What will it take to accelerate housebuilding? Our development panel weighs in

We asked the panel – which is made up of some of the biggest builders of social housing across the UK – to share ideas about how to start more developments, their reactions to what has happened already and hopes for future policy changes.

Rents and high rises

In England, much of the lobbying has been around rent: a settlement that would see rents rise by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus 1% is on the table, and the sector has also been pushing for the government to restart a programme of rent convergence. The policy, which was scrapped by the former Conservative government in 2015, aimed to bring social rents gradually up to a “target rent”, and end the hodgepodge that sees residents paying quite different rents for very similar properties.

“Things like CPI plus 1% and rent convergence is just the bare minimum that we need to keep the wheels turning,” cautions Joe Marshall, regional managing director for the South at Sovereign Network Group (SNG).

Development directors on the call are split into those whose organisations have significant exposure to high-rise buildings – and the remediation or safety costs now associated with them – and those who do not.

Angie Hooper, new business director at L&Q, says the 109,000-home landlord has “over 2,000 buildings caught by the building safety review, which is diverting any development capacity away at the moment”.

“I’m slightly envious of what some of you have discussed this morning,” she says, alluding to the fact that the other participants mostly fall into the other camp. For landlords such as L&Q, access to building safety funds is key to their capacity to build more.

For the rest of the panel, the building safety picture is different. “We aren’t as encumbered as others are in the G15 in terms of building safety costs and remediation of fire safety issues,” Mr Marshall says.

Martyn Blackman, chief investment officer at Bromford Flagship, agrees. “The risk profile of our stock is relatively low. We’ve only got three high rises across 80,000 homes. We’ve not got the same drain on building and fire safety that maybe some of our peers have.”

With the Spending Review pushed back from spring 2025 to 11 June, Ms Hooper says the “big frustration” is the “delay in coming up with solutions”.

“By the time we’ve all got our heads around [announcements in the Spending Review] and understand what that means for all of us as organisations trying to contribute to the 1.5 million new homes that’s needed, the government will have lost a year already.”

Russell Baldwinson, executive director of development at LiveWest, says the landlord has been growing its development programme over the past two years, rather than scaling back. It plans to deliver 1,000 homes a year over the next five years, half of which will be for social rent.

“We’re in a financially resilient space, but obviously that’s not enabling us to significantly increase on our development targets, which I think is one of the challenges that a lot of organisations are facing,” he says.

For LiveWest, securing opportunities isn’t a barrier. Instead, the problem hinges on “the relationship between the cost of borrowing and the returns that we generate through our development activities. That is limiting what we’re able to do,” he says.

It is a similar story at Platform, where Paula Heatley, the landlord’s new homes delivery director, says its development programme is also continuing to grow.

“We’re not exposed to building safety in any significant way. We have 11 high rises across 50,000 homes and that has helped us to continue to grow our development programme.”

Mr Baldwinson points out that there will probably be “a three or four-year period leading up to 2029 where the focus of a number of organisations is going to be on building fire safety and legacy issues”.

“The quicker that can be worked through, the quicker those organisations will have capacity to develop homes,” he says.

What is the solution? For L&Q, it is not more land so much as about how to pay for developing it. “I actually own and control about 25,000 plots. About 2,500 of those can come forward in the next two years,” Ms Hooper says.

“But we need grant funding. We need access to the building safety funds,” she explains. “All the time that there is a delay to telling us how the [rent] settlement is going to look or what the Spending Review is going to look like, the temporary housing crisis is getting worse.”

One way of potentially increasing development capacity is through a merger, and the prospect of more merger activity is likely, according to many of our panellists.

Mr Blackman – who is joining the call on the day of Bromford’s merger with Flagship – says “consolidation is inevitable” to free up capacity.

“The smaller organisations aren’t going to be able to continue to deliver with the pressures they’ve got. I think there will be more and more merger activity in the coming years.”

The merger with Flagship, Mr Blackman notes, has created room in the business to deliver around 7,000 extra homes over the next 15 years, in addition to what the two organisations were delivering separately.

For Mr Marshall, there is a possibility that Sovereign and Network Homes would not have been able to go on developing at the same rate in London specifically if the organisations hadn’t merged in October 2023.

A legacy pipeline of Section 106 properties, as well as less exposure to contractor insolvency, have also helped SNG to protect its developments. The landlord completed 2,015 homes in 2023-24, up from 1,879, and ranked second in Inside Housing’s Top 50 Biggest Builders list last year.

The merger has “given us the mandate to go out and acquire new opportunities”, Mr Marshall says, and the landlord has ambitions to build 25,000 homes over the next decade. “But again, in that context of 1.5 million homes, it goes to show the scale of the challenge.”

Moving targets

New mandatory housing targets mean local authorities may find themselves having to aim for higher numbers of homes than they initially planned for.

Setareh Neshati, head of development at Westminster City Council, says current comparisons with the London Plan for Westminster look “very rosy”, but as the London Plan is updated over the next two years, things may change.

“Our focus quickly shifted to creating a new pipeline, because that’s where the pressure is, and that’s how we will be assessed going forward,” she says.

Ms Neshati says the council is currently on target and halfway through delivering its 4,000-home programme, and is about to start planning the new pipeline to make sure it keeps up with any revised targets.

“We have to try harder and be more creative. And I don’t know whether that’s even good enough.”

The panel met before the government published a consultation on its Planning and Infrastructure Bill, squarely aimed at increasing delivery. But members already had ideas about what could change. One came from L&Q’s Ms Hooper, who says “we need a tweak to planning committees”.

“If a scheme has been approved by an officer’s recommendation and fits into the local plan, the committee members will have already signed off the parameters of local plans. Why does it need to go to a committee to get an approval?”

A common theme throughout the discussion is long-term commitment – something echoed in conversations taking place across the sector.

“One of the things we’ve been talking to MHCLG [the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] and Homes England about is moving to a more long-term, place-based and scale-based investment model,” which would stretch 10 to 15 years, Mr Blackman explains.

Lindsay Lauder, director of development and regeneration at Wheatley, says despite the budget in Scotland being restored after a 26% cut for 2024-25, it has damaged development pipelines.

“There is a large onward impact in terms of the sites that have effectively been stalled,” she says, with some developments now prolonged over a number of years.

“I think really the big ask for us would be a longer-term commitment on funding. It’s got to be a multi-year funding package, as opposed to working on an annual basis,” she says.