CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE 2016: Housing minister Gavin Barwell has said there will be a “whole range of interventions” from government to encourage housebuilding.
Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party Conference, he said the “starting point“ would be how much land government releases into the system.
He said: “In this country, essentially the government has complete control over where and what we can build.
“And we have not, certainly in some parts of the country been releasing anything like enough land into the system.”
Chancellor Philip Hammond will today announce government borrowing of £2bn to support an “accelerated construction” scheme, which aims to get houses built on publicly-owned “brownfield” land available for swift development.
Barwell said the government was also looking at improved local plan coverage and policy around density to boost housebuilding.
Signalling a new era of housing policy which supports supply rather than demand, he said he was looking at solving the problems of a lack of SME housebuilders, a lack of custom and self-build, and a lack of institutional investment into PRS.
Another area he is keen to promote is innovative construction methods such as off-site construction.
He said: “It is a sector that is still to a degree building homes in a very similar way to which it has done for a long period of time.
“If you look elsewhere around the world, there is plenty of potential for more innovation in to how we build homes which could potentially reduce costs, speed up delivery and also potentially makes homes cheaper for people when they are moving into them in terms of running costs.”
He added: “I don’t think there is any single silver bullet; but certainly just thinking that you can reform the planning system and think that everything will be taken care of is not a view that I will take.”
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