Now is no time for house-builders to sit on planning permissions
SIR – Daniel Bentley’s appraisal of the housing situation (Comment, July 16) is timely. Last week the building industry asked for an increase in government support for new-builds.
In my own small rural district, the latest annual monitoring report shows 157 homes completed (about 70 per cent of the Local Plan target). Planning permissions granted but not started came to 1,800! Yet we press ahead with new permissions, mostly against local wishes, in the faint hope that if enough are granted some might be built.
The law of supply and demand indicates the opposite, and the appetite of builders for profits will always mean a bank of permissions to keep the needy hungry for homes. SIR – Daniel Bentley joins a series of commentators who propose solving the housing crisis by punishing the suppliers, and by more government intervention. Governments delude themselves that their housing allocation numbers have solved the problem and the house-builders are blamed for not building fast enough.
House-builders are just businesses that want to sell houses quickly. To do so, they buy land on the open market. The houses they sell do not exist in a vacuum. New houses represent about 15 per cent of those for sale, and the price of land is based on the prices of all the new and old houses in the area.
True, an eventual increase in supply will reduce overall prices, but the problem is not a conspiracy in which house-builders jack up their price by withholding stock. The problem lies in the ever more complicated processes for getting the housing started.
Take an example of a local authority allocation of 4,000 residential units (houses and flats). My firm is working on several of these. I will ignore the time taken to get the allocation. Once it is made, it will take at least two years to get permission for the masterplan that has to be granted before any housing can start. Committees, review bodies, departments, vested interests and officials must be consulted. Once permission is granted, it will take at least 18 months to clear all the legal agreements required. Once the masterplan is approved, to bring the first phase of houses to the next set of permissions for construction will take at least another six months. So now, a minimum of four years later, they can cut the first turf.
Mr Bentley’s proposal to “impose build-out rates” will not change reality. Infrastructure has to be put in, landscape planted, road junctions built. The most optimistic sales rate on one development phase of 200 units would be one house per week. This is nothing to do with “drip feeding”, it is how the market – which includes new and old stock – responds.
The problem lies not in building and selling new houses. It is getting to the point when you can start to build them. Bashing the suppliers of the product is not the Conservative way. Professor Robert Adam Adam Urbanism Winchester, Hampshire