Taylor Wimpey boss: ‘Labour are right to free up development’

The New Score Leisure Centre in Leyton has not been officially opened yet, but local schoolkids are already making full use of one of the five Olympic-standard basketball courts.
“It is great to see kids using it,” says Jennie Daly, chief executive of Taylor Wimpey, who is on a whistle-stop tour of the site. “The last time I was here it was just a concrete hall.”
The FTSE 100 housebuilder does not build many basketball courts, never mind Olympic-standard ones, but construction of the leisure centre was one of the keys to unlocking the seven-acre Coronation Square site in Leyton, where Taylor Wimpey is building 750 new homes, half of them affordable.
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The development, on land owned by Waltham Forest council, involved the existing sports centre (and a nursery) being demolished and rebuilt. There is also a new public square, a private garden for residents built on top of those basketball courts and commercial space for shops and restaurants.
“What did the council want? They had low-grade facilities on valuable land. They got regeneration, state-of-the-art leisure facilities and much-needed affordable housing. It’s a win-win. The benefit of partnership.”
Like all big developments Coronation Square has not been without its challenges: UK quarries could not supply the paving specified by the planners for the public square and the Spanish alternative was delayed in customs for weeks, delaying progress. But Daly is clearly proud of the development and the quality of the flats and facilities that are being built.
Writing in The Times, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to stop housebuilding and infrastructure projects being “held to ransom” by nimbys and environmentalists in an attempt to deliver on his promise to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of this parliament.
Persuading housebuilders to take on complicated sites such as Coronation Square will be the key to meeting that 1.5 million pledge. “We would all like to do more … but there is a level of risk that you take on as a business to deliver schemes of this nature,” Daly says.
Planning, increasing regulation and nimby opposition mean that like other housebuilders Taylor Wimpey is actually undertaking far fewer complicated schemes. “We’re doing fewer developments of this nature than we have done for a very long time,” she says.
London is particularly challenging, even for Taylor Wimpey, one of the UK’s largest housebuilders. “We have local boroughs like here in Waltham Forest who have their plans, their policies and their requirements. Then if it’s a development of scale, like this, it also has to be referred to the Greater London Authority, [which has] another layer of requirements and policies.”
Double jeopardy is how she describes it. “I keep talking about certainty, the need for certainty. We have a huge amount of uncertainty and inconsistency at the moment.”
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The issue, however, is not just opposition to developments (or demanding local authorities), but also the lack of resources, skills and capacity in planning departments, says Daly, who started her career working as a planning officer for both Blackpool and Macclesfield councils before joining Westbury Homes.
“The level of resources and investment in planning has fallen at the same time that planning … has become more complex. When I started as a planning officer the things that we would have considered were predominantly design, drainage and highway safety.
“Over the years we have added environmental impact assessments. We have hydrology, archaeology, ecology and economic gap analysis. Health impact analysis. Even if they have the hours in the day, do they have the expertise?”
Daly would like planning fees to be “ringfenced” and used to develop the capacity and skills of not just planning officers but also councillors. “There’s little point having lots of credibility and knowledge in the officer group if actually most decisions are being made by planning committees who don’t have sufficient skills or haven’t been trained.”
Daly, who became the first female boss of a major housebuilder when she was appointed in 2022, is clearly passionate about quality housing and the role of private housebuilders in providing it.
Pete Redfern, Daly’s predecessor at Taylor Wimpey, talks about her boundless energy. “It was always clear that she had the potential to be chief executive. She has the courage to stand up for what she believes in.”
Daly has, in the past, spoken publicly about her childhood in Northern Ireland and the effect on her family of the shortage of quality housing at the time. Lack of affordable, quality housing is a huge barrier to economic and social mobility, she argues. “People cannot move to an area where there is better access to education or better access to jobs. The market is becoming really atrophied because it’s so constrained. The level of underinvestment, the rapid increase in rental costs, homelessness. All of those are showing us that we have a significant problem.”
It is those that are at the edge of society who are hardest hit, she adds. “Kids that are in poor housing have less educational positive outcomes and are more likely to suffer from health issues. Some of the strain on our health service is because we can’t get people out of hospitals because of the homes that they live in.”
Despite the challenges, she insists that she remains optimistic. Last month Taylor Wimpey told shareholders it expected to deliver closer to 10,000 homes this year, up from 9,500, amid steady signs of improvement in customer demand. “We are well positioned for growth,” Daly told them.
“I think the fundamentals for our sector are really strong. Labour have significant ambitions, but it will take multiple sectors — the affordable housing sector, private rental market and the private housing sector — to deliver the numbers that they have in mind.”
Like all housebuilders, though, she was disappointed by the decision of Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, not to extend stamp duty relief for first-time buyers in November’s budget. “First-time buyers are fundamental to the market and I think this is probably the first time in decades that there has been no assistance of any description for first-time buyers,” she says.
She is more positive about the first few months of the new government than other business leaders, praising the creation of the New Homes Accelerator, which aims to unblock and accelerate the construction of large-scale housing developments, and the New Towns Taskforce.
Like her rivals, Daly hopes that the government will publish before Christmas its revised national planning policy framework, which will reinstate the mandatory housing targets for local planning authorities.
The government’s target is a “great starting point … Everyone can agree that there’s a housing need. If left to the local leader, who is up for re-election every three or four years, the ability to kick the can down the road and not make a hard choice is a really attractive one. But if there’s a target, if there’s a level that has to be met, then their job as a civic leader is to find the best way to deliver that with the best outcomes for their local electorate.
“We talk about the harm from development; we don’t talk enough about the positives that come from a development. That’s what I would like to see change.”