EP chairman seeks to settle nerves as super-agency merger speeds up

There has been mounting speculation that the combining of EP and the Housing Corporation to create the new super-agency would result in a focus on regional offices rather than remaining in their present London headquarters.

But Napier told Regenerate: “My advice to Bob is the more he can do to maintain stability of locations, the better for the agency. The staff is important and have a corporate memory and it would be crazy to lose that. If you start moving offices there is a cost in lost expertise.”

Napier echoed recent comments made by incoming HCA chief executive Sir Robert Kerslake at the Chartered Institute of Housing dinner, who said he wanted to speed up the merger process. “We’re hoping that by November structures will be in place so that the staff can concentrate on their new jobs.”

Kerslake is already attending EP board meetings and earlier this month joined Napier in briefing EP staff. Said Napier: “I told the staff it is all a bit of a challenge. The market is certainly not going up, the government is adding more tasks – such as local housing companies and the carbon challenge – which require more resource, and we need a smooth glide path to the new agency. We have to maintain business as usual on outputs against a number of challenges.”

Keeping the land coming

Evidence that EP is maintaining its focus came from the launch earlier this month of a strategic land division within EP, headed by Duncan Innes. The new division will effectively keep a flow of land coming through the development pipeline, particularly from the hospital sites programme and through local housing companies, the new vehicles to release local authority land for development now being piloted with 14 councils.

Uncertainty abounds out there. It is a question of confidence and that is looking very shaky

Robert Napier

Facilitating delivery is becoming ever more important as market jitters persist. Top 10 housebuilders Barratt, Taylor Wimpey, Redrow, Persimmon, Bovis and Miller have all recently reported falls in completions or forward sales. Napier acknowledged that the market is giving cause for concern, saying: “Uncertainty abounds out there. It is a question of confidence and that is looking very shaky. Spring is the key period and what happens to footfall then will determine what happens.”

That raises the question of whether deteriorating market conditions might prompt EP to relax some of the demands on environment, design and community placed on developers working on land that passes through its hands. Napier, a former WWF UK chief executive, has a reputation for being fearless in attacking the environmentally profligate and responded with a personal view: “When we build a house, we effectively build a carbon footprint into it for years and it is quite unacceptable not to push forward on the environment because of short-term issues. It’s nonsense. One challenge is that there may be higher upfront costs in new technologies, but homes equipped with those technologies have lower energy bills, so you might have to find ways to capture that upfront.

“There may be a case here for encouraging in new housebuilding players, for dividing sites so that they can be developed by smaller players. Housing markets vary regionally, so even if we find that the market is soggy in one area, we can take forward sites in different parts of the country. We can’t get away from the government’s housebuilding aims.”

Tough message

In his former WWF role, Napier pushed the government to make the Code for Sustainable Homes tougher when it looked like they were set to water it down. He is therefore hardly likely to express sympathy with their complaints about the stringency and uncertainty surrounding the code. “Go and try and test it,” was his message to industry, he said. “The carbon challenge is about testing it. Unless we push the boundary we won’t test it for the consumer. This in the end is about providing places for people to live. It is broader than simply the carbon agenda.”

Napier was chief executive of building materials producer Redland through the 1990s and has seen the housebuilding industry from several sides. His view of it? “It is not an industry that moves rapidly. Its mutual dependence is enormous,” he responded. Napier was a longstanding non-executive director of EP before taking on the role of chair at the start of 2008. Yet if Kerslake succeeds in his objective to speed up HCA’s emergence, Napier could be out of that job before 2008 is out. So will there be a role for him at HCA? For once Napier was non-committal: “I have a contract that goes up to the transition. We will wait and see.”