Biggest Builders: housing association development rises 16% despite supply chain crisis

Vicky Savage, group development director at L&Q, said: “I’ve never seen numbers like we achieved last year. And this year, we’re going to achieve even more.”

This comes despite L&Q’s decision to scale down its annual housebuilding target from 10,000 a year to 3,000 a year. Ms Savage confirmed the 3,000-home target remains in place.

This strong performance came despite landlords reporting substantial problems that are likely to hold back the sector’s ability to build at scale in the next few years.

For example, Home Group told Inside Housing it has experienced material and labour supply chain issues on almost every one of its sites.

Vivid rose from eighth to fourth place in the top 50 builders by completions, with 1,401 homes completed. Group development director Mike Shepherd said that the 33,000-home landlord is aiming to build 2,000 homes a year by 2024-25.

He said: “We are starting to see some cost pressure coming through. The way we tend to procure is a fixed-sum contract. What we are seeing at the moment are significant price increases, a pinch with new development and some existing contracts where developers are asking to come back [and renegotiate].”

He added: “We’ve got over 1,000 homes at the minute caught within planning, a mixture of nitrate mitigation, phosphate mitigation, or just a lack of resource in planning departments to move Section 106 [developments] forward.”

The number of social rent homes developed by the Biggest Builders has meanwhile risen 35% year on year, to 6,757 homes. The biggest social rent builder was Link Group in Scotland, followed by Bromford.

Read the full top 50 listing and in-depth analysis of what the figures can tell us about current and future housing association development.