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We can solve the UK’s housing crisis by protecting smaller builders

By Hugo Owen 2026-01-28T07:00:00

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The backbone of postwar Britain’s vast housebuilding drive, small builders now face extinction as regulatory barriers and policy layering make it ever harder for them to compete, build and survive. Hugo Owen has some solutions

When the Second World War ended, Britain turned to its builders with a task no less urgent than the war effort: rebuild the nation. Homes had been bombed, slums blighted industrial towns, and millions lived in overcrowded conditions. 

It was not today’s corporate giants but small and medium-sized enterprises –  family firms, regional builders, local trades – that became the backbone of post-war Britain.

The planning settlement of 1947, forged by Clement Attlee’s Labour government, created a national framework light enough to let builders get on with the job. In the 1950s, Harold Macmillan, as housing minister, presided over the construction of 300,000 homes a year, a feat unimaginable today, because thousands of SMEs were operating at their peak.

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