the roll out of up to date Local Plans. The resultant void creates tensions. The overall attitude is too often about adopting a negative starting point and that there must automatically be unacceptable harm.

The White Paper seeks to address this, but it requires key stakeholders to recognise the opportunities and benefits for all that can be achieved by creating a greater supply of housing.

What can we do to make buying a house for first timers less of a “distant dream”?

Certainty and supply which are key interlinked themes. If the White Paper delivers on this, there will inevitably be a wider choice for every level of the housing ladder.

What does the future of the housing look like?

The sector looks confident, with a sense of really wanting to get sites into and out of planning quickly and start delivering new homes. More recently, we have seen greater activity amongst SME scale developers who have been missing from the market place for some time. The SME marketplace is important and will complement the work of the larger sized operations.

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