Bargate Homes’ managing director Mark White – who sits on the All-Party Parliamentary Group advisory board for SME housebuilders – says urgent action is needed to reduce the delays to start on site.
There is widespread awareness of how stretched Local Planning Authorities are. Until they are properly resourced, the 13-week timeframe that the industry used to work within for consideration of major planning applications will continue to be a pipedream. Most residential planning applications take 12 months to reach Committee. If they are refused at a local level, it’s another 12 months to go through the Appeal process.
When we receive the green light from a planning committee, local people think we are land banking if we don’t get shovels in the ground within weeks. We want nothing more than to get on site, but the time it takes to agree the Section 106 and discharge all the pre-commencement conditions can now take 18 months! This process used to take a few months – then in recent years it crept up to six months. The lag between receiving a resolution to grant planning and commencing construction has now tripled for the majority of our sites.
Due to the requirements of Natural England, Local Highways Authorities, and the water authorities, we are facing unprecedented hurdles during the planning process. Alongside the pre-commencement and pre-occupation conditions being placed on housebuilders, this is seeing the number of new homes being delivered fall to alarmingly low levels. The UK’s housing crisis will continue to get worse unless collective action is taken.
The impact of these delays is wide-ranging. The structure of development finance arrangements changes if the pre-commencement/occupation conditions prevent a home from being handed over within the anticipated time window. It must be understood that this whole drawn out process impacts SMEs far more than the PLCs who have extra cards to play to mitigate the issues. What will the current government – or indeed the next one – do to see housebuilding volumes return to the required levels?
Box out
Established in 2006, Bargate Homes will complete a record 230 homes during the current financial year, due to the pre-construction work of its land, planning, and technical departments over recent years. The award-winning housebuilder has launched four major new developments during the past 12 months and its resilient sales performance across all live sites has resulted in solid growth of the business.
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