Small Sites, Big Impact
9/10 homes nowadays are built by a large developer and we have lost 30% of all small to medium sized builders in the UK in the last 15 years, but why should you care?
Housebuilding in the UK reminds me of the science experiment we undertook in secondary school. First, a beaker is filled to the brim with large glass beads. The teacher asks the class, “is the beaker full?” The class responds “yes” and the teacher smirks. He then takes the same weight of small beads and pours them into the beaker as well, the smaller beads fill the gaps between the larger ones, and again the teacher asks, “is the beaker full?” The class somewhat hesitantly replies “yes” once more, and the teacher’s smirk grows. He then repeats this process with the same weight of sand and this time the class firmly responds “yes” to the question of whether the beaker is full, seeing that no other full beakers are left on the desk. The teacher then fills the empty beaker in his hand with water from the tap and pours it into the sand-filled one, filling the beaker to the brim. The class sit back in their chairs and begin laughing.
Our towns and cities in the UK, like the beakers, should be filled with all scales of construction. Extra-large, large, medium, and small. I’ll take a small, please. Sadly the balance which currently exists lends itself, through the guise of economic and political forces, to prioritising larger developments.
The large builders that dominate the industry tend only to take on large projects due to their perceived profitability, often overlooking the intricate fine-grain ‘non-places’ in between — the smaller intriguing urban fabric which so often characterises the essence of the places we live. The complex land ownership and procurement problems associated with these smaller sites make them too much effort than its worth for the larger builders. The priority of these builders therefore is to find other places to develop, or to really drive home the metaphor, other beakers to fill.
We need to see a shift in the mindset of the construction industry. Rather than focusing on greenfield sites and new garden towns, the focus should be in identifying and unlocking a good supply of small sites and builders. Infill not overspill!
What this would result in is a change in the way our cities are designed, which challenges monotony and favours contextual design solutions to site-specific constraints. Some of the most interesting pieces of our urban fabric are such because of their creative response to complex contextual problems. Think of the structural innovation of the new buildings which oversail transport infrastructure, the millennial markets which utilise dead space surrounding historic viaducts to sell avocado at an overly inflated price. The issue however, is that if our cities and towns should be beakers filled with all manner of beads, sand and water, then what is required is an equal supply of each, which as it stands currently, is not the case.
According to London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, “for far too long, London’s housing market has been over-reliant on large developers building the majority of our homes on large brownfield sites. The number of small sites coming forward has halved in the last decade, and we have lost almost a third of all small and medium-sized homebuilders operating in the capital.” Far from being a trend isolated to the London boroughs, we see the same reduction in the influence of smaller builders throughout the rest of the UK as well, if not more so. In the 1980s, 40% of all homes were built by small developers, now barely one in ten is.
A report by the Home Builders Federation in 2017 revealed the worrying decline of small developers operating in the UK. During the year following the 2007 financial crash, one-third of small and medium housebuilders ceased to exist, a reduction which has struggled to bounce back due to council-led local plans favouring larger sites which are out of reach of all but the biggest developers.
This is where we see the compounding of problems beginning to take root in the UK, as it is the over dominance of the large housebuilders which is exacerbating other worries such as the reduction in build quality. In addition to this, the increasing reliance on these larger developers only solidifies the Government’s inability to take action against them, for lack of an alternative means to reach housing targets and maintain the steady increase in property value which is required for re-election but shafts the electorate in every other way: a topic I touched on in my previous article Building Tall is Building Less.
One of the ways that the Government is attempting to fight back against this trend is through its recently approved Small Sites, Small Builders initiative launched by the Mayor of London in February 2018. The pilot scheme, which involved the bringing forward of ten TFL owned small sites for development, was deemed a success due to the 130 bids which it received from 80 different organisations including community-led housing groups. What is quite amusing about the announcement of the pilot scheme’s success is the apparent surprise that there was such an ‘innovative’ response which provided many more units and much greater value than expected. As if the architectural profession just performed the first round of the beaker experiment to the Mayor of London, who sat stunned at his classroom desk, pencil in hand. Innovative design and site-specific consideration are clearly not common practices amongst the larger builders the Government are accustomed to working with.
The initiative outlines that one of the biggest barriers to smaller builders is the complexity and scarcity of small site procurement routes. These barriers include financial risks involved with un-surveyed land, contamination and demolition of existing buildings. The Government hopes that the £14.703m which it has pledged to the scheme between 2018 and 2021 will help alleviate some of these problems.
The sites which form the pilot scheme have been acquired from TFL, the third largest land owner in London. I am keen to see how appropriate the small site procurement method, which is being developed and tested in London, is in the rest of the country where the disparity between large and small builder is much greater.
What is promising about the scheme, is the focus on community-led and affordable housing, which comes as a condition to the development of the sites. Even with the 'affordable housing' siren going off in my head reminding me that the term refers to affordability only in comparison with the artificially high average rents in the surrounding area. Four out of the ten pilot sites have conditions of at least 50% affordable housing, and for two of these, this figure is set at 100%.
It seems that progress in this mindset shift is being made with the launch of the Small Sites, Small Builders initiative. What is required now is action and publicity. For the reversal of the trend we have been seeing over the last two or three decades to take hold, there is a responsibility for the first pilot sites to truly exemplify the values and quality of build which we should be aspiring to in all scales of housebuilding. Build quality and truly affordable community-led housing must be at the forefront of their development.
To quote Danny Dorling, we need to get out of the current status quo of home buyers simply having “to choose the least bad home they are offered." I believe that a response to many of the problems we are currently facing lays partly in the rebalancing the scales between large and small builders.
I will follow the progression of these sites with great interest.
Previously - Why my Toaster will Last Longer than Your House
