52 finance, of skilled labour, of political will. This isn’ t quite accurate. I would describe it more as a“ disconnection”.
Feature
Real meaningful change takes place in a difficult market
Edwin de Silva, championing SME housebuilders through STARK UK, Regional Building Foundation and the All-Party Parliamentary Group for SME Housebuilders, on why challenging markets can present the right opportunities to change how we build.
Ben Bolgar( left) and Edwin de Silva( right)
ANYONE who has had a career in this industry spanning decades knows how it is shaped by cycles. Costs rise, demand softens, viability tightens, and the instinct, quite understandably, is to hunker down and wait for conditions to improve. Having observed several of these cycles, I keep coming back to one thing: the businesses which emerge from adverse conditions the strongest are never the ones that waited. They are the ones that leveraged difficult conditions to change how they work.
British housebuilding is in one of those cycles now and has been, arguably, for the last few years. Rather than waiting it out, a small group of us have spent the past two years developing a new framework which could revolutionise how communities get built in this country.
A coordination problem, not a capability problem The problems faced by the construction sector are usually described in relation to shortages— of land, of
52 finance, of skilled labour, of political will. This isn’ t quite accurate. I would describe it more as a“ disconnection”.
Speaking to housebuilders, materials suppliers and other industry practitioners on a daily basis, it’ s abundantly clear that the capability is already there. In every region of the UK there are builders who know how to create beautiful, durable homes; landowners with suitable sites; merchants and manufacturers with the materials and the technical knowledge; funders looking for somewhere sensible to put their money; and pockets of skilled resource around the country which can be utilised to offset the skills shortage that will follow when the market picks up.
The consequence of this disjointed approach is a delivery model that has narrowed dramatically. In the 1980s, small housebuilders delivered around 40 per cent of new homes in this country. Today, according to the Federation of Master Builders, the figure is just nine per cent. A national housing programme now rests on a very small number of very large firms— a concentration the Home Builders Federation itself has repeatedly warned about. Even the largest builders have no interest in seeing SME housebuilders disappear. As with any ecosystem, housebuilding is no different, and its vibrancy will be reliant on diversity.
What we mean by an ecosystem
The Regional Building Foundation is a Community Interest Company, established as a joint venture between The King’ s Foundation and the University of the Built Environment, growing out of a Government-funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership between both organisations. Our mission is to accelerate place building by coordinating regional housebuilders, landowners, materials suppliers and funders around a scalable building system.
“ Ecosystem” is a word that gets used loosely, so let me be concrete. In each of the 14 regions across the country we are assembling a forum containing every stakeholder and practitioner needed to take a place from bare land to a lived-in community: the builder, the landowner, the supplier, the funder, the local authority, the college. They meet in the same room, in the same region, and work towards a shared building system rather than reinventing every scheme from first principles.
The innovation at the centre
That building system is the part I would draw a merchant’ s attention to.
A firm building 30 homes a year cannot buy on the terms available to a firm building 3,000— simply because it lacks economies of scale. A regional forum which is built around regionally distinctive pattern books and collective buying power changes that arithmetic. It aggregates demand currently scattered across dozens of firms buying in smaller quantities and standardises enough of the specification to make that aggregation genuinely useful to the people supplying it.
Admittedly this isn’ t the most glamorous form of innovation- it’ s not a new material or a new machine, but a different way of coordinating who talks to whom, and when. It changes what is buildable and viable in a region- and it is realistic precisely because the market is difficult, when everyone involved has reason to try something other than what they did before.
The first region Our first regional forum, covering the Hampshire Basin, launches on 10 September at St Giles House in Wimborne, Dorset, hosted by the Earl of Shaftesbury.
The event brings together 150 people from across the full ecosystem and will begin on site, at Wyatt Homes’ Rivers Edge development, because these conversations go better standing on a plot than sitting in a hall. From there, we’ ll hear from Ben Bolgar, Executive Director for Projects at The King’ s Foundation and Board Director of the Regional