HBF Policy Conference 2025

Planning not enough to help housing – HBF Policy Conference

The government has made impressive strides on planning reform but much more needs to be done to tackle the various other challenges the industry faces to delivering the homes the country needs, according to speakers at HBF’s Planning Conference.

At the conference in London, Neil Jefferson, HBF’s ceo, said the projections on housebuilding from the Office for Budget Responsibility, as announced in Wednesday’s Spring Statement, included “some heroic assumptions” but “we’ll take something from that”. However, “in order to achieve this growth, we need stimulus”.

Jefferson outlined the other issues suppressing housebuilding, including the absence of support for first time buyers, the section 106 crisis, uncertainty around the Future Homes Standard, building safety and the clarity needed on the costs of the Nature Restoration Fund, set to unlock sites blighted by nutrient neutrality demands.

Jefferson said the government had made some “progressive policy interventions and some solid decisions for the long term. But there are frustrations that [other] issues have not been dealt with. These are probably reducing capacity in the industry”.

Mark Aedy, chairman of EMEA & Asia at Moelis & Company, agreed that the Labour government was “only focused on the supply side. There needs to be stimulus on the demand side”.

Giving a view of the market and investment, Aedy said the government had shown a “clear commitment” to housing. But “I’m concerned about building safety [regulations] and the other burdens on industry”.

There was also the operational concern of whether there were “enough plumbers and enough bricklayers to put brick on brick”.

The government, Aedy said, “had an enormous burden to deliver the sense of confidence that the UK is a good plane to invest” after Brexit, previous political turmoil and other events had dented investors’ appetite.

It would be difficult, said Lucian Cook, Savills’ head of residential research, for the government to find a stimulus to the housing market “that fits with the constraints of the Treasury”. There was a wish to see more first time-buyers in the market, however, “the Bank of England don’t want a debt-driven housing boom”.

The government, Cook stated, was hoping for some deregulation of the housing market through its growth agenda “to open it up”. He pointed out that ministers were aiming for 1.5 million homes when the market recovery was still fragile.

Cook also pointed to the question of land viability, an issue covered by previous speaker Richard Donnell, Zoopla’s executive director.

Donnell said: “The government needs to clock the fact that planning is part of the solution, but you’ve got to get to the bottom of the viability piece.”

According to Zoopla’s data, more people wanted to move home this year than previously. But Donnell commented that layers of regulation and increased build costs would make some areas unviable for housing.

If the challenges of planning, viability and demand could be solved, then “not far behind those [would be] skills, training and production capacity,” said Mark Farmer, founder and executive director of Cast Consultancy.

Farmer said the sector had lost 20% of its workforce since 2019.

He expected to see a continued reliance on labour intensive roles to deliver schemes. And he anticipated “incremental” applications of modern methods of construction, rather than homes being delivered in factories – a model that the failures of some companies had proved to be unworkable.

Also speaking at the conference, Sir Michael Lyons, chair of the New Towns Taskforce, said collaboration would be key to the delivery of the government’s key initiative.

Lyons said the Taskforce was “open” to hearing the advice and experiences of housebuilders, housing associations, customers and from those “who have lived and invested in earlier generations of New Towns”.

“Only with shared aims” could the government’s New Towns, set to consist of 10,000 homes or more, be achieved at pace, creating badly needed homes with amenities that were affordable for people and in places where they wanted to live, Lyons said.

But he stressed that the programme was a long-term endeavour that should not distract from the need for local authorities to provide homes in the shorter term.

Other speakers included Homes England’s Eamonn Boylan who expressed the agency’s continuing readiness to work with developers in partnership.

Andy Dean, Lloyds Banking Group’s head of housing development and sustainability, offered an overview of the mortgage lending market, which had seen a recovery.

He also touched upon the government’s desire to address mortgage regulation, which Emily Williams, Savills’ director of residential research, referenced in her speech as a route to boosting new homes sales.

Emma Toms, ceo of the New Homes Quality Board, gave a summary of how the New Homes Quality Code and Ombudsman had settled in two years after their introduction, to drive improved quality and customer care in housebuilding.

Joanna Averley, MHCLG’s chief planner, also spoke at the conference.