Digest

• The Scottish entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter has emerged as a serious player in the British housebuilding industry with bids for both Wilson Bowden and Crest Nicholson due to be decided in the coming month. Hunter – who is backed by HBOS in his vehicle Castle Bidco – has steadily begun building a stake in the sector since last summer when he joined with property investors the Reuben Brothers to pay £1.1bn for the retirement home builder McCarthy & Stone. Castle Bidco is expected to finalise its £713m bid for Crest Nicholson at the end of February. Meanwhile, City analysts have said that the final shortlist of three bidders for Wilson Bowden will be announced before the end of January. Besides Hunter it will include rival housebuilders Barratt and George Wimpey. Speculation is rife that if Hunter succeeds in both bids he will merge the two businesses, creating the country’s fifth-biggest housebuilder.

• Planners have come in for yet more criticism this month with the publication of two reports, one of which accuses them of damaging Britons’ quality of life and another which says they are too unpredictable. The former message is from think tank the Policy Exchange which calls for the abolition of the green belt because, it claims, it has strangled the UK’s urban areas. Oliver Hartwich, co-author of The Best Laid Plans – how planning prevents economic growth, published this week, said: “We want to get rid of the national green belt policy. An extra 10% for urban areas would only be an extra 1% of land… If you let cities grow naturally, you will see larger and more comfortable houses and lower house prices.” He added that the “greying of our cities” – or disappearance of playing fields and other green spaces for development – has meant “we are sacrificing the quality of life in the cities in order to protect the countryside”.

The report also calls for the planning gain supplement to be £0.5m per hectare and for the proceeds to be paid directly to local authorities.

The second report was compiled for the government by consultancy Arup and investigated “councillor involvement in planning decisions”. It found that, contrary to expectation, many councillors are “reluctant to get involved in [early] discussions” due to good practice documents urging them to be cautious. As a result of this and other factors, it is “difficult” to predict the outcome of many planning applications.

• Housebuilders have told the Treasury that it is missing out on up to £150m in tax revenues each year due to increasingly protracted negotiations over the provision of affordable housing. At a meeting with Treasury officials last year it is understood that housebuilders claimed that affordable housing depresses land and scheme values and so hits their profits and the amount they then pay in taxes. The government is now expected to take steps to define in legislation precisely what councils can ask for in affordable housing negotiations. In a document for the House Builders Association, which analysed three consultation papers on the planning gain supplement that were published by the government in December, strategic policy adviser Roger Humber said one change would be to “introduce a common starting point for the value of developer contributions to affordable housing”.