‘Conservation rules are holding up construction’
AHOUSEBUILDER has attacked regulations to protect wildlife habitats – saying they make it hard to start work on sites.
John Tutte, chief executive of Redrow, said companies like his often had to fit in work around the requirements of different species, leaving them “a very small window” to start construction.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph, the head of the Flintshirebased firm said: “If you get planning permission, you will not be able to start on site if you have ecology issues because of hibernation seasons.
“One particular site [near Cheltenham] had dormice, so that meant we can’t start on the site until spring next year, but then the issue is you have the bird-nesting season. So there’s a very small window of trying to start work on a site.”
Mr Tutte also criticised EU legislation to protect the great crested newt, which has seen a dramatic decline in the UK in recent decades due to loss of habitat and pesticide use – a decline conservationists say is continuing.
Numbers are even lower in continental Europe, making the UK population even more important in conservation terms.
However, Mr Tutte said: “The UK has the largest colonies of great crested newts in the whole of Europe – we haven’t got a shortage. There’s no threat to great crested newts in the UK, but it’s European legislation.”
Destroying great crested newt habitat can lead to a fine or imprisonment. Developers are required to comply with laws protecting newts when they seek planning permission. They may have to halt work if a pond inhabited by newts is discovered.
Changes to the rules introduced last year by Natural England allow housebuilders to remove newts to another colony away from the site. But Mr Tutte said being able to do so depends on the time of the year.
“You can’t collect and transport the newts to new sites if the temperature is below 5˚C. So it writes off the winter for being able to do those works on the site,” he said.
More generally, Mr Tutte criticised a proliferation of regulations imposed on builders, on everything from archaeology and ecology to infrastructure and trees.
“Twenty-five, 30 years ago, you had a handful of conditions. Now it is not unusual to have up to 50 conditions attached to a planning permission and many of those have to be satisfied before you start on a site,” he said.
The slow progress in building new homes has led to accusations of “landbanking’” with a House of Lords report claiming an oligopoly of large private housebuilders was “restricting the volume of housebuilding to maximise their profit margins”.
But Mr Tutte said much of the land could not yet be built on because planning conditions had not been met.
He said: “I don’t think [the Government has] given the industry the credit for the increase in housing numbers that it has produced, particularly the major housebuilders.
“[The industry] has increased output dramatically from 2010. Even over the last two or three years, housing output has probably gone up by about a third among the major builders.”
Mr Tutte added the housebuilding sector is “very profitable, so people will point fingers at the industry – but they tend to forget it went through some pretty tough times in the recession.”
In the year to June Redrow built 4,716 new homes, a rise of 17% on the previous year. It reported record pretax profits of £250m, up 23%.