Building certainty: a recipe for growth

The government’s constant back and forth between plans to address the nations housing crisis is growing old quick. 

Neil Murray, CEO of Impact Data Metrics, an organisation that uses technologies to provide insights to experts within the property and economic sector, shares his views about techniques that could be used to successfully deliver new homes, helping to solve arguably one of the biggest issues our country has faced. 

The latest government initiative designed to tackle the housing crisis – giving development corporations the ability to seize brownfield land and quickly grant planning permission to accelerate the delivery of the new homes – will I am sure have caused eyebrows to be raised in boardrooms and council chambers from Newcastle to Newquay.

Over the years the development landscape has been littered with a host of new initiatives  – we’ve had investment zones, freeports and innovation zones, as well as the Levelling Up funding and policy agenda. And now we’re going back to the ‘80s with development corporations.

It seems ‘new-ism’ is the only constant.

That’s not to say that any of these initiatives are necessarily a bad idea – both Merseyside and London Docklands Development Corporations were largely seen as successful in their regeneration of two chronically blighted areas.

If you have a situation where there is a new policy every other week however, developers don’t know which way to jump because they don’t want to take the risk of starting something and then finding out that the entire landscape has changed – and with a general election around the corner in 18 months, who knows which way the wind will blow?

As a business working with both developers and local authorities to help them unlock growth, it’s clear that there is no silver bullet to address the housing crisis, just like there isn’t one to tackle the North-South economic divide.

It’s going to take time, clarity of purpose, innovative thinking in terms of partnerships between local and central government, good data on which to base key decisions and support gut instinct, and yes funding too.

What developers, commercial or residential, need most is certainty. Ideally, we need to take the politics out of the process, which I know is easier said than done.

Give developers certainty that something is going to happen, then they will grasp the opportunity and get on with it. Housebuilding is a classic example. There is a lot of criticism around how much land-banking has gone on and how relatively little housebuilding has happened.

My view is that it’s because there is a lack of certainty over planning policy, it’s easier for the housebuilders to focus on land acquisition until there is less risk of policy u-turns. Ultimately these are commericial organisations and land is a good asset to hold as it’s not going to depreciate.

Whatever the framework is going to be development corporations (which have actually been around for about 40 years in various guises) may be the right vehicle, if they are given the right resource, responsibilities and statutory powers.

Get this right and the log-jam can be unblocked.

This applies whether it’s in the middle of Manchester, London, or in Cambridge, where they will need to develop on green belt if they want to double the size of the city to take advantage of the extraordinary amount of innovation-led growth they’ve seen there.

Another ingredient for positive change is to look at some of the projects that are delivering homes and growth now and accelerate them. After all, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. English Cities Fund – a partnership between institutional investor Legal & General, Homes England and developer Muse, is having a transformational impact in places as diverse as Salford Central in the North West and Manor Road in Canning Town, London. These are big and challenging projects that are making a significant difference locally.

This is not just about building houses for the sake of it. Yes, we need thousands of new homes, but you must build the right product for the right people in the right place ,and there has to be a recognition that housing is only a part – albeit a key part – of your overall economy and environment.

It’s just one piece of the jigsaw and you have to understand how the people who are going to live in these homes are going to fit in to the wider economy so that they and it can prosper.

What are the local amenities? What jobs are these people going to fill? What’s the business landscape, the local skills requirements and education provision?

It always comes back to the holistic view that should be adopted around any development, which is about properly understanding the context of that development for a local area. The way to get that context is data, but only if it’s good quality, accurate data.

Images: Avel Chuklanov and Impact Data Metrics