The 2022 WhatHouse? Awards - THE BEST NEW HOMES IN BRITAIN
The Great Room at the JW Marriott Grosvenor House in London’s Park lane is always packed with the great and the good, the bold and the brilliant, of the housebuilding industry. Perhaps one year we should have a fan zone in Hyde Park – actually, they’re not fans, they’re illinformed cynics – beaming the WhatHouse? Awards ceremony live to politicians, planning authorities and full-bore NIMBYs to inform them there are some exceptional new homes being built out there by exceptional people.
We could fill Hyde Park simply by inviting previous housing secretaries and ministers, who come in, trumpet how they are going to solve the scandalous undersupply of housing and that it will be their life’s work to deliver. Five minutes of their life later and they have moved on. No time to build houses, especially affordable ones, when there’s a greasy pole to climb.
See our video from the 2022 awards
It is not fashionable to sympathise with the housebuilding industry; it’s a perception problem that won’t go away but needs to if we are ever going to get anywhere near building 300,000 homes a year. Wherever you sit on the Just Stop Oil campaign with activists blocking roads and gluing themselves to Van Gogh, at least the clue to their motives is in the word Stop.
Government talks of building more homes; then introduces a raft of measures to stop them.
The HBF has identified 12 new taxes, levies and regulations that add up to a £4.5bn a year bill from various government departments. Of course, builders have to pay their way, but it must be fair and proportional because additional costs – surprise, surprise – make building homes less viable and that extends to investment in local communities, not just housing delivery.
I am sure, by the time you read this, our Awards host this year, Lord Hague of Richmond, would have wryly observed the extraordinary Westminster events of recent months, indeed years.
But as a politician he has not only hosted the Awards several times, but chaired conferences on housebuilding organised by What House Digital and Show House. I’d make William Hague housing czar tomorrow and, like the trees he loves to plant at his home in Wales, he would grow and nurture the solutions for the long term. Despite these government roadblocks, every housebuilder and every cog in their supply chains deserves huge congratulations for their efforts in adversity and a refusal to be bowed.
So let us celebrate the best new homes in Britain and those who created them – the people, the products and the services. We would like to thank all the housebuilders, suppliers and other industry colleagues and, of course, our sponsors and judges for all their fantastic support.
We hope you had a wonderful day – the biggest in the housebuilding calendar – and many congratulations to all the winners.
Rupert Bates
Editorial Director
WhatHouse.com & Show House magazine