200 small- and medium-sized (SME) housebuilders have supported a letter by the Home Builders Federation (HBF) to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling for far greater support for housing.
The letter calls for more new homes as a solution to the housing crisis, with the HBF calling out government on it’s anti-development policies. These disproportionately affect SME housebuilders, which includes all custom and self build developers, who are struggling with ever increasing levels of bureaucracy.
The HBF organised a march on Downing Street to deliver the letter, calling out archaic planning rules as a key component in suppressing activity, together with issues around tax.
“It is estimated that there are today 85% fewer small home builders than there was a generation ago, but the barriers we experience today threaten to obliterate the contribution to housing supply from our local businesses,” says the HBF in the letter.
The letter also revealed that 93% of the 200 firms polled were planning to scale back their residential construction activity in light of the difficult operating conditions.
The barriers to growth, as set out in the letter, are:
- The planning process,
- Planning reform,
- Anti-development government quangos,
- The cumulative burden of new taxes, regulations and policies, and
- Skills shortages and increasing costs.
The HBF recently published a report, State of Play: Challenges and Opportunities Facing SME Home Builders that found that 92% of SME housebuilders were dissatisfied with the government’s approach to planning. A lack of funding for planning departments, together with a greater number of small sites, were the top issues for SMEs, which government could remedy.
It reported that the majority of housebuilders found that either obtaining planning permission in the first instance or discharging conditions was a major issue.
This compounded wider industry woes around economic uncertainty and materials and labour shortages.
The Federation of Master Builders also called on government to make a clear commitment to SME housebuilding recently, in light of the drop in activity. This followed the S&P Global/CIPs UK Construction PMI® announcement of the fastest decline in overall residential work for just over three years.
