UK ‘not capable’ of hitting housing targets due to construction workforce crisis, Baroness Thornhill says

“The bottom line is there is no quick fix,” she said. “We must diversify who builds, we can’t leave it to the major house builders, we have to get [small and medium-sized enterprises] back in the game, councils back in the game, housing associations – who are actually withdrawing from development, very worryingly – back in the game, self-build.

“All of those things are very important, and how we build. We have to look at modern methods of construction and the barriers to that,” Baroness Thornhill said.

However, she added that she did not believe the UK was capable of building 300,000 homes a year, and was “nowhere near” the Liberal Democrats’ target of 380,000 homes per year.

Baroness Thornhill said: “So where is the workforce strategy? Where is Labour’s workforce strategy? Where is our workforce strategy?

“Without the right people to do the job, all those other things that we can all talk about tweaking… pale into insignificance.”

She said there needed to be more of everyone, from planning officers through to all those working on site and “everyone in between”.

Inside Housing has launched its Housing Hires campaign to promote the social housing sector as a place to work, and supports people to find and develop careers at housing associations and councils.

At an earlier session looking at how the country can get building, Peter Taylor, the current mayor of Watford, said Labour’s funding of 300 planning officers was a “good start” but did not even cover every council in the country. “We need more planners,” he said.

The impact of the lack of supply and investment in housing was also discussed at the session.

Sarah Gibson, the recently elected Liberal Democrat MP for Chippenham, told delegates her inbox was full of emails from people threatened with or experiencing homelessness, and from social tenants “who are really suffering from a lack of investment and poor funding of housing associations”.

Ms Gibson said: “The other part of my inbox, which is hugely full of course, is those residents of social housing who are really suffering from a lack of investment and poor funding of housing associations, [which] are therefore unable to meet their targets for renewing housing, but also unable to communicate with their residents on a regular enough basis and deal with some of the maintenance issues, some of which are quite, quite complicated.”

She also criticised the lack of reform of a “1950s” and “out-of-date” planning system, saying it was getting in the way of new homes.

She said: “Lots of us in this room would agree that more housing needs to be built, but we have been talking about this for the last 15 years and we’ve had housing targets for a long time and nobody, as far as I know, ever achieves their housing targets.

“There’s a really good reason for this. At the moment we are in a situation where the housing target is given to the local authority, so they are the ones with the stick behind them.

“But they are not in a position to be able to carry it out, because the power and the ability to build those houses once they’ve been given planning permission is in the hands of our volume house builders.”

So while there was no planning reform which took some of the power “out of the hands” of the house builders and put it “back into our democratically elected local authorities”, we were “kidding ourselves. Angela Rayner [the housing secretary] is kidding herself if she thinks she’s going to [deliver housing targets].”

Earlier in the session, Wells Chomutare, managing director for south London at Peabody, told delegates the landlord was “ready and able” to build new homes, but associations needed more financial capacity to support them to do so.

He said providers were under “stress” in a “challenging” economic environment, while residents were also struggling financially.

He said: “We are ready and able to deliver the homes that are really needed. But of course, that comes at a cost  And with interest rates going up, it’s been very difficult.

“Housing associations have been there trying to support the delivery of homes. For every social home that we develop – and we’ve developed around 3,700 homes in the last two years – it takes us about 60 years for each of those homes to pay for itself. So you can see the dilemma.

“How do you plug that gap? That gap between how long it takes for that house to pay for itself has to be paid somehow.

“We need more financial capacity to help with the development.”

The leader of the Liberal Democrats was pressed on his party’s reputation for nimbyism at its conference in Brighton, after he reiterated his support for a “community-led” approach to planning.