Digest

• A flurry of takeover activity among the major British housebuilders looks set to draw to a close later this month with entrepreneur Sir Tom Hunter and HBOS having until midday on 28 February to make their final offer for Crest Nicholson. Having missed out on Wilson Bowden – which was snapped up for £2.2bn by Barratt – Hunter and HBOS are expected to table a £730m offer. Galliford Try has also joined in the action with its £244.5m purchse of Linden Homes. This deal will propel the new group into the top ten of British housebuilders with annual completions of around 3000 homes (see page 12).

• The Communities Plan is four years old this month. However, it had a rather muted birthday at an event in London with the IPPR reminding the government that by 2016 – the proposed end date for the plan – the greater South-east will have built 217,000 fewer homes than it needs. The government had promised in the plan that it would build an additional 200,000 homes in four housing growth areas by 2016. Jim Bennett, senior research fellow at the IPPR, reiterated findings from last August's report Would You Live Here?, saying: “The [housebuilding] targets we have set ourselves are not high enough to meet household demand and we haven't been meeting these targets to date.” However, the government response was refreshingly honest.

Speaking at the same event, DCLG head of new growth areas Henry Cleary, said: “We are well ahead of our planned trajectory for the Communities Plan. Unfortunately it is not enough… We cannot ignore household [growth] projections. The plan was based on 1996 projections of 150,000 a year. 2003 figures showed this was up to 209,000.”

Cleary said that it was in response to these figures the DCLG had announced 29 further “housing growth points” to build 100,000 homes across 70 local authorities in December 2005.

• The major British housebuilders need to “fundamentally review” the design of their core housing products if they are to meet the 2016 zero-carbon homes target. This was one of the key findings of the annual “housing audit” carried out by design watchdog Cabe. The study of 293 developments over the past five years in the Midlands and South-west was combined with existing data on the six other English regions. It also showed that of the top 10 housebuilders – before the Barratt/Wilson Bowden and Galliford Try/Linden Homes mergers – Bellway had the poorest record and Berkeley the best. In the report Cabe said: “The results paint an unflattering picture: fewer than one in five developments was assessed as good or very good and 29% are so poor they should not even have got planning permission.”

• Social housing is on average a quarter more energy efficient than its private sector equivalent. The English House Condition Survey for 2005 published in January also found that 4.4m homes – 20% of the total – failed to provide adequate levels of thermal comfort. However, the report added that almost 60% of the 6m homes that fail the government's decent homes standard fall short on this criterion only. This would mean that a concerted push to better insulate homes would dramatically reduce the figure of 27% of all homes that fail to meet the decency standard.

• Work on the largest publicly owned regeneration site in Northern Ireland moved a step closer this month with the appointment of consultant Mott MacDonald and architect HOK to design a multi-use sports stadium for the 360-acre former site of Maze Prison in Belfast. The consortium will now work on producing detailed designs for the 42,000 rugby and Gaelic sports facility. The remainder of the £400m project will include leisure, commercial and housing and, according to the Northern Ireland Office, is due to come to market for tendering “shortly” with the whole of the site being completed by 2012.