Part 1 (18-09-23).
If you did not watch the first part of this after the England game last night it is very much worth your time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m001rkn5/britains-housing-crisis-what-went-wrong
The development industry was probably wary of a hatchet job, but my sense was that it was the short-term nature of political decision-making that came out as the villain of the piece.
It certainly highlighted to me that anybody harbouring anger, resentment and bitterness towards the development industry because the government chooses to subsidise the private rental market and first time buyers rather than subside homes for social rent, which I'm sure some people do, would be better served directing that anger, resentment and bitterness elsewhere. Politics, as was said, is choices...
Landbanking got a mention, of course, but responses to that are pretty well rehearsed now and, whisper it quietly, I think starting to become more widely appreciated and understood (little by little).
The trope about ‘cherry-picking profitable sites’ got a run out as well, which betrays a fundamental (and probably wilful) misunderstanding of development and is something that the industry should perhaps also start to push back on.
Margin, to my unsophisticated mind, is a function of risk, not location, and so hurdle rates are
the same in essence when looking at brownfield sites in the north or greenfield sites in
the south. One might look to increase margin as a buffer if sales rates are
likely to be sticky in untested market areas in the north, but cut margin in highly competitive
areas in the south because that might be the only sales flag in that leafy town
for the next five years. Headline profitability could be higher in the former
scenario then than in the latter one.
The idea that the land market is simply awash with opportunities so as to be akin to a supermarket in which fastidious developers can simply pick sites off of a shelf is, to put it mildly, somewhat fanciful.
Part 2 (19-10-23 am).
I wanted to think (it was on the BBC after all…) that the first episode was laying the foundations for a serious exploration of the reasons why not enough houses get built, but, alas not, the second episode was a smorgasbord of grievance and shame.
The indefensible can, by definition, never be defended, but the portrayal of the development industry reminded me of the portrayal of Homer in this old episode of The Simpsons.
Nobody apart from the campaigners giving up their time to right manifest wrongs emerge from the two programmes with any credit, including, to my mind, the makers of them.
My sense is that the people who did not like volume housebuilders before watching them will still not like volume housebuilders, but one can but hope that there is but a tiny bit more appreciation of the political environment within which the industry has to operate.
All parties: the builders, the registered providers, local government and the home-buying and home-renting public at large are all mere actors in a tragic-comic play, the script of which emerges from the Government's legislative framework and the direction of which is provided by the Government's policy agenda.
Post Script (19-10-23 pm).
I thought that Nick Boles came across well and that Eric Pickles did not, which other planners working around the time of the NPPF and the revocation of the Regional Spatial Strategies might find of some satisfaction.
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