Richard Beal, Chairman and Managing Director of East Yorkshire housebuilder Beal Homes, today welcomed the Chancellor’s announcement as “a Budget for house building”.
Mr Beal said scrapping of stamp duty for first-time buyers purchasing properties for under £300,000 was very welcome.
He said: “In the region we serve, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, many first time buyers enter the market below the current stamp duty threshold of £125,000, but this announcement will be a big boost for a significant number of buyers locally and many more elsewhere across the country.
“It will stimulate the housing market generally and support younger buyers to get on the property ladder.”
On the Budget housing measures more generally, Mr Beal said: “The target of building 300,000 homes a year by 2025 is a huge challenge.
“As the Government has recognised, the significant increase in supply can’t just come from the big national builders. We need more housebuilders in the market place to develop smaller sites to help boost a step change in the volumes of new homes being delivered, while ensuring quality is maintained.
“During the recession, many smaller builders went out of business or left the industry and, since then, the funding has simply not been available from the banks to enable SME housebuilders to return or enter the market. The Government’s commitments on funding to support small and medium-sized housebuilders could provide a breakthrough for the industry, providing this funding can be easily unlocked.”
Mr Beal said it was a “myth” that housebuilders were land hoarding and sitting on sites with planning permission: “Why would we do that? Once we get a planning approval we want to be on site building the next day. We can’t afford to pay for land and sit on it.
“What is needed is reform to streamline and speed up the process of gaining planning permission and to ensure onerous planning conditions don’t delay construction starting after consent is granted.
“Any reasonable conditions should be addressed before planning permission is approved or during the construction process. Currently, we often have to address a long list of conditions before a brick is laid, which delays the supply of new homes significantly and unnecessarily.”
Mr Beal also welcomed the commitment to support training and skills for the industry.
He said: “To build tens of thousands more homes we need a larger workforce and that can only be achieved by significant improvements in the quality of training provision, an overhaul of the apprenticeships system and by attracting more young people into the industry.
“At Beal Homes, we would be interested in exploring funding direct to companies such as ours to deliver high-quality in-house and on-site training. The industry as a whole also has to promote strongly that house building offers excellent, diverse and highly-rewarding careers in a growing sector of critical importance to the UK economy.”
Mr Beal added: “Overall, this is a Budget for housebuilders, which is great news for the industry and for the hundreds of thousands of people who aspire to own a home of their own.
“It’s important the Government now works closely with the housebuilding industry to turn the headline announcements into deliverable initiatives that achieve a sustained step change in the number of new homes, delivered by a more diverse range of builders and by a growing, highly-skilled workforce.”
Beal Homes has been building high-quality homes in East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire for almost 50 years and has developed an exceptional reputation for quality and customer service.
The East Yorkshire-based company claimed the Housebuilder of the Year title in the prestigious Insider Yorkshire Property Industry Awards 2017, in addition to being named Housebuilder of the Year in the Yorkshire Residential Property Awards 2016 and winning the Best Customer Satisfaction Initiative award at the 2015 national Housebuilder Awards.
