The next person to move into Downing Street will need to enrol the support of those working in the many areas of housing delivery with experience and expertise in their respective areas of the market.

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The UK’s housing market is fundamentally unfair; it has left millions of people in insecure, low-quality homes and left a generation of young people unable to achieve the security that older generations once enjoyed. There is a large debate around the underlying issues that are driving it, but the consensus is that the housing crisis has persisted and deepened regardless of the political leadership. Over the past few years, housing has played a small-to-non-existent part in mainstream policy debate. When it has been mentioned, it's been treated with the usual glib terminology of building more, faster, better. Disappointingly, despite the urgent need to provide new homes for this country, the latest Spring Budget was only notable for its lack of attention given to housebuilding. How to more forward?  

Unravelling a property crisis that's decades in the making will require a long-term vision for housing aided by ambitious policy changes, long-term investment, and fast-tracked regulatory reform. But most importantly, it will require the support of those working in the many areas of housing delivery with experience and expertise in their respective areas of the market instead of career bureaucrats. Whoever moves into Number 10 will need to appoint a group of leading delivery-focused industry experts to help accelerate stalled developments and boost housing delivery across the communities. 

Independent Housing Delivery Expert Committee

I believe the best way to do this is to create an independent Housing Delivery Expert Committee or Taskforce that will work alongside the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities by providing independent advice to ministers, acting as sounding board and providing recommendations. The taskforce must bring together leaders from across the UK’s housebuilding and development finance sectors to identify the interventions required to safeguard delivery of homes, with a particular emphasis on affordable housing. The group must include councils, housing associations, developers, development finance lenders, unions, construction bodies, community groups and industry bodies.

I urge the incoming government to bring together key industry figures in the housing sector to put forward proposals and recommendations on how to solve the crisis by tackling its main challenges, namely legacy planning issues, funding rigidity, policy uncertainty, and lack of government investment. But importantly the incoming government must ensure that the proposals raised by the taskforce members are taken forward, centred around the thematic challenges identified by the taskforce.

The Home Builders Federation recent report ‘Beyond Barker’s Report’ highlights the harmful consequences of great advice that goes ignored. According to the report, England would have 2 million more homes today - equivalent to the entire housing stock of Ireland, or the urban areas of Manchester and Birmingham combined - if the Barker Review’s most ambitious housing supply scenario had been achieved. Even if comparing to Barker’s central scenario for increasing housing supply (requiring 240,000 homes to be built a year on average) England has still fallen 900,000 homes short of the total number needed to make the market more affordable over the past 20 years.