Solving Britain’s housing crisis is going to take years, experts warn

LEADING property and real-estate developers have cautioned that the next government faces a battle to fix the country’s housing system.

Kamal Pankhania, a property developer and entrepreneur who leads Westcombe Group, said at last week’s inaugural Eastern Eye Property Awards that the lack of houses being built to meet demand has been a long-term issue.

“The housing system is a mess, it’s been a mess for 25-30 years,” said Pankhania.

“The Conservative government tried, but not delivered. And Labour (if they form the next government), they’ve got a big challenge on their hands.

“It’s not an overnight solution – it’s going to take years.”

Niamh O’Connor is a founding partner at Summix, which has specialised in delivering sustainable, new, mixed-use housing projects across the UK and Ireland for nearly two decades.

“Most of us in this room who deal with planning know we have to work very, very hard to get an officer’s recommendation for approval,” she said. “We’re then subjected to a planning committee of elected individuals, most of whom have zero experience in the planning sphere – they just want to be re-elected.

“We’ll work hard to get an officer’s recommendation for approval, and then we’ll receive a rejection from the planning committee and the public purse will then have to go to an appeal process in order for us to seek the consent that we were rightly deserved in the first place.

“If the planning system changed and it wasn’t elected individuals making these decisions, that would be a good start.”

She added, “From the election manifestos, the majority of the parties agree there needs to be a change in the planning system.

“It seems like there is going to be a Labour majority and here are many things that they’re doing to accelerate housing growth.

“They want to have one-and-ahalf million houses within the first five years of the election. They are looking at doing that through new towns, which we are huge supporters of. But we all know that huge new towns aren’t going to be deliverable within the first five years because of the infrastructure required.

“Then we look at things they’re doing to streamline the speed of the planning process by delivering 300 new planning professionals – we’ve lost 3,100 planning officers within the last 12 years – within the public sector to determine applications in a more quicker time.”

Despite the positive steps proposed by Labour, O’Connor warned that it would not solve the housing crisis in the UK.

“In England alone, there are over 300 (local) authorities. That’s one (extra) planning officer for each authority – that’s not going to be able to deal with the backlog and the immense number of applications that we’re going to need to have to be able to deliver a 300,000 a year target,” she said.

“A lot of the ideas are great, but I just don’t think they’re going far enough to be able to deliver the change that the country actually needs in delivering the homes that we need.”

Harry Murphy co-founded Situu, a London-based agency that specialised in the delivery and marketing of managed office space. The company was bought by the global real-estate adviser Savills two months ago. He is now cohead of the Savills Workthere UK’s team of specialist consultants.

Murphy said he “feared” what was still to come for the UK property sector especially as people continue to work from home and large office buildings are left empty.

New projects needed to serve multiple purposes and old office buildings needed to be adapted to people’s needs, he said. “Truthfully, people don’t want to go back to work, they’re happy [to be] working at all. When people do come back to work now, it’s about collaboration, it’s about offices being fit for purpose,” Murphy added.

“What we’re actually seeing now is a lot of these old buildings – if you look at places like Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Old Street, Kings Cross, what were cool warehouse buildings pre-Covid and would’ve been renting at really high rents, now people don’t want them, because these buildings don’t align with a lot of employee attendance requirements which could be sustainability, it could be diversity, and equal opportunities.

“A lot of these buildings may not have a lift because it’s a ‘cool warehouse’, but actually, if someone is in a wheelchair, how can they work in this building?

“To a degree, you’re finding that the market’s changing. You’ve got some property owners who are seeing this, and they’re adapting in terms of what they’re doing to their buildings, making them sustainable and how they design these offices.

“The property owners who do not adapt and change their properties, there’s no value. It’s no longer a case of ‘at the right place, someone will take it’.

“If people can’t get into the building, if it hasn’t got good air conditioning, if the meeting rooms are not fit for purpose, because they haven’t got the artistic qualities you would expect to be doing on your podcast – quite simply, they will be left empty”.