Housing Market Intelligence Conference 2025

The industry needs to see immediate changes to housebuilding policy to help the industry deliver more homes, Neil Jefferson, ceo of the Home Builders Federation, has said.

Speaking at the Housing Market Intelligence (HMI) Conference in London, Jefferson said that in the year since forming government, the Labour party had “clearly made a lot of foundational changes”, including to the planning system and with aiding SME housebuilders.

“But all those foundational changes will only help in the long term,” Jefferson stated. “We really need changes now, sometimes needing compromise.”

As well as giving an overview of the government’s progress with housing issues since coming to power - “the government has remained engaged but what we have seen is a mixed bag” – Jefferson summarised the various challenges that remained for the industry, including a lack of first time buyer support, the section 106 crisis and viability challenges.

Jefferson highlighted the impact of “layer upon layer” of regulations on the industry, with the introduction of the Building Safety Levy strongly opposed by housebuilders.

He found it “fundamentally unfair” that ministers wished to “press ahead [with the levy] without contributions from some powerful companies”.

Also speaking at the conference, Paul Johnson, economist and provost of the Queen’s College, Oxford, considered what could be expected in the upcoming Budget.

He commented that stamp duty was "the most damaging tax against some pretty serious competition”. He also noted that there had been no real wage growth in 15 years, which was “unprecedented”.

Johnson hoped in the Budget for "some kind of announcement on a proper review of the taxation of housing”.

Matthew Spry, Lichfields’ senior director, head of London office, addressed the levers the government was attempting to pull on planning reform to “achieve the economic growth it is seeking”.

He said the government had “inherited the hardware” of the previous administration’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Act and had promised to “change the software” of this through its revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).

But Spry wondered whether the government’s “constant leaning” into its 1.5 million homes target was “undermining” the work it had undertaken on planning reform.

The conference featured two panels – one on how the industry could deliver the government’s homes target, and the second on the opportunities and challenges of meeting today’s sustainability and environmental demands.

In the former, David O’Leary, HBF’s executive director, Eleanor Deeley, joint md of Deeley Group, Greg Hill, deputy ceo of Hill Group and Rob Lane, chief property officer of Clarion Housing Group, answered questions from chair Justin Webb, presenter of Today on Radio Four, on regulations, skills, whether the government’s rhetoric had made a difference to planning, the resource problem in planning departments, viability issues and the chancellor Rachel Reeves’ focus on wildlife.

The second panel considered the compatibility of nature and housebuilding, whether politics could be removed from the environmental agenda, the role of the utilities sector and taking inspiration from other countries’ approaches to sustainability.

This panel consisted of Bukky Bird, Barratt Redrow’s group sustainability director, Ed Lockhart, ceo of the Future Homes Hub, Marian Spain, ceo of Natural England and Mark White, md of Bargate Homes.

HMI also offered economic and housing market outlooks from Gráinne Gilmore, Cluttons’ director of research and insights, Richard Donnell, executive director of Zoopla and David Smith, economics editor of The Sunday Times.

All three conveyed the subdued and uncertain market conditions. Gilmore pointed to the effect of the media “floating stories” on the government’s possible changes to property taxes, which had caused “an instant impact on the market”. She stated that just as buyer enquiries had begun to rise according to data from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, they “then fell”.

The country’s growth prospects in the medium term, according to Smith, were “weak”, with growth of 1% to 1.5% forecast.

But he referenced some positives including the focus on housing in the Spending Review. He also noted that the UK economy “hasn’t been doing too badly”, with a “quite” strong performance in the first quarter of 2025.

Donnell also partly concentrated on “the positives”, compelling the housebuilding audience to think of how they could find the buyers who did wish to move.

At the same time, he highlighted the “viability gap” in the regions, with far better affordability for buyers in the North and Midlands but an unviable situation for housebuilders in these regions for buying land.

“The government needs to take a view of how much regulation it wants to layer on,” Donnell said.

And also speaking at the conference, Darryl Stewart, NHBC’s head of commercial services, articulated his organisation’s quest to maintain quality while attempting to ramp up housebuilding in response to the government’s targets.

He warned: “It doesn’t really matter how far we go back [in time] – when we see a sharp increase in homes being built, quality and customer satisfaction take a hit.”

Stewart also looked at regulatory changes, NHBC’s services including its Standards and Land Quality Service and how it was responding to the skills shortage.

Housebuilder, October 9, 2025