Property industry to Labour: ‘Now is the time to actually deliver’

While the rhetoric and promises from government have the built environment feeling optimistic, the consensus at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool was that it was time to turn talk of building homes and infrastructure into reality.

Chris Ball, president of UK and Ireland at AtkinsRéalis, summed it up best when speaking at a Sunday Centre for Cities reception.

“There’s been a lot of positive moves over the past 12 to 18 months,” he told the crowd. “It’s fantastic to see but we now need to put that into action and get the pace going.”

The next day, Dave Cleary, Lloyds Banking Group managing director for housing, corporate, and institutional banking, made a similar comment to Place North West when discussing how the government would hit its 1.5m-home target.

“Making delivery is all about moving at pace,” he said. “[Government] has got to talk about the outcomes that they want, which is not just the 1.5m homes. It’s got to be about people. Then they’ve got to move at pace to deliver.”

Kate Henderson, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, said part of the problem is the fact that when it comes to social housing delivery, the government and housing associations are starting from a low point to begin with.

“There’s lots of work to do, but there’s every signal and every intent from government that they are up for the scale of the challenge and so are we,” she said.

Too soon to judge

Walter Boettcher, head of research and economics at Colliers, told Place: “I think it’s probably still a bit too early to see how the government are going to push a lot of their initiatives forward.”

However, current murmurings about the budget are not encouraging.

“I can’t say that with the first budget, and now with the second budget, that what we’re looking at there is laying the groundwork for the sort of stability that we need in order for investors to be able to make long-term investment decisions,” he said.

“So, like everybody else, I’m just waiting until the end of November to see what’s going to come and whether we might break the log jam of investment and things start to move again.”

Andrew Dickman, chairman of Tritax Big Box Developments, agreed that it was “relatively early days” when it came to evaluating the government’s performance on delivering on its building ambitions thus far. Like the others, he noted that the government has “lots of good ideas”.

But the one they need to act on first?

“Reform of the planning system,” Dickman answered, without missing a beat.

Taylor Wimpey chief executive Jennie Daly had made a similar remark earlier in the day during a panel session about the work the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government was undertaking to increase housing delivery.

“The Planning and Infrastructure Bill and a range of other initiatives that we are seeing coming out of Matthew [Pennycook]’s department of MHCLG are really, really helpful – but planning is a tanker,” she said.

A change in attitude

Some of the issues are residual, said Sam Stafford, managing director of the Land, Planning, and Development Federation. The fact that planning permissions are down 6% from last year is still due to actions taken by the Conservative government, he argued.

“Where we are now compared to where we were a couple of years ago is exponentially different in terms of the overall mood and the overall drive and ambition of the government,” Stafford said in an interview with Place during a Labour YIMBY rally on Monday.

“The zeitgeist is different, so [government] should be very much applauded, with the help of these kind of organisations [Labour YIMBY] for actually wanting to build some houses. I don’t think the last government wanted to.”

Stafford made a point to praise Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government for several things: reintroducing and increasing housing targets, bringing in the idea of a ‘grey belt’, and changing legislation around judicial review and national infrastructure.

Dickman also agreed that fixing the planning system goes beyond just a bill or two.

“We also need to reform education. We need to get this country so that people are being educated to come into the professional roles that we need to reform the planning system,” he said.

“I think there’s an awful lot of challenges out there,” he continued. “I think prioritising those challenges is quite hard, because it’s a bit – it must be a bit like playing Whack-a-Mole.”

Now is the time

But focussing on long-term goals does not give government a free pass in today’s world.

“I think patience is fine, but we are in a world where politics is quite short-term and people vote against things rather than for things,” Dickman said. “You’ve got to get some early wins in to grab people’s attention and make them believe that your long-term vision is deliverable.”

And to deliver those wins, the government needs to tackle viability, according to Capital&Centric managing director John Moffat.

“I think there’s still a wider conversation around viability in that every factor in a development appraisal has gone in the wrong direction over the last five years,” he said.

Still, he noted that the general mood at the Labour Party conference was “very upbeat and very positive”.

“Probably even more so than last year,” he added. “Which is a surprise, given that they were just off the back of a landslide win.

“I think now is the time to actually deliver on all of those promises that got them elected last year.”