Sam Russo, Partner at Welling Partnership, a leading property and construction consultancy in the South of England, shares his reaction to Labour’s Autumn Budget to ‘Get Britain Building’.
“It was extremely encouraging to see support announced for affordable housing specifically, and for housing associations. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Autumn Budget needed to address and provide solutions to address the systemic challenges facing the housing building industry, and I feel it has provided some positivity for the sector.
Quite simply, we as an industry are not building enough homes, particularly affordable housing. Meaningful support, such as today’s announcement that local authorities will be able to ‘retain the full receipts generated by sales’ is reassuring and will create vital reinvestment into existing stock and new developments.
Affordable Housing needs continued investment, with initiatives and funding announced – however it would have been good to see the renewal of the Homes England Strategic Partnership Programme. This would have underpinned Housing Associations and Local Authorities to unlock affordable housing supply at their own pace.
Housing Associations need a long-term funding settlement to ease competing investment decisions, removing the difficulties and conflict between modernising and upgrading existing stock in lieu of prioritising new build developments.
Reforms across the whole planning process are welcomed in order to aid the planning backlog. Providing more planning officers will relieve the pressure felt in many departments and by Local Authorities. However, it would be further beneficial to reform the planning determination process, by allowing all sites allocated through the Local Plan to be solely determined by case officers under delegated powers. It would speed up planning approvals, avoid politicisation of housing delivery, and reduce the number of schemes overturned on appeal.
Further investment in skills development, which was mentioned within the budget with Skills England, is promising and will help to create jobs across all ages and backgrounds. This is critical to address the chronic skills shortage in the industry. Providing better support for SMEs to recruit, train, and develop talent is another way this could be achieved.”
