Over Nigel Wilson’s 10 years as chief executive of Legal & General, he has seen five prime ministers, double that number of housing ministers and a string of promises as to what government will do to tackle the country’s housing shortage.
So, forgive him if, on a rainy day in Bristol to mark the opening of a modular housing project, he sounds sceptical about what has been achieved over a decade marked by a “lack of continuity” in the country’s leadership.
“We have failed miserably to get the government, over a long period of time, to step up and replicate what we’re doing at a local level and a national level,” he tells guests at the launch of the 185-home Bonnington scheme, outlining the chasm between private and public sector commitment. “Every time we get a politician to commit to anything, they lose their job.”
Making a difference
Wilson spoke to EG the day after Liz Truss’s resignation as prime minister. He sits on the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council but was reported to have declined a role in her cabinet as minister for investment. Would a cabinet post not have been a perfect way to instigate change from the inside?
“I am happy – very happy – at L&G,” he says. And it is not as if he is running short of work to do in his current role.
One of the longest-serving FTSE 100 chief executives, Wilson joined L&G as its chief financial officer in 2009 and was promoted to the position of chief executive in 2012. Today, when not fielding government job offers, Wilson and his colleagues have been pulling at various levers across the £1.3tn AUM group to tackle the county’s housing shortage.
The group bought into housebuilder Cala Homes in 2013 – initially in a co-ownership with Patron Capital Partners but then took sole ownership four years later. It grew that £250m business to revenues of some £1.2bn last year. L&G also has interests in modular housing, urban and suburban build-to-rent, affordable housing and accommodation for the homeless.
“We are the only UK business that does everything,” Wilson says. “We want to do everything because we want to make a difference, not just in one or two places but right across the country.”
That nationwide focus should play right into the levelling-up agenda, but here he says he has seen too little in the way of progress – or, as he puts it, “too much moaning and groaning and not enough doing”.
“If the planning system of the UK had been better, we’d have done more levelling up,” he says. “It was not a shortage of capital that was stopping it. It was a shortage of planning to get stuff done. “You need policy and regulation from central government and that’s always been slow because of this lack of continuity that we’ve had for a long time.” He adds: “We’ve got the blockers and the tacklers, the moaners and the groaners, and not enough on the doing side.”
Wilson grew up in a council home in the new town of Newton Aycliffe, so he understands the importance of delivering modern and affordable housing, and of creating environments that people want to live in.
“I got to move into a new council house, I went to the new school with new teachers, new everything, and that really created a platform for the rest of my life,” he says. “I would never have been here today had I continued to live with my grandparents in a massively overcrowded house.”
That drives him at L&G. “We want people to have that opportunity today. We have really done a poor job on social mobility. At the heart of that are housing, health, and education,” he says. “We’re just not doing enough on any of these things and myself and others have to do a better job, influencing the government to change policy and regulation so we can do things quicker.”
Planning problems
Wilson has concerns in London too. Back in 2014, L&G launched a paper titled Let’s House Britain, exploring problems around housing and calling for consensus on how to tackle the supply side issue of how to build more homes in the UK.
Now the group is preparing to launch Let’s House London, as Wilson sees the city struggling with out-of-reach targets.
“If you look at London in a bird’s eye way, you’ll find there are two bits which are very highly built up – the City and Canary Wharf – and vast amounts that are not,” he says. The sites are there, Wilson insists, but planning remains a problem.
“We’ve kept out of central London, or large parts of London, for the last 10 or 15 years,” he says. “We’ve done lots in other towns and cities because frankly it was much easier to get stuff done.”
Indeed, Wilson believes the biggest hurdle for the UK in overcoming its housing crisis is the planning system. “If there is anything we could change in Britain completely it is the planning system. It just slows us down so much,” he says. “And as we move into a higher interest rate environment, the costs of slowdowns grow and people’s willingness to enter [projects] goes down because they realise it’s going to take too long and the costs become too high and very difficult to forecast.”
Much of the challenge is due to resources, he adds – there are too few planning officers and so those in the role are overworked. “It’s not their individual fault,” he says. “It’s the collective fault of the system that is resulting in not enough housing being built.”
Innovations such as modular construction can be part of the wider solution he says. Wilson has been an advocate for modular housing for a long time, although he says it will take years for the business to make the mark he believes it will be ultimately capable of. No matter – L&G, founded in 1836, has time.
“It’s a bit like the car industry in the 1910s, when it just was emerging,” he says. “Manufacturers didn’t do very well, but it changed very quickly. You get tipping points.”
Perhaps for Wilson, we are on the brink of one of those tipping points now. But only if there are people willing to get on with it.
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