15
PRO INSTALLER DECEMBER 2016
PRO NEWS
@proinstaller1
CAUTIOUS WELCOME FOR
AUTUMN STATEMENT
Statements from the Chancellor of the Exchequer
aren’t always cause for
celebration, but the latest
one has left Eurocell feeling
cautiously optimistic. Chris
Coxon, Eurocell plc’s head of
marketing, takes a view.
“Wrapped up as the National
Productivity Investment Fund –
£23bn between 2017 and 2021
– Chancellor Phillip Hammond’s
Autumn Statement outlined investments in housing, transport, digital
communications and R&D.
Within that there’s a £2.3bn
housing infrastructure fund,
£1.4bn for affordable housing and
£1.7m for accelerated construction to speed up house building
on public land. This is obviously
welcome because of the pressing
issue of housing affordability.
If the government can pumpprime supply then it would be
hoped eventually that the improvements in meeting demand
would reduce prices – at least at
the ‘bottom’ end – and enable the
next generation of home ownership.
As an aside, one topic rarely
discussed in respect of housing
affordability is how much money
large mortgage payments and high
rents take out of the real economy, such payments vanishing into
institutions and funds and not into
the high street.
We will have to wait for the
detail of policy in the expected
Housing White Paper, to be published ‘shortly’, according to the
Treasury. There have been strong
hints that offsite construction will
feature strongly.
Admittedly, we’ve been here
before. Construction is a cyclical affair. When skills shortages
threaten, thoughts turn to fac-
tory-based production; call it
prefab, offsite, modern methods
of construction, pre-manufacture
or flying factories. This would
represent a radical departure from
how building products currently
arrive on site, and caution needs
to be maintained if whole sectors
of manufacture are not to be detrimentally impacted by this.
The difference this time – maybe
– is that this government understands that its ambitious housing
targets will not be met without
a sea-change in how housing is
delivered and – here’s the important bit – that policy must drive a
change. To achieve its targets of
200,00 builds (some say 250,000
to 300,000 are needed) per year,
the current methodology has to
be challenged and the regime
appears to at least be mindful
of that, if not quite yet offering
solutions.
The exciting bit, for us, was news
of the creation of industrial strategy challenge fund – loosely based
on the US’s DARPA programme.
The areas which the fund will
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focus on will be decided in due
course, yet let’s hope it doesn’t get
too hung up on ‘funky’ tech, and
encompasses more prosaic sectors
such as ours.
And there’s something for innovators in the tax regime too. As
the statement said: “To ensure the
UK tax system is strongly pro-innovation, the government will review the tax environment for R&D
to look at ways to build on the
introduction of the ‘above the line’
R&D tax credit to make the UK an
even more competitive place to do
R&D”.
Depending on how both these
initiatives play out, it sounds like
good news at the moment and the
right words and actions from government provide some reassurance
that our investment in innovation
today will bear fruit tomorrow.”
www.eurocell.co.uk