Leeds Councils Conroy Brook Housebuilding Residential

Local authorities will be unable to restore completions of new homes to record post-war levels, a west Yorkshire local authorities Director for Regeneration has warned.

Richard Conroy, Chief Executive Officer at Yorkshire-based SME housebuilder Conroy Brook, told delegates at the West Yorkshire Development Conference that councils had played a major role in achieving the record post-war completion levels seen in the 1960s: “We can’t rely on section 106, we need large scale development of social housing. We need councils to start delivering more council houses.” [emaillocker id=”71749″]

Tom Stannard, Corporate Director for Regeneration & Economic Growth at Wakefield Council, said the Leeds city-region has some of the highest level of planning permissions in England. But many sites cannot be delivered because they are not viable, due to issues like decontamination.

Pointing to 10 to 15 sites numbering 500 to 1,000 units that require a high level of intervention to come forward in the city, Stannard said: “Make no mistake, there is a capital intervention required at scale to bring those schemes forward. We can’t say on local authorities’ behalf that our capital programmes alone can bear the strain of that level of intervention. They cannot.”

Helen Lennon, Chief Executive of Connect Housing, said the west Yorkshire association had trebled its output of new homes last year to 100, but agreeing with Stannard, she said: “We all have the will and are answering the call but are constrained.”

Lennon said that while Connect Housing is exploring the use of off-site construction, its relatively small size as an organisation means it cannot achieve the volumes required to cost effectively exploit these techniques.

View the next events in your area. Click here > 

Off-site manufacture of housing remains uneconomic for SME housebuilders like his own firm, said Conroy: “The problem is that modular is still more expensive, even factoring in quicker construction, unless you get economies of scale, which is frustrating.

“The time is clearly coming but for us it’s just too expensive and too early,” he said, adding that offsite methods also make it harder to adapt homes the way his mainly higher end clients often want.

But Conroy said he is “very interested” in using modern methods of construction (MMC), which it is exploring in a collaboration with Manchester housing association Great Places on a Homes England funded project where the partnership is exploring the use of prefabricated insulated panels.

The offsite market does not necessarily require public sector support, said Wakefield’s Stannard: “For some of the players we want to nurture and develop, MMC is not currently an affordable option. Public agencies have a role to play in encouraging that market but don’t necessarily assume it’s the role of local authorities to suddenly step in and develop it. A lot of builders we talk with have modular and MMC players in their supply pipelines over the next two to three years. Even without direct intervention by local authorities, we are seeing it coming into the pipeline.”

Naz Parkar, Director of Housing at Kirklees Council, said the authority is currently working with Homes England on two sites to deliver 500 homes using MMC, and he challenged off-site manufacturers to collaborate with smaller developers to help the latter to adopt the technology.

“The key barrier to offsite becoming mainstream is scale: I don’t understand why smaller players don’t collaborate more with the likes of Ilke” Parkar said, referring to the recently established north of England MMC supplier.

He also revealed that Kirklees will launch a new masterplan for Huddersfield town centre “later this month”. The proposals in the document won’t be retail led, but will instead focus on creating a more ‘pleasant” environment that will encourage people to “dwell” in the west Yorkshire town, he said: “There is real heritage and architectural value in Huddersfield, we want to exploit that.”

Parkar said Kirklees would not seek to provide social housing in the town centre, capitalising instead on Huddersfield’s location between Leeds and Manchester when considering the type of new homes that should be developed there.

And he said Kirklees is keen to promote a better quality private rented offer in the borough, which he said contains around 6,000 poor quality homes in the tenure.

Parkar said promoting a more diverse tenure is a “really good mechanism to accelerate housing supply” in places like Dewsbury Riverside, where a large part of the proposed 10,000 homes urban district will be Build to Rent.

Stannard said the answer for the regeneration of Wakefield’s city centre is “clearly not retail” and that there is potential for business space, adding that the authority is keen to retain the public services employment that is a “good driver” of footfall.

But he said the council is being “more cautious” on employment allocations in its local plan, promoting city centre fringe rather than out of town locations.
[/emaillocker]