Better housing, not just more housing, must be the goal

Nobody wants new homes built nearby because what housebuilders do looks horrible and inevitably overwhelms local infrastructure – right?  Well, hold on. How else can the government achieve its target of a million and a half new homes within the life of this parliament?

According to the 2024 Competition & Markets Authority report, in 2021-22 the largest 11 speculative housing developers together supplied around 40% of new homes built.  The government response has been to instigate bold reforms to housing delivery targets for councils and an overhaul of the planning system, investing in affordable housing and encouraging SME developers. 

Even with the welcome additional £350m funding for social housing announced last week, almost half of the increased supply is going to be delivered by speculative housebuilders.

To give housebuilders a fighting chance of delivering homes that meet our aspirations, we must stop allocating unsuitable sites for housing with poor access and remote from key infrastructure

So, before anyone takes flight in the face of the forthcoming tsunami of housebuilding on green/grey belt land about to overwhelm our towns and cities with housing estates we do not like, let’s stop and think how we can ride the wave in style. To give housebuilders a fighting chance of delivering homes that meet our aspirations, we must stop allocating unsuitable sites for housing with poor access and remote from key infrastructure. 

And avoiding a wipeout requires the planning system to feed in the right kind of land and would mean applying the standards we have already got, or which are near to hand.

Making the nationally described space standard mandatory, rather than an opt-in for local authorities is an obvious first step – the standardisation probably also suits housebuilders’ business model. Implementation of the Future Homes Standard has been imminent for years, the best housebuilders are already exceeding it so, no reason not to plunge in. 

Building for a Healthy Life 12 is guidance already used internally by some of the majors and referenced in many local plans. These must be reinforced and the government is reviewing and revising key existing standards, not least the national model design code and the manual for streets; the sooner, the better. 

If we want better design, we should at least use these standards and ask for it.  It is notable that the government’s own housing agency (“championing the creation of sustainable homes, communities and places that are brilliantly designed”) procures development with scoring systems for competing bidders that prioritises land price and often allocates only 10% to design quality. And let’s not perpetuate the double standard that allows poor quality homes often in the wrong place – the government can and should repeal permitted development rights.

Housebuilders are brilliant at hedging their risks to secure profit. The speculative process involves long time-frames from placing options on un-designated land, through the often tortuous development management process. 

Once approved, housebuilders only build what they can sell to limit costs of capital employed and to sustain prices. So the development cycle is streamlined with boiler-plate processes and cookie-cutter house-types honed to minimise costs. The entire business, from land-buying to site layout to sales, is as standardised as possible.

As land prices have run out of control, supply chain and energy costs have escalated, and the market has softened, housebuilders have become increasingly protective of their business processes, less and less inclined to innovate. They have little capacity for the fight to overcome obstacles to better placemaking – things like intransigent traffic engineers, objections to connections through adjacent neighbourhoods, councils who insist on huge commuted sums for street trees.

We have learnt how far we can push to obtain better composed housing schemes, improved building aesthetic, parking arrangements and verdant public realm

So, my message to colleagues who, like me, would like to see both more and better housing, is that we must beware of unintended consequences and be careful what we wish for. We won’t make much progress until we improve the context for housebuilding; a better resourced, faster and more transparent planning system, a vision for quality that is aligned across all the bureaucracies of compliance (especially those responsible for road safety), sufficient up-front investment in social and physical infrastructure.

After many years of working with housebuilders at HTA Design, we now think we know how to obtain the best of both worlds – good placemaking and profitable housebuilding.   We have learnt how far we can push to obtain better composed housing schemes, improved building aesthetic, parking arrangements and verdant public realm.

Of course the dilemma for government is not to kill the goose that lays the (some would say tarnished) golden egg – almost half the nation’s new-build housing output. The key is a policy framework that, with gentle nudges, moves the housebuilders to a position where they are earning profit from a value derived from place as a whole, rather than plot by plot.

We believe such an outcome can be prescribed using design codes that focus on public realm with limited constraint on built form, overseen by interdisciplinary design review.

But, to avoid putting a quality spanner in the works of the speculative housebuilder business model, we would do well to understand how far we can go before the machine grinds to a halt.