Taylor Wimpey has warned that the government’s plan to build more than 200,000 discounted houses for first-time buyers could in doubt because of confusion about how the scheme would work.
Pete Redfern, chief executive of Britain’s third-biggest housebuilder, said the starter homes programme, outlined in the chancellor’s autumn statement, could work but big questions remained unanswered, including about the impact on the affordable housing sector.
Under the plan, the government wants builders to construct homes in England for sale only to first-time buyers. The properties, which will be built on brownfield land, will be sold at a discount of at least 20% to the market rate.
In London, the maximum cost of a qualifying home will be set at £450,000; and outside the capital it will be £250,000. The plan is part of a government drive to deal with what George Osborne described in November as a “growing crisis of home ownership”.
Redfern told City analysts on Monday that two key questions were how the 20% discount would be set and the involvement of local authorities. The government is scrapping obligations on builders to provide affordable housing or make payments in lieu to councils. The Local Government Assocation said these payments were worth about £15,000 per house to councils.
Related: Revealed: housebuilders sitting on 600,000 plots of land
“The government has been supportive of our industry and first-time buyers so we want to work with them to make it work. There are a couple of things that particularly concern me. They are more about the scale at which the policy can work and particularly the impact on the affordability sector,” he said.
The problems were serious and had to be resolved, he said, adding that the longer the questions remained unanswered the harder it would be to meet the government’s target for building. “If it were just niggly bits around ‘we are not sure how it would work’, I would put it that way,” Redfern said.
He voiced his concerns as Taylor Wimpey said returns for its shareholders were likely to increase in 2016, after its sales rose 7% in the year to the end of December. The company said in a trading update that current trading was strong after average selling prices rose 8% to £230,000 last year.
Housebuilders have gained from rising prices and government initiatives to help people buy a home. The Guardian revealed at the end of 2015 that builders owned enough land to build more than 600,000 homes, including almost 185,000 for Taylor Wimpey.
The company sold 13,341 properties last year and had 76,000 plots in its short-term land bank after switching more than 8,000 plots from its long-term “strategic pipeline”t.
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