Kevin McCloud has hit out at the ‘broken’ property market in the UK, saying it is not in the industry’s interests to try and achieve the housing targets set out by the Labour government.
The Grand Designs presenter was speaking to The London Economic ahead of Grand Designs Live, which is taking place at London ExCel from 2-5 May.
Previewing the exhibition, McCloud said this year’s event would be “almost unrecognisable” for those who had been before.
“It’s been refocused and we’ve got lots of new exhibits,” he said. “Traditionally we had this central exhibit called Ask the Expert which has been so popular that we’ve now actually made 4 hubs around the show, so it’s really tight and focused.
“There’s a hub for homes and gardens and there’s one for bathrooms, one for build, and I think the nice thing about it is that this year I’ll be kind of be just jumping around from one stage to another.
“It means the audiences then become much more focused and you go to a specific destination to learn it and get involved with a specific thing.
“The whole show is about quality. It’s about the well-made thing and the relationship through objects between people.”
‘We need to focus on quality in housing instead of numbers’
This focus on the quality of building and the “well-made thing” is one that – as you’d expect from someone who has devoted their life to architecture – is close to McCloud’s heart. When asked about what he made of Labour’s housing policies since they came into power last year, and their promise to build 1.5 million new homes across the UK, McCloud said he wanted to see more focus on build quality instead of number targets.
He said: “I’ve been talking to some friends of mine and some colleagues about trying to emphasise the need for quality in the build environment, the quality of design and quality of construction, and somehow enshrine that, if not in government policy then certainly in some kind of organisation that could carry some clout.
“Because so much of what’s happening right now is reactive to government policy, and it’s reactive to the wider delivery problems in the market, and there’s a great deal of emphasis on the numbers.
“People have been talking about these numbers for as long as I remember. The targets were sort of enshrined in 2004 by Kate Barker, who wrote a report for Gordon Brown, and it was all about getting the housing market to deliver these numbers, but it hasn’t.”
‘UK housing is fantastic for investors but not good for communities’
McCloud said there were a “lot of positives” coming from Labour, such as their Planning and Infrastructure bill (“It has the potential to upscale planning and streamline planning”) and the government’s support for the regions (“Planning is on the ground, it’s contextual to where it is”).
However, he said the “concentration on numbers” was still concerning because of the “broken delivery model” in UK housing.
He explained: “I say it’s broken, it’s fantastic for investors, it’s one of the finest capitalist models in the world, but it’s not good for places and it’s not good for communities. That model needs to change if we’re going to deliver the numbers, and that model doesn’t want to.
“It’s not in its interests to deliver what Rachel Reeves set out in the autumn Statement. In 21 years it hasn’t delivered and it doesn’t want to.
“So either we radically remodel it through some kind of massive state intervention to effectively dismantle this capitalist structure, or we try and create a culture of quality in which those big players really find it hard to compete and where smaller players can come along and deliver.”
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This brings comparisons to European countries such as Germany and Denmark, where McCloud points out there are “thousands of house builders, each doing small to medium-sized schemes in cities and towns, which are beautiful, well-designed and responsive to where they are, and are well built.”
Hope for first-time buyers?
In an interview with joe.co.uk last year, McCloud suggested the best advice to Brits looking to get on the property ladder was to move to Germany or Denmark. So, a year on, does he still reckon this is the only hope for first-time buyers?
He said: “It’s pointless saying ‘be patient’ isn’t it, saying ‘wait 20 years to see what happens in policy,’ because they want somewhere to live now, and my heart goes out to these people because it is so hard to wait. It is so hard when people want to raise families. So the argument about moving abroad still stands.”
But all hope is not lost here in the UK, with McCloud urging people to “keep an eye” on what’s happening in housing in Wales and Scotland.
He explains how these nations, along with Northern Ireland, are all trying to “drive their own standards.”
“Scotland is busy trying to introduce passive standards for all new building, Wales has its Well-being of Future Generations Act and it’s got its one planet development policies”, McCloud points out.
He also highlights regions in England such as Lancaster and Cambridge, which he describes as “hubs of innovation.” Here, well-resourced local authorities with strong planning departments are “driving a local plan where they’re demanding developers to come and build a high quality homes.”
All of this will contribute, in McCloud’s opinion, to a “two-speed” market in the UK where some areas have “greater choice” in their housing offering.
Whilst large parts of the country are “30 years behind” the property markets in European countries (where there is “joined-up-ness between the builder, the local authority planning, and the mortgage company”) McCloud reckons areas such as Lancaster and Cambridge are closest to replicating this.
“It’s going to be really interesting over the next 20 years, where we go, in terms of offering help for people who are trying to get onto the housing ladder,” he adds.
With the housing market in London being so unaffordable for many, McCloud reckoned there could be a growing trend of people ditching the capital, highlighting Leeds and Sheffield as cities that are providing more innovative and affordable options.
Cautious optimism for housing market under Labour
But whilst the UK property market still has its major issues, McCloud does believe things are more positive under the Keir Starmer’s government.
“It’s not desperate like it was before the election,” he said. “It’s still relatively desperate, I suppose, but the mere change of government was a positive step, towards a more inclusive and democratic society, and that’s good generally for housing.”
He continued: “Their statements about housing and about planning have been really welcome, but it’s still relatively timid. And I come back to that point about quality and about the well-made thing, and the best well-made object that we ever encounter in our lives is our own home.
“It’s such an extraordinary shame that so much of what has been built in the last 50 years is not up to scratch and is not of good quality, and it’s a terrible statement about our self-worth as a nation. How can we get that so wrong?”
Kevin McCloud was speaking ahead of Grand Designs Live at London ExCeL, the UK’s premier home and design exhibition, taking place from 2-5 May.