One of the biggest housebuilders in Britain has hit out at criticism that the industry is not doing enough to solve the housing crisis and is hoarding land, calling it “frustrating”.
Pete Redfern, the chief executive of Taylor Wimpey, said that the housebuilding industry was “growing as fast as anyone can expect”.
“The industry has been growing by more than double digits over the last four years,” Mr Redfern said. “For any industry, particularly one that is capital intensive like ours and where the production time is six or seven months, not three weeks, that level of growth is unusual.”
His comments come after recent criticism that housebuilders are sitting on large “strategic land banks”, waiting for them to rise in value before building more homes, despite a UK housing shortage. Taylor Wimpey has one of the largest strategic land pipelines in the sector with 107,000 potential plots.
However, Mr Redfern, who is conducting an independent review into the UK’s housing shortage at the request of John Healey, the shadow housing minister, said that those sites did not have planning permission. “Those are sites we are working to bring forward to improve land supply and to deliver for future growth,” Mr Redfern said.
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He added that large private housebuilders “can’t afford to, and don’t have, a strategic interest on sitting on land, just waiting for its value to grow”.
He said: “It tends to frustrate us a little when people accuse us of slowing things down when we’re thinking ‘No, actually, if anything, we are sometimes rightly accused of accelerating those early stages too much.”
Mr Redfern was speaking as Taylor Wimpey became the latest housebuilder to report record full-year results. The FTSE 100 company posted a 34 per cent jump in pre-tax profits to £604 million for the year to the end of December, on the back of a 16.9 per cent rise in revenue to £3.1 billion.
It returned £249 million to shareholders in July last year, and another £300 million is scheduled to be paid this July, with the dividend lifted by 7.1 per cent to 1.67p a share from 1.56p the previous year.
The company sold 13,219 homes at an average price of £230,000, up on the 12,294 homes sold for £213,000 in 2014. The group had a record order book of £1.7 billion, a rise of 27 per cent in value and representing 7,484 homes.
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The results were helped by a severe supply-and-demand imbalance for housing in the UK, as well as low mortgage rates and a raft of government initiatives to encourage homeownership, such as Help to Buy, which accounted for 37 per cent of Taylor Wimpey’s sales.
Shares in Taylor Wimpey added 1p to close at 187¼p yesterday.