Emma Reynolds MP, Labour’s Shadow Housing Minister, in a speech to the National House-Building Council, said:

[Check against delivery]

It is a great pleasure to be here to deliver my first keynote address as Shadow Housing Minister.

I would like to thank you Mike (Quinton) and to the National House-Building Council for inviting me to speak to you today.

Now in its 78th year the Council has from its very beginnings sought to ensure quality and high standards in house-building.

The Council’s motto ‘be safe by taking care’ laid down the founding principles and values of the NHBC.

And as I will make clear today those values of quality and high standards will be essential to a major uplift in housebuilding under the next Labour Government.

This is an important moment for housing.

Important because as you all know, we’re in the midst of the biggest housing crisis in a generation.

But also important because housing is now at the centre of the political debate and will be a key priority for Labour at the next election.

That is in no small part due to my predecessor Jack Dromey who worked tirelessly on this brief.

But also the importance placed on the issue by the Labour leadership.

Ed Miliband made it a centrepiece of his conference speech,
launched the Lyons Housing Commission in December and promoted the position of Shadow Housing Minister to the Shadow Cabinet.

The Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls also gave a speech to your annual lunch confirming the support of a Labour treasury for our housing plans – in particular financial guarantees for New Towns.

I’m sure many of you would say – it’s about time housing moved centre-stage.

Adequate shelter is after all a basic human need – and a right enshrined in international law.

You will need no convincing of the benefits of secure and affordable homes.

House building makes a significant contribution to the economy – 3% of GDP.

Homes enable us to put down roots, to be part of a place and to feel at home in a community.

There are also considerable benefits to home ownership.

For younger people, owning a home gives them their first step on the property ladder.

For young couples, owning a home gives them the stability to start and bring up a young family.

For older people their home is an asset to give them financial security for later in life.

For all of these reasons housing should always be a priority.

But that hasn’t always been the case and we all know we’re not building enough homes and we haven’t been for decades.

Our failure to build enough homes as a country means that we are facing a chronic housing shortage.

The housing shortage is central to the cost of living crisis that Ed Miliband and the Labour Party have been talking about for months now.

Affording a decent home has become more and more expensive over the past thirty years.

The average unassisted first-time buyer is now aged 33 and private rents have risen by 37 per cent in the past five years.

This housing shortage is putting at risk what Ed Miliband has called the “promise of Britain”.

A promise that each generation will pass to the next: a life of greater opportunity, prosperity and wellbeing.

For previous generations, owning a secure and affordable home was an ambition that was within reach and home ownership became widespread.

But for many young people of this generation, and for the next generation that follows, owning your own home is now an ambition that is out of reach even if you work hard and have a decent job.

This trend will have major consequences for the way today’s young people, and their children and grandchildren, live their lives.

They will live with or be dependent on their parents for longer and longer, and delay settling down with a family.

And many will be subject to the insecurity of renting.

This is not sustainable.

Unless something is done, young people of this generation and the next will be unable to afford secure homes, with negative consequences for their families, our local communities and our society.

After three years in power, what is the Government’s record and what is its response?

The figures are not encouraging. Over that period the Government has presided over the lowest levels of house building in peacetime since the 1920s.

Over the last twelve months in England, we started to build less than half the number of homes we need to build each year.

The number of affordable homes built dropped by 29% in the last year.

And on large-scale development we’ve had promise after promise on Garden Cities from David Cameron to Nick Clegg and Grant Shapps, but nothing has been delivered.

We’re still waiting for the prospectus that was promised two years ago.

But while the Government has not made building the homes we need a priority, they have intervened in the mortgage market through Help to Buy.

Now we have been clear that we support helping people, and especially first time buyers, to realise their dream of home ownership.

But it won’t ultimately help them or anyone else if the result of doing this simply pushes up prices further out of reach.

And that is why so many people – including the Treasury Select Committee and the IMF have raised concerns about the Help to Buy scheme.

That’s why Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls has said the Bank of England should be assessing its impact now, and not in a year from now.

Because we know that the fundamental problem is supply. And boosting demand, without significantly increasingly supply, brings with it considerable risks.

It is clear that the Government is in denial both about the scale of the housing crisis and its own failure to tackle it.

But the truth is over the past thirty years Governments of both parties haven’t done enough to build the homes our country so desperately needs.

Too often short-term decisions have been put before the long-term decisions needed to ensure this generation and the next can afford their own home.

If we want to meet the housing challenge that confronts us we need to plan for the long-term.

And we must face the fundamental problem that there are simply not enough homes for people to buy and rent affordably.

We need a Government that will plan for the long-term and develop a housing strategy that has building more homes at its heart.

That’s why we have asked Sir Michael Lyons, supported by a panel of experts, to lead our Housing Commission.

Its task will be to set out a roadmap and long-term strategy for how the next Labour Government can help secure a step change in the number of homes being built.

We have committed to building at least 200,000 homes a year by 2020.

But we already know that to deliver that long-term housing strategy we will have to face some uncomfortable truths.

As currently structured, our country’s building sector has a broken gear stick.

When the time comes to shift up a gear our housebuilding
industry is found wanting.

Despite rising demand and prices, we have seen a failure to increase output and respond adequately over a sustained period.

Over the past 30 years we have been consistently out-built by our international competitors.

In terms of new dwellings per 1,000 households among the EU15, the UK was second from bottom in 1985, third from bottom in 1995 and second from bottom in 2002.

And with housebuilding at its lowest levels since the 1920s, it is no different now.

Last year in England we started to build only 117,110 homes but our international competitors are building many many more. Those homes are often of a bigger size, quality and at a lower price.

France has a similar population but is building three times as many homes.

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has pointed to Canada which has half our population but is out-building us by two to one. He acknowledges that “there is a very large supply-side issue here.”

Japan has twice our population but is building ten times as many homes – building over 90,000 homes in November alone.

There is no single reason for this but one of the key factors is that our building sector has become less competitive and this has had serious consequences.

In the 1930s when we reached the highest levels of private market house building ever achieved in the UK – the top 10 housing companies had a market share of no more than six to seven per cent.

In 1988, firms completing less than 500 units per annum delivered two thirds of UK housing.

However by 2012 that proportion was less than a third.

As the number of small builders has declined and other firms have grown ever bigger, it has become easier for the more dominant firms to buy up land.

This has further denied access to land for smaller builders resulting in a vicious cycle of decline.

And as Kate Barker found in her report for the last Labour Government

“limited land supply means competition tends to be focused on land acquisition rather than on consumers. Housebuilders’ profitability depends on obtaining valuable land rather than building a higher quality product in ever more efficient ways.”

In other countries the building industry is very different.

And one lesson is very clear.

In many other countries the housing market is made up of a much more diverse number of builders, including self and custom builders.

In Canada, France, Germany and the US, self or custom build delivers in excess of 40% of the housing output – in others such as Austria it is up to 80% of homes.

This means the output in housebuilding is much higher but the homes are also attractive and of a good quality – essential if we are to win the support in communities across the country for new homes in their local areas.

Let me be clear, to achieve our ambition of doubling housebuilding and then going further to meet need – we need a thriving building sector. That means our big volume housebuilders have an essential role to play.

However, we must introduce greater competition and diversity if we are to increase output, driving innovation and improving quality.

Custom Build gives power to aspiring buyers and allows a local approach to planning helping to increase design quality and reduce community objections to new homes.

Custom build doesn’t mean building the whole home yourself, it can be like choosing a kitchen.

In a new scheme in Lewisham, the local Labour council is running a custom build scheme that allows the residents to choose the design, select the contractors and specify individual requirements.

While in Labour run Oldham, the council has bought and cleared the land for a custom build scheme that will deliver homes at 20% less than market value.

To be fair to the Government they have said a great deal about promoting self-build and have even set-up a welcome fund to help budding self-builders.

Grant Shapps even promised a “self-build revolution” and pledged to “double the self-build sector.”

But the facts show that the re-entry to the market of smaller firms is currently slower than in previous recessions.

And last year, far from doubling the size of the sector, the number of self-build homes actually fell to the lowest level in 30 years.

That’s why I am announcing today “Build First” – a package of measures to assemble an army of smaller firms and custom builders to tackle the housing shortage and help the next generation on to the property ladder.

Our aim is to significantly boost the role of the smaller firms, and the self and custom build industry to help us reach our ambition of building at least 200,000 a homes a year by 2020.

Building those extra homes could bring up to 230,000 jobs to our construction industry and I want to see many of those jobs created by small and medium sized builders.

We know that one of the key barriers for small and custom builders is access to land.

Too often a huge emphasis is placed on large land sites by local and national government ignoring smaller sites.

So I can announce today that the next Labour Government will require Local Authorities to include a higher proportion of small sites in their five year land supply.

Second, we will give guaranteed access to public land to smaller firms and custom builders.

We will ensure that any public land given over for housebuilding will have a proportion dedicated for this purpose.

In addition, we have affirmed our commitment to building a new generation of New Towns and Garden Cities.

Ed Balls has outlined the backing of a Labour Treasury and has committed to providing financial guarantees for New Towns and Garden Cities.

But today I can also commit that a proportion of the homes built in these new settlements will be built by smaller firms and custom builders.

It is also right that where communities want to expand and build the homes for their children and grandchildren, they should know where land in their local area is available.

So we will increase transparency in the land market by ensuring that developers register the land they own or have options on.

We know that access to finance for both builders of these homes and buyers is also an issue.

So where sites are identified on public land for the purpose of self or custom build, we will encourage the use of the Build Now, Pay Later scheme which will allow the builders to get on and build and landowners to realise a fair value for the their land.

And we will work with the mortgage lenders to create standardised self and custom build mortgages.
But we must go further.

One of the reasons the housing crisis has developed is because the badly housed and those shut out of home ownership have not had a voice.

Too often, the conversation over a planning application at the local level is between a developer and those in the community who oppose development.

We want to give a voice for those shut out of this conversation.

The National Planning Policy Framework requires local authorities to assess the demand for self build in their jurisdiction and make provision for it in their local plans.

The truth is that it is very difficult for local authorities to identify demand.

Research recently carried out by the University of York also found that a much wider range of householders could benefit from self and custom build but that the current self-build market is dominated by an older, asset-rich demographic.

The Government has talked vaguely about registers for people interested in building their own home.

We believe they should get on and do it and the next Labour Government will ask every local authority in the country to create a new waiting list for those that want to register their interest in a custom-build, co-operative build or community land trust plot.

Local people will have priority so they can live affordably within their community.

For too long, the badly housed have not had a voice.
We want to give them a voice and help the next generation get on the property ladder.

These are just some of the proposals that will help us tackle the housing shortage but they aren’t a silver bullet, there isn’t one.

Only a long-term plan for reform will deliver the homes our country needs and that’s why the Lyons Housing Commission is so important.

Sir Michael and his team will be taking evidence – and we will certainly want to hear your views on all of these issues.

But I have a very clear message.

The next Labour Government will make house building a priority and play its full part in delivering the scale of change that we need.

The post-war Labour government under Clement Atlee, from a standing start in 1945, was building nearly 200,000 homes a year by 1950 and started to build 11 New Towns.

Harold Macmillan treated the position of housing minister as a war job and smashed his target of building 300,000 homes a year.

Harold Wilson went on to build even more.

Yes, they were different times but we must capture that post-war spirit.

But we will match the post-war zeal for numbers and volume, with a determination to deliver quality.

It’s not just about building homes after all, it’s about building thriving communities and places where people want to live.

And we look forward to working with you to achieve it.

Thank you