He added: “We’ve got £1bn worth of infrastructure to put in, and most of that we want to do early.
“We’re £100m in already, and we haven’t put a spade in the ground… it’s taken us 15 years.”
On delivery vehicles, Alison Crofton, chief property officer at Homes England, said development corporations may not be the right solution for every new town on the government’s shortlist.
She said: “It probably will be the solution for some of those on that list, but it absolutely won’t be the solution for everywhere, and that is completely, categorically agreed throughout all the parties that we talk to.”
Boosting capital
In order to significantly boost the delivery of new homes, Homes England has been very clear that the sector needs much more private capital.
During the summit’s opening session, Simon Century, the agency’s chief investment officer and chief executive officer of the new National Housing Bank, said that the “whole of the sector needs to step up” across all players and all tenures.
When one attendee asked how Homes England is addressing a “growing narrative about the financialisation of housing”, Mr Century said both the agency and the government have clearly shown a “very, very strong desire to significantly increase the amount of institutional capital in the market”.
“We’ve laid out very specifically our own very clear objective, signed off from the most senior fellows in government, that we’re trying to raise £53bn of private capital. That’s a pretty direct statement in terms of what our ambition is,” he said.
“We need something or someone to say ‘now we’re going to build MMC’. Build it and they will come”
Mr Century was also asked for more details of the £2.5bn of low-interest loans earmarked for the social housing sector through the bank. He did not give much away but said providers will have more detail about the rollout “by the summer”.
He said Homes England sees the loans working “as a combination and as a package” with grant funding, which will make them “extremely impactful”.
In London, where providers will have exclusive access to £1.5bn of the package, the scheme is also yet to officially launch.
Tom Copley, deputy London mayor for housing and residential development, said: “We haven’t quite launched low-cost loans yet… but very keen to get them launched as soon as possible. And I don’t think we’re going to struggle to get this funding out the door.”
Do we need an ‘Elon Musk of MMC’?
To round off the day, a panel titled ‘What needs to change to deliver 1.5 million homes?’ looked how the housing sector can learn from experience. Along with debates about planning constraints and the role of institutional investment, the panellists also discussed the need to boost modern methods of construction (MMC).
Justin Young, chief executive officer at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, said one of his big asks of government is to “help us with… getting that message out so that people are absolutely accepting of the great quality that MMC can provide” and the speed it can enable.
MMC might, therefore, need a champion, suggested Elizabeth Froude, chief executive officer of Sage Homes.
“Doesn’t it just need someone who’s going to come and lead the charge? If you think about it, if we hadn’t had Elon Musk – and I don’t like him very much – none of us would be driving electric cars now.
“So we need something or someone to say ‘now we’re going to build MMC’. Build it and they will come.”
But Alexandra Notay, chief executive officer at the Housing Forum, said MMC is a broad umbrella term for lots of methodologies and is already “really embedded” in the sector, including panel systems.
She said the biggest failing of MMC in the UK – alluding to a series of factory closures over recent years – is the “lack of standardisation of components” and the “lack of collaboration”.
Ms Notay added: “This industry talks a very, very good game about partnership.
“But actually, if we’d had that collaboration in the early days of that volumetric MMC in the UK venture, and they’d been able to standardise things, I do think we’d have a lot more players doing it now. But it’s not gone, it is in the sector.”