Principle calls for joined up project management from all involved to deliver the promised 1.5 million homes

The government’s commitment to delivering over 1,500,000 homes across this Parliament is commendable but there are too many factors working against the delivery of the required buildings.

Bob Simonds, our business development director, said: “In general, the mood among developers is that they welcome the Labour government’s commitment to build more houses, and the steps being taken to ease the pain in planning consents.”

This week Labour announced that they would strip environmental quangos of powers to delay housebuilding and infrastructure developments. The current requirement that developers must mitigate the environmental damage caused by new buildings before construction can start has now been removed. The initiative is designed to ensure that developers can start projects without delays and later pay into a new national “nature restoration” fund to “offset” any potential damage.

But Bob said there were still too many logjams in the pipeline that would continue to prevent construction going ahead promptly and developments being finished in a timely fashion.

“The problem going forward, initially, is that while the number of planning applications is increasing, planning departments at local authorities simply don’t have the capacity to deal with this flood of applications, which will lead to increasing delays. Add to this the fact that developers and construction companies don’t have the resources, the skilled staff or the supply chain capacity to build at the rate they would like, and this compounds the problem. Infrastructure is a massive issue because at present there is simply not enough capacity that the National Grid can deliver to cope with planned developments, far less those still in the planning process. “Cities, towns and rural areas alike need massive upgrading of all the utilities – electric, gas, water and sewerage – to cope with anything like 1.5 million new homes coming online over the next five years. More and more people are charging their electric cars on their drives overnight and this will only increase as new homes are built with charging facilities as standard – another massive drain on the national grid system.”

He added: “The question is really whether local authorities and the utilities can deliver the level of cooperation and project planning required to allow developers any chance of delivering the number of homes they want to build. The construction industry needs to gear up now for this increased activity and plan to fill skills gaps where they know they are going to be short – whether bricklayers, electricians or in professional services.”