The English Devolution White Paper was published in December 2024 and followed in February 2025 with an announcement that six areas in England will elect mayors for the first time in May 2026. Mark White, managing director for Bargate Homes, who also chairs the Future Homes Hub’s SME Liaison Group, discusses how the government’s devolution agenda could impact SME housebuilders.
Until May 2026, only half of the English population will have an elected mayor. But with Cumbria, Cheshire & Warrington, Norfolk & Suffolk, Greater Essex, Sussex & Brighton and Hampshire & Solent now confirmed to join the government’s Devolution Priority Programme, the vast majority of the country will have a regional mayor in little over a year. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) says these areas will be given “sweeping powers,”, including over housing and transport.
The government has also announced legislation to establish four new devolution institutions. These include two new mayoral authorities in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire. Late last year, Angela Rayner also revealed that combined county authorities will be formed in Devon & Torbay, and Lancashire.
With Bargate’s operating area being Hampshire & Solent, I welcome the introduction of more regional mayors. Having access to senior regional politicians with the ear of Westminster should deliver clear benefits.
Elected mayors – working alongside Homes England – could be a driver for a seismic shift in housing delivery. Those who exercised their ‘Right to Buy’ during the 1980s and 90s often credited Margaret Thatcher for enabling them to become homeowners. Mayors want to achieve a similar sentiment to gain voter loyalty, so they should be highly motivated to assemble and give the go-ahead to quality residential planning applications, major mixed-use developments and new towns.
To facilitate such a highly ambitious housebuilding programme, I hope the revised NPPF measures and mandatory targets are being passed down to the LPAs instantaneously, with stringent penalties if they don’t comply. It may have now dawned on No.10 that certain local authorities aren’t dancing to the same tune, especially as some rushed through their preferred neighbourhood plan before the NPPF announcement was made in December 2024.
I do hope that if any local plans don’t meet Labour’s new mandatory housing targets, the deputy prime minister will keep to her word and use her powers of intervention. Last summer, Rayner went as far as saying she would even consider taking over an authority’s plan-making role.
But there are some proposed devolution policy measures that are causing alarm for SME housebuilders. The prospect of a mayoral levy on developers to ensure new schemes are supported by the necessary infrastructure would be the nail in the coffin for most proposals that are currently on the drawing board. Housebuilders simply cannot afford another levy.
The only way the vast majority of residential-led development opportunities could remain commercially viable is if a new mayoral levy was in lieu of CIL payments. I believe the mood music from some policymakers is that this additional – significant – tax could just be reflected in land values, but this isn’t possible on sites identified within a two-to-five-year pipeline, as the price has already been negotiated.
The thought that a new mayoral levy is actually required to fund essential infrastructure is very concerning. Housebuilders have been paying local authorities hefty CIL payments for a decade – specifically to fund infrastructure enhancements. Perhaps the HBF could help to clarify how much has been collected in CIL payments, what that cash has been spent on, and help to explain the rationale behind proposals for an additional mayoral levy?
The stringent asks of the Building Safety Regulator for Gateways 2 and 3 – which even the government refer to as “hold points” are having a catastrophic impact on the delivery programmes for any residential scheme over 18 metres/seven storeys. Dense urban developments should offer the quickest route to help the government make headway with its housing pledge, but there can be as much as an 18-month delay to receive permission to build at the Gateway 2 stage!
Perhaps it’s therefore a blessing that dense urban developments aren’t the natural domain for SME housebuilders. Creating sustainable clusters of family homes and enhancing traditional communities within edge of settlement, semi-rural and rural locations is the usual sweet spot for Bargate and many of our peers. That is where we can be distinctive and prioritise design quality, green technologies and placemaking over ugly densification.
My ask is for elected regional mayors to pull Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) together and designate a fair proportion of new residential development opportunities to SMEs. This would considerably enhance the quality, choice and distinctiveness of new housing.
As an SME housebuilder now in our 20th year of business, we are relieved to find that planning decisions for some of our schemes are beginning to come through in a quicker timeframe than during Michael Gove’s reign at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Some approvals are even starting to come through via delegated powers.
Efficiencies encountered throughout the planning and pre-construction process could enable us to increase the number of homes we build by 25%. The same growth is achievable for most SMEs. It’s the ability to scale up without compromising the quality that makes small and medium housebuilders so invaluable to the overall health of the new homes industry. For devolution to create a strong legacy, elected mayors must be sympathetic to the needs of the people and not just see dense urban mega-sites as the answer to achieving housing targets.
