‘The government’s pro-development agenda is really helpful overall’: Home Builders Federation boss Neal Jefferson on delivering through economic turbulence

Certainty is a scarce resource in 2025. You digest the news in the morning along with your cornflakes, but by lunchtime the world always seems to have moved on.

Neil Jefferson, chief executive of the Home Builders Federation (HBF), was recently on the sharp end of this problem, being required to produce some documentation for his organisation after a meeting with government officials. “Every time I went to sign it off, things had moved on again,” he recalls.

The HBF’s members deliver around 80% of new homes built each year and, as its chief, Jefferson is responsible for representing an industry that has historically thrived on stability as it navigates these uncertain times. But, while the global picture has everybody scratching their heads, back home Jefferson has some cause for optimism.

For the first time in many years, there is a government that is perceived as seeing the sector as a friend rather than an enemy. In the latter days of the last Conservative government, the HBF found it difficult enough even to get a meeting with Michael Gove and his ministers, let alone get their way in policy battles. By contrast, Jefferson praises the “level of engagement” with Keir Starmer’s administration.

At the end of the outgoing government there was a bit of a doom loop going on. That negativity did pervade

“A pro-development agenda is really helpful overall for the industry,” he says. “At the end of the outgoing government there was a bit of a doom loop going on. That negativity did pervade.”

Policy changes have come thick and fast. A new National Planning Policy Framework came in December, unpicking many of the changes introduced by former housing secretary Gove, followed by successive boosts to affordable housing grants and a Planning and Infrastructure Bill which promises to cut regulation around environmental issues.

Then there was the grey belt policy, which has the potential to unlock supposedly under-utilised parts of the green belt for development – Jefferson says he only wishes the HBF had a big enough marketing budget “to coin such phrases and amplify them”.

The government’s performance so far has not been perfect, Jefferson admits. Some of the tax changes in the Budget were “unhelpful” for SMEs, he says. As was the government’s flip-flopping over the introduction of the Building Safety Act.

But, while these have “tempered” the positivity around the Labour government among housebuilders, there still seems to be a reasonable degree of confidence in Starmer and his team’s ability to deal with the “knotty issues that the new government inherited”.

Chief among these, for Jefferson, are nutrient neutrality and affordable housing delivery. The first of these, he admits, the HBF does not talk about “quite as loudly as we were doing”, owing to the fact that the government has put forward proposals to address it in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, introduced to parliament earlier this year.

As well as instituting a radical shake-up of the planning committee system, the bill would create a new nature restoration fund, which the government claims will ensure that builders meet their environmental obligations more efficiently by pooling contributions to fund larger interventions. 

But, while Jefferson and the HBF might not be complaining as noisily as they once did about this issue, rest assured their concerns remain. “We’ve waited seven years and we are going to wait at least another year until that apparatus is in place,” he says.

“At the moment we still don’t really know exactly how these extra restoration schemes are going to work and how much they’re going to cost.”

He is also keen that the measures remain temporary and do not end up “part of the furniture”, holding the view that new water infrastructure should void the need for it.

>> Read more: What the delays at the Building Safety Regulator mean for high-rise development

>> Read more: What does the collapse in section 106 demand mean for housing delivery?

On the affordable housing issue, the HBF basically echoes the views of its peers in the National Housing Federation, calling for more funds, rent convergence and long-term rent agreements. Jefferson says the recent injection of £2bn into the affordable homes programme was “helpful”, but notes that new funding is “pretty much soaked up immediately” and complains that it “can’t be used to fund what we think is the number one priority”.

That priority is the section 106 logjam. The HBF has been complaining for some time that new housing developments are being held back by a lack of bids from housing associations for homes built under section 106 agreements.

“You can’t use grant funding for those purposes that need to come from the cash flows of housing associations, who are just choosing, understandably, to prioritise other activities, whether that is mould and condensation or building safety,” says Jefferson. 

Some housing associations have contended that their reluctance to buy S106 homes is related to concerns over quality, but Jefferson is keen to point out that “they don’t actually mean quality as I might think of it, which is construction quality”. Instead, he claims, it refers to the quality of the deal and the specification of the homes in question.

You can’t use grant funding for those purposes that need to come from the cash flows of housing associations, who are just choosing, understandably, to prioritise other activities, whether that is mould and condensation or building safety

“Understandably, if they are taking a 40-year view, they maybe don’t want homes that have got gas boilers,” he explains. “They’ll be looking to take on homes that are essentially future-proofed in terms of future standards, even though we’re still some way from that in terms of the building regulation.”

The issue tends to hurt SMEs the most. This isn’t helped by ever increasing consolidation in the housing sector. Small builders working to deliver small sites often find it very difficult to find a large housing association interested in picking up a few random additional homes to add to their stock, particularly if they are built in rural areas.

Homes England has put in place a clearing house for stuck S106 homes, but Jefferson says it is “really just one part of the solution”. Solving the issue, he claims, doesn’t need more money.

“What we really need, to be quite clear, is a written ministerial statement from the housing minister that instructs local authorities to enable cascade mechanisms so that, where homes have been agreed under the S106 – which is a legal agreement for a particular tenure, which could be, say, homes for social rent – consideration can be given to changing those tenures into tenures which may be viable in that area, which may not need a local housing association to take them on.”

This might be a big ask of Angela Rayner, a secretary of state who has made a point of calling for a “council house revolution”, but Jefferson is hoping creative solutions will help them make their case. Discounted sale is one innovative tenure type which he says “works quite well”.

This is when a housebuilder sells – say – 80% of a home to the buyer, reducing mortgage outlay for the homeowner, while 20% would be held in perpetuity by the local authority. Jefferson is somewhat agnostic on exactly how the issue is solved, however, and we discuss whether the government could force local authorities to buy up S106 homes using unspent developer contributions, another pet peeve of the HBF.

In the meantime, Jefferson is just hopeful that the government avoids lumping additional burdens on housebuilders. He says the industry was “pleased” by the deferral of the building safety levy as, under original plans, it would have been introduced on sites where payment had not been considered within viability assessments. But he is sceptical about whether it is needed at all and expresses frustration at how much developers have been expected to contribute to the costs of making British buildings safe, particularly compared with product manufacturers.

More of a concern to Jefferson are the persistently long wait times for gateway 2 approvals in the new building safety system. The regulator recently insisted that wait times are coming down, but Jefferson says there is still “no doubt that some applications are taking the best part of a year to process”.

Having a targeted equity loan scheme for first-time buyers needn’t cost money, and the experience of Help to Buy would tell us, actually, that the government comes out of it pretty well

He admits that the industry is still “learning in terms of understanding what a good application looks like” and that there has recently been “more dialogue” with the regulator, but adds that he “cannot overstate the problems that are being created by these delays”.

One issue with such delays is the “huge risk” for developers in terms of mounting interest paid on borrowing.

Solving this issue, one would imagine, will either require the regulator to lower its expectations or the government to increase resources. But Jefferson insists that there is plenty that the government can do for housing “that wouldn’t cost anything”.

He notes that this is the first period in 60 years without an effective government scheme to support first-time buyers. “Having a targeted equity loan scheme for first-time buyers needn’t cost money, and the experience of Help to Buy would tell us, actually, that the government comes out of it pretty well,” he says.

Such a scheme could help to address flagging consumer confidence, he says. But, if ever-changing global economic conditions go the industry’s way, it might not be needed.

Donald Trump’s tariffs “shouldn’t be holding up the delivery of new homes” in the UK from a practical perspective, Jefferson says, but their knock-on impact on demand is less certain. When we speak, Jefferson says the tariffs’ potential effects on consumer sentiment are ”concerning”.

Since then there has been a growing view (or perhaps a hope) that the tariffs could be disinflationary for the UK, as a result of a weaker dollar and a glut of cheap Chinese exports. If this leads to cuts to interest rates, it could actually be a boon for housebuilding.

Once again, it is proving hard to find a steady footing in 2025 before the world moves on again.