‘Small private housing builds would deliver more homes’

The industry body, which represents a number of local builders and contractors, has made a submission on the Island Development Plan review.

Planners are currently considering the various responses to the consultation.

The GBTEA canvassed its members on the proposed changes, which intend to improve the rate at which new houses can be delivered.

The association said it fully endorsed this idea, but members raised concerns about how the planners aimed to do this.

‘There are some positives in the proposed changes, but taken as a whole we do not believe that they will deliver the additional housing, particularly in the private housing sector that is intended,’ it said.

In the private market, the review said that there was already sufficient land to develop more than 2,000 units – significantly more than was believed to be needed – so the Development & Planning Authority has not proposed to allocate any additional land specifically for private housing.

But the GBTEA said it was not that simple.

‘To get homes built the DPA needs to look past the zoning of sites and look at the landowners, many of the currently zoned housing sites are in multiple ownership and require the many owners to agree to get anything done,’ it said.

‘This rarely happens.

‘There are also large pockets of this land owned by companies that simply won’t develop it at pace as they will saturate their own market.

‘The homes will get built slowly to keep prices high.’

In the proposals the DPA recognised that not all land allocated for private housing would come forward for development, but said that encouraging the delivery of housing would fall within the remit of other States committees.

The GBTEA said action was needed.

‘Our members have proposed one solution, that would be for the review to look at smaller, more deliverable sites, spread around the island,’ it stated.

‘Sites that can be brought forward by small to medium-size building firms, with manageable levels of finance. Not sites of many hundred homes that require tens of millions in funding and massive infrastructure.’

Currently new housing is focused in the main centres – Town and the Bridge – or local centres, such as St Peter’s village, Cobo and St Martin’s village.

There had been some expectation that an extra local centre might be created in the planners’ proposals, but instead the draft only made the L’Aumone centre larger, to include the Castel Hospital, and six sites in or around the centres were allocated for affordable housing.

The association said one way of creating more private housing was slightly expanding the limits of the current local centres and possibly adding an additional one at Perelle.

But tweaking the Island Development Plan may not be enough.

‘The solution to releasing sites and kick-starting additional house building is likely to require more than just changes to the IDP.

‘Some of the larger identified sites in the north of the island are owned by the States, perhaps portions of these could be offered for sale to private developers in small lots, capable of holding 10 to 25 units.’

The submission mirrored some comments in the response of the Guernsey Construction Forum, which was also worried that the plan would not deliver enough private housing.