With housing delivery numbers plunging to near record lows, and the volume builders struggling to overcome lengthy delays at the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), a coalition of industry leaders have outlined a nine-point plan which could break the current impasse and get Britain housebuilding again.

This would enable SME housebuilders to step up to unlock tens of thousands of new homes across thousands of small sites nationally. According to the report, implementing the Nine-Point Plan could drastically cut costs for SMEs overnight, who currently face an average £60,000 higher cost building a home for a first-time buyer in high-demand areas like London compared with large PLC developers.

The move comes as volume builders and large-scale residential developers face the perfect storm of consented developments being held up by the Building Safety Regulator and weakening sales pipelines driving decisions not to progress with large-scale delivery commitments.

By contrast, SME housebuilders are ideally placed to bring forward much smaller individual schemes, less dependent on the scale of sales required to support the construction of large-phase developments, and schemes less likely to be captured by delays from the BSR.

The plan, The Road to a Proportionate System, outlines nine practical steps to reduce red tape, rebalance the cost burden, and unleash a new wave of SME-led housing. This includes introducing targeted exemptions for SME developers from burdensome requirements such as Biodiversity Net Gain, simplifying S.106 requirements, and using the forthcoming National Development Management Policies (NDMPs) to embed a principle of proportionality across the planning system.