UK house builders face Bricks and finance shortages

When the British housing market finally showed signs of life earlier this year, Stephen Stone’s company tried to order concrete building blocks for a new homes project, only to find he would have to wait months and import them from Germany.

The experience of Stone, chief executive of housebuilder Crest Nicholson, typifies the industry’s difficulties in responding rapidly to government pressure for more new homes to ease a shortage and help a weakeconomy.

“Imagine if you haven’t got raw materials like bricks and blocks and you’re waiting for three months to get them. It’s a problem,” Stone said.

Bricks and blocks aren’t the only problem for a sector that shrank sharply to survive the property downturn after the 2008 financial crisis. It now faces rising costs, and financing conditions remain tough, on top of long-standing difficulties in getting projects approved under Britain’s strict planning rules.

With housebuilding at its lowest in about 90 years, finance minister George Osborne has launched the first part of a scheme to lend and guarantee billions of pounds in mortgages, aiming to help Britons buy newly built homes with relatively small deposits.

But the chances of his “Help to Buy” scheme drawing a rapid response are slim, due largely to the shrunken state of an industry that had relied heavily on foreign workers, many of whom left Britain during the downturn because of a lack of jobs.

Britain is therefore unlikely to achieve anything near the 250,000 homes needed each year to keep up with a growing population, and critics fear this shortfall means Osborne’s scheme will fuel house prices rather than house building.

“The government hopes that we can turn the tap on right away but it doesn’t happen that way,” Stone told Reuters. “It’ll take at least four to six months for the supply chain to respond. Theconstruction industry is 50 percent of what it was. The overseas workers have all gone home.”

The government declined to comment on its expectations for the industry.

Housebuilding in Britain has fallen to levels not seen since the 1920s, according to property consultancy Savills, after the largest housebuilders, such as Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey, retrenched during the downturn to concentrate on raising profit margins rather than their sales.

Private housebuilders completed 88,000 homes last year, well below an annual average of 115,000 over the past four years, Savills said.

The country’s 10 biggest housebuilders, such as Barratt Developments, which construct about two thirds of new homes, have not committed themselves to firm completion targets. However, some say they are aiming to sell 20-30 percent more homes annually in the next few years.

Osborne and his department, the Treasury, have also not said how many more homes they want built under the scheme. Its second phase, in which the government will guarantee loans for people buying second-hand homes, will start in January.

“There are a lot of other obstacles that the government is not only not overcoming but in some respects is making worse,” said Roger Humber, strategic policy adviser to lobby group House Builders Association. Source: Reuters