Quality in the Built Environment

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 13th December 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jo Churchill]

My hon. Friend is in an area of the country where there is large pressure on the number of houses being built. She brings a pertinent point to the debate. It is difficult to be independent when not independent of the entire system. I will come to that point.

There are four different redress providers in the system: the housing ombudsman; the property ombudsman; ombudsman services; and the property redress scheme. However, there are still gaps. A key point is that we need simplicity in any system we develop for the individual homebuyer, for them to understand how to navigate the system.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on bringing this forward. I am chair of the all-party parliamentary group for healthy homes and buildings, and therefore this is a very important issue for me. We are doing an inquiry at the moment looking at noise, acoustics, heating, windows and finish so that we have homes that are habitable for this day and age. Does she agree that being environmentally responsible and promoting social integration—the designer sometimes does not see that important issue—are key components in delivering quality in the built environment, and that planners and indeed Government need to give consideration to that?

[Jo Churchill]

I could not agree more. Many of us sit on different APPGs, and the hon. Gentleman brought up environmental issues and the fact that people’s homes should use modern-day construction methods that give them the cheapness to be able to run a home efficiently. It should not impact on the environment. We should be using what skills we have to make homes healthier for people and communities. I trust that my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (John Howell) may well come on to the importance of design within the environment. The hon. Gentleman is right. Also, building in the vernacular is extremely important in certain areas of the country, making people feel like they are rooted and have more of a sense of place.

The NHBC guarantee currently covers most builds in the sector and purports to be independent, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Julia Lopez) said. However, in the main, large house builders fund the organisation, and any surplus funds are returned to the house builder at the end of the guarantee period. It is my belief that that skews the system and leaves it unable to act clearly on the side of the consumer.

Large house builders obviously seek to make a profit, and I have no issue with that, but some of our largest house builders have paid themselves tens of millions of pounds—in one case it was hundreds of millions of pounds —in dividends this year. When we have such poor outcomes on quality, I find that challenging. For an industry that has overseen a substantial rise in profitability over recent years to oversee an equal decline in customer satisfaction ratings and a fall-off in skills training, for which it sees itself as only partially responsible, is unacceptable. Just 10 companies build half of new private homes. Arguably, that does not aid competition. As the number of new homes has risen, satisfaction has fallen. The time for Government action to step into the broken market is arguably upon us.

Research indicates that investment by these companies should be targeted at skills. They build thousands of units each year—thankfully, they built somewhere in the region of 220,000 to 230,000 units last year—but they directly employ very few skilled workers and are largely reliant on subcontractors across the industry, where the whole basis is to drive down costs rather than concentrate on quality. An acute shortage of good site managers compounds the problem, yet they seem reluctant to train and to ensure quality and delivery. Worryingly, the industry estimates that to carry on building in the same way we would need to double our workforce. My question to the Minister is why we are not building construction training schools at the heart of large sites—even those sites subdivided between different house builders—so that individuals can earn while they learn and be proud of the homes in which their communities live.

It is not an industry into which young people will be encouraged to go, given the working in all weathers, the cyclical nature of the industry and the prospects it holds. The difficulty for small builders and subcontractors in accessing and providing employment for training over the course of a national vocational qualification period means that, if work dries up and they have apprentices, they potentially fail to enable them to complete their training. There is no co-ordinated thinking. If someone is on a price for a contract, they are less likely to spend time training employees—they will be looking to optimise their income.

Large house builders take much of the gain from others’ training, but do not always feed back down the supply chain, nor do they incentivise or reward the benefit they ultimately get from others. That is short-sighted, since it is those skilled craftsmen who will ensure continuity of supply in the future. Having an independent clerk of works or similar who would look at the quality of the work as the construction is going up is one solution. Currently, there are some 700 inspectors in the industry, which equates to their inspecting some 317 units each year. We know that houses are not being inspected properly.

What about the consumer? Unless there is a challenge to the system to ensure that quality standards are driven up, there is little encouragement for those house builders who produce a poor quality product to raise their game. Some large producers concentrate on quality, but that is often reflected in the price. Should quality be a question of either/or? Snagging on new house builds ranges from issues such as backfilling cavity walls with site rubbish to splicing broken roof trusses, leaky roofs, poor electrical work, insufficient insulation and the repointing of joints on walls where purposeful demolition and reconstruction should have happened. My hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster alluded to the problems she had.