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Housebuilding on the rise, according to new reports

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This week we’ve been reading up on the new report by the Home Builders Federation (HBF) and Glenigan which reveals that housebuilders are continuing to invest in land and are getting new sites approved despite the wider political and economic uncertainty.

This spring, we’ve been writing a lot about the state of the construction industry, and housebuilding in particular, on the Advantage blog.

Recently, we blogged about how housebuilding has returned the construction sector to growth, and this week we’ve been reading up on the new report by the Home Builders Federation (HBF) and Glenigan which reveals that housebuilders are continuing to invest in land and are getting new sites approved despite the wider political and economic uncertainty.

The Planner reported that: In 2018, 370,000 new homes had received planning permission, the second highest annual total on record and over double the number being granted a decade ago.

Housing supply has risen by 78 percent in the past five years with 222,000 homes added to the housing stock last year. Although the level of increase is unprecedented, the total is still some way short of the number of homes the country needs to be building. To address the shortfall, government has set the industry a challenging target of building 300,000 a year by the mid-2020s (see our related recent Advantage blog on why we need to build more social housing).

The Planner stated that local authorities are taking too long to process permissions to the point where builders can actually start on site. The industry is keen to work with central and local government to ensure that local authority planning departments have sufficient resources to deal with the increased number of applications being submitted.

Stewart Baseley, executive chairman at HBF, said:

“The industry is investing massively in people and land to ensure it can meet the challenge set by government to deliver even more, high-quality homes.

“Last year saw output continue to increase alongside improved customer satisfaction levels. Builders are acutely focused on delivering further improvements in quality and service levels alongside investing in more land to enable further increase in supply.

“The industry continues to work with central and local government to ensure local planning departments have the capacity to deal effectively with the increased number of applications. It is also pushing government for confirmation that it will have ongoing access to skilled labour from abroad post-Brexit, which will be key to its ability to build out these sites.”

We’ll be back soon with Advantage’s take on the latest construction industry news on our regularly updated news page.

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