How Do You Kick-Start the Local Housing Industry? ; Our Latest Post Property Forum Looked at Issues Affecting the Region's Residential Property Market, and the Affordable Homes Sector. Organised As Always by Headline Communications, the Event Was Hosted by Willmott Dixon Housing, and We Sent Ian Halstead Along to Cover Proceedings, in the Convivial Surroundings of the Hotel Du Vin

Birmingham Post › October 14, 2010

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Summary

Testing the mood of both public and private sector on any subject always seems a sound idea, but from the off, it was clear that chairman Adrian Bland would require all his urbane charm to prevent the event becoming an intellectual cagefight.

The opening topic asked what - bar oodles of finance - might kick- start house-building, and Nick Scregg, the divisional managing director of Persimmon Special Projects, was first to rise ... with a manner suggesting a life spent lecturing hapless civil servants, who hadn't quite mastered their briefs.

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Extract

How Do You Kick-Start the Local Housing Industry? ; Our Latest Post Property Forum Looked at Issues Affecting the Region's Residential Property Market, and the Affordable Homes Sector. Organised As Always by Headline Communications, the Event Was Hosted by Willmott Dixon Housing, and We Sent Ian Halstead Along to Cover Proceedings, in the Convivial Surroundings of the Hotel Du Vin

"At the peak of the housing market, from 2006 to 2007, the industry was building between 170,000 and 175,000 homes a year. Now we are down by probably 50 per cent, and there may be 110,000 properties built this year, against a requirement of between 240,000 and 270,000," he said.

"We all expected a localism agenda from the new government, but the speed at which it has been implemented, has been a surprise. The revocation of the Regional Spatial Strategies, for example, has left a huge policy vacuum, and we need, as a matter of urgency, to be told how localism is going to work.

"The New Homes Bonus, where councils will receive money equivalent to a property's council tax, will work out at something like pounds 8,500 per ...

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