AT editor Isabel Allen responds to Labour’s first King’s speech and calls for the industry to focus not just on the opportunities that emerge and the promises that have been made, but on the huge gaps in the government’s agenda.
A new parliament; a new dawn. A bright-eyed government committed to construction and growth; a monarch with a proven passion for both architecture and the environment; a prime minister fixated on delivery and change.
Early indications suggest we can look forward to a policy framework to match: a promise to overhaul the planning system, accompanied by a pledge to ‘take the brakes off Britain’ by building housing and infrastructure at an unprecedented scale.
To the construction sector, the rallying cry to ‘get Britain building again’ is an unambiguous promise of better times ahead. An acknowledgement that our country needs its builders and its architects. That patriotic duty, professional satisfaction, and profit can perhaps go hand in hand.
It’s a rare moment of opportunity, not just to reverse our fortunes, but also to show our mettle. To rise to the occasion. To operate, not as a ragtag collection of players scrabbling for opportunities and competing for quick wins, but as a community of professionals, willing and able to use its knowledge – and its principles – for the greater good. A profession with the courage not just to court, but to educate its clients. To challenge the instinct to build too carelessly and quickly. And to use its collective clout to hold its government to account.
It’s time to focus, not just on the opportunities that emerge and the promises that have been made, but on the huge gaps in the government’s agenda. To insist on measures that are essential, not just to the future of the profession, but to the future of society itself: embodied carbon assessments as a prerequisite for planning consent; the abolition of VAT on refurbishment projects; investment in the skills and materials required for the transition to a regenerative construction industry.
Crucially, we need to have the courage, and the foresight, to challenge the vocabulary of turbo charging and growth. To insist that opportunities for retrofit, recycling and reuse are at the heart of every conversation. To demonstrate that, given sufficient resources and momentum, a mantra of make do and mend can be as transformative – and infinitely less destructive – than a bullish determination to build anew.
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