HBF Policy Conference - General Election Special

A packed house of senior industry delegates experienced a lively and sometimes heated debate between housing minister John Healey and shadow Grant Shapps at the HBF Policy conference 2010.

Healey criticised Shapps’ community-led approach to planning, whilst Shapps retorted that the idea of the industry defending the current, failing planning system was “ludicrous.” Referring to Shapps’ plans, third panel member Christine Whitehead (LSE’s professor of housing economics ) said that the country could not afford to have “massive change” to the planning system.
The second session featured Citigroup’s chief UK economist Michael Saunders, Capital Economics’ chief property economist Ed Stansfield, and HBF’s director of economic affairs John Stewart in an economic analysis of the industry. Each of the economic experts seemed to agree that the road to recovery for the housebuilding industry would be long. Stansfield commented that with the UK’s large deficit and other factors such as unemployment, the housing market’s problems were “not yet over.”