Self Build is essential to meet government’s housing targets – Opinion

Self Build is essential to meet government’s housing targets – Opinion


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The Darlington Building Society says:

Rachel Reeves MP highlighted the new government’s plans to build 1.5m homes in England over the course of this parliament in her inaugural speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Supporting this target, housing reforms featured in the King’s Speech with a new Planning and Infrastructure bill set to make it easier and faster for homes to be built.

As ever, the devil is in the detail, and Darlington Building Society fully supports the government’s objective to ease the housing crisis.

Early perceptions are encouraging as the new Housing Minister, Matthew Pennycook MP’s enthusiasm towards self-build is apparent.

In a recent interview, the minister gave an insight into the new government’s plans to revitalise the housing sector. The plans – which come under the new Industrial Strategy – include ‘new towns’ and removal of outdated compulsory purchase practices to free up affordable land. Both measures will all work towards supporting self-building and getting ever closer to hitting the 1.5m homes target.

The new build market in 2023 made for gloomy reading. In 2023, there was a decrease in new home registrations—the process by which a developer registers their intent to build a new home—to 105,449, compared to 189,009 in 2022.

However, the Right to Build register has over 50,000 signatories so far, with just 7,000 plot opportunities available. The new Planning and Infrastructure bill proposed in the King’s Speech could be a vehicle to alleviate this issue and open the gates to more self-builders and therefore more homes.

Chris Blewitt, Head of Intermediary Distribution at Darlington Building Society, said: “With 1 in 3 people considering building/commissioning their own home the scope to amplify housebuilding rates with self-build is huge. But support for the individuals is needed.

“Sites such as Graven Hill in Oxfordshire perfectly set out how affordable and realistic self-build developments can thrive, with a diverse range of self-build homes on a scale of budgets. This type of development supports independent self-builders whilst contributing to that all-important target, and we’d like to see something of this kind in our north-east heartland.

“We need housebuilding to be firing on all cylinders to reach the target set out by the Chancellor—50% higher than the previous 200,000 homes per year target, which was never met.”

Self-build also drives diversification of housing stock to provide future generations with a range of architecture alongside out-of-the-box mass market homes.

Like any economic scale, supply and demand drive house prices up and down—and with it, affordability.

By increasing its support for independent self-builders, the government will clear the path for more to follow this home ownership journey, effectively creating a supplementary stream of housebuilding that is not reliant on large corporations and associated red tape delays.

Darlington Building Society supports the previous government’s Help to Build initiative and is encouraged that it looks set to continue with the new government. Continuing to provide financial clarity and reassurance for people embarking on a self-build journey for the first time.

In her inaugural speech, the Chancellor laid out plans to review green belt boundaries to prioritise the 1.2 million brownfield sites and newly coined “grey belt” land. This could go some way to providing self-builders with the much-needed land and permissions to build their dream home.

Every self-build journey starts with research. Darlington Building Society lends on self-build projects up and down the UK and is partnered with BuildLoan so that aspiring self-builders have access to knowledgeable experts from pre-planning to unlocking their new front door.

Chris Martin, Head of Product Development and Lender Relationships at BuildLoan said: “We’ve worked closely with Darlington Building Society for many years and together we’ve created a fantastic range of innovative products. We look forward to continuing our relationship which will see self and custom build produce an increasingly meaningful number of new family homes each year.”

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