Three of the winning designs for John Prescott’s £60,000 houses have been submitted to their local planning authorities to see if they find favour with the taste-makers of Leeds, Milton Keynes and Upton in Northamptonshire. This is their final test.
But as the winners of this much vaunted competition, which began in April 2005, breast the finishing tape, Trevor Beattie, of English Partnerships, the agency charged with running the competition, feels that the project may have been widely misunderstood.
The Deputy Prime Minister’s initiative had an attractive price tag and appeared to offer hope to so many first-time buyers. Within the industry it was a challenge to think imaginatively and tackle the growing costs of construction. About a hundred developer-design teams threw their hats in the ring at the beginning of the competition, coming up with their new ideas about how to design low-budget houses; 33 reached the second stage, and there were nine eventual winners. The winners were then asked to bid to build on one or more of ten specific sites across the United Kingdom. Eight have been decided and two more sites are to be announced this month, in Maidstone, Kent, and Merton, southwest London.
But as the competition wound its way through the various stages, criticisms began to fly. Developers complained that buyers were asking where the £60,000 houses could be found. Property pundits described it as little more than a public relations stunt, since it has been generally known within the industry that one-bedroom flats can be built for an average of £57,000. It was the price of land, they said, rather than construction or design, that pushed values beyond the reach of first-time buyers.
So Beattie, director of corporate strategy at English Partnerships, sitting in his large office in Victoria, Central London, is both deeply frustrated and keen to emphasise the many good things that have come out of the competition. “We called it the Design for Manufacture Competition — the £60,000 house competition was just shorthand,” says Beattie. “It is a competition for the industry, not for the consumer. Developers are bidding for and buying these sites from us. We are not giving them the land.”
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Beattie insists that the figure of £60,000 is a target construction cost, not the total development cost or even the final sale price. In fact, only 30 per cent of the new homes submitted for the competition must hit the £60,000 mark.
So there is no question that homes will ever be bought for £60,000 by the lucky few at the front of the queue? “We aren’t going to sell them at a lower price than their neighbours. We won’t distort the market or create a sub-market,” he says. Include the cost of the land and you are more likely to end up paying between £90,000 and £120,000, depending on where the new homes are built.
Costs aside, the competition has pushed developers to think creatively about design and construction methods. The engineering firm William Verry has produced a wonderful curling dragon’s tail of a terrace for a nightmare of a site dominated by a gas container in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. The homes can be built quickly and to a high standard because they use prefabricated timber panelling from WeberHaus, a German provider of modular housing. But it remains to be seen if the local planning committee will like it.
There have been unexpected shotgun marriages, too. At Oxley Park in Milton Keynes, Wimpey has teamed up with Richard Rogers to create flat-pack houses with “eco hats” which pull light into their interiors; the houses can be built in 31 days. The first three to go to planning will be at Allerton Bywater near Leeds, Upton in Northamptonshire and Oxley Park at Milton Keynes. Then there is Barratt, using its own factory pod and panel system that eliminates the need for rafters. It means the roof space can be used to make an extra room and a double-height living room. Simple and brilliant.
Interestingly, the developer Redrow had launched a new range of Debut homes with a starting price of £49,950 in Rugby which sold out even before the £60,000 house competition got under way. More are now for sale in Castle Vale in Birmingham.
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How do they do it? By increasing the density on each site, so some homes are smaller, and excluding investors. Redrow continues to manage each site, levying a monthly service charge for communal hot water and heating, external maintenance and building insurance to help people to manage their budgets. Paul Pedley, executive deputy chairman of Redrow, says: “We make the land value work a lot harder, use a lightweight steel system and assume they will sell fast, because vast numbers of young people are waiting to get on the ladder. There are 400,000 first-time buyers missing from the market.”
www.designformanufacture.info
Redrow: www.debutbyredrow.co.uk