The government’s housing and regeneration agency, Homes England, has published a pipeline of 14 different infrastructure contracts worth £210.2m.
The largest job is a £52m project to build phases 3a and 3b of Northstowe, a new town in South Cambridgeshire. The two phases include 5,000 new homes, three primary schools, and large areas of open space around them.
The National Federation of Builders, NFB, police, and market insight head Rico Wojtulewicz said: “It’s promising that we now know that they are planning this project. The real challenge will be how they divide these sites to enable diversity of the housing sector.”
Home England gained outline planning permission for the Northstowe project, which lies on the former RAF Oakington base, in 2020. Infrastructure tenders are expected by mid-December and early January, and the work is estimated to take 44 months.
Another significant project was a tender last month for an access roundabout, spine road, secondary roads, drainage, new park, and landscaping for Burtree Garden Village in Darlington. Home England expects to award the 18-month contract next month. In January, it announced it had invested £43m in the scheme, including 2,000 new homes and 200,000 square meters of employment space across 307 acres.
Darlington Borough Council has already permitted Hellens Group to build 750 homes in the first phase of the scheme.
A 20-month contract to build a £15m primary school for the Brookleigh housing development in Sussex was also announced. Construction started for the first phase of the 3,500 homes at Burgess Hill in February. Homes England also published a contract worth £5m for early planting works and an offsite mobility corridor.
More house buying incentives are needed to boost demand
The Home Builders Federation, HBF, said the government’s challenges to build 1.5m new homes over the next five years were huge.
The trade body estimated that planning permissions would need to increase by 55 percent if the government reaches its new target of 370,000 new homes a year.
HBF chief executive Neil Jefferson said that further interventions would be needed, including boosting demand by helping people to buy.
“The upcoming budget provides an opportunity for the Government to take more positive steps to address the mounting housing crisis and to commit to their pledge to get Britain building again.”
Finance brokers Hank Zarihs Associates said development finance lenders would like to see more initiatives for first-time buyers besides shared ownership and the mortgage guarantee scheme.
HBF’s housebuilding pipeline report for the 12 months leading up to June 2024 revealed the number of units and sites gaining planning approval had dropped to its lowest in a decade.
The housebuilding industry has welcomed the Labour government’s decision to reinstate local authority housing targets and reform planning to allow building on ‘grey sites’ in the green belt.