The following guest article is reaction from Stuart Law, CEO of Assetz Capital, about how the Budget and subsequently released documents fail to take into account SME housebuilders, who can act much quicker and flexibly, and instead focuses on larger bodies that have been proven to move much slower in delivery…
“The Budget documents reveal a striking imbalance. While the speech offered warm words about growth and delivery, the written detail confirms an overwhelming focus on large sites and large developers – despite the painfully slow build-out rates the sector is currently experiencing.
Major developments are delivering roughly 0.4 homes per week per site, yet the government has doubled down on a strategy dominated by big, complex schemes with long lead‑times and huge infrastructure requirements.
The MOD land release programme (which was not mentioned in the Chancellor’s speech and appeared only in the supporting documents released afterwards), targeting up to 100,000 homes, will inevitably be delivered through master‑developers, large consortia or development corporations.
Likewise, the £1.3 billion devolved National Housing Delivery Fund (also absent from the speech and revealed only in the written Budget papers) is designed for large urban regeneration projects and strategic infrastructure‑heavy sites. None of this creates land access for SME builders, none of it requires plot subdivision, and none of it enables the smaller sites that SMEs specialise in bringing forward.
This is a profound missed opportunity. SME house builders could deliver far more homes across thousands of small and mid‑sized sites nationwide than a handful of giant developments ever will. Instead, the Budget offers nothing targeted at SMEs – no small‑site pipeline, no serviced plot requirements, no fast‑track planning routes for <30‑unit schemes, and no mechanisms to level the playing field.
At a time when the country needs rapid, distributed housing delivery, it is deeply disappointing that the government has centred its entire strategy on big schemes with slow outputs and long gestation periods.
The absence of meaningful SME support undermines the goal of accelerating housing supply and ignores the proven ability of smaller builders to deliver quickly, flexibly and at scale across the nation.”
