Construction specialists convened at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool to discuss finding sustainable ways to solve the housing crisis.

The panel was headed up by Mike Reader, MP for Northampton South, in front of a packed audience.

Reader said: “There are a lot of different build solutions that are going to help to get us to 1.5 million homes – and timber solutions are part of them.”

“Vistry, who I met today, are doing 6,000 homes a year using structural timber in their developments.

“We need to make sure planning [law] allows builders to have repeatable products. Because we know in the industry, and we’ve seen in other parts of the public sector specifically, repeatability drives down cost. It enables us to innovate, especially using products like timber.”

Commenting on the importance of industry collaboration with the government, he said, “I was with Sarah [Jones—Minister for Industry] this morning, and she committed to a panel of industry representatives, and the STA [Structural Timber Association] would be another we could commit to. The government is going to listen.”

He added, in a plea to the sector, “We want you to come to us and help us deliver on our missions.”

Andrew Carpenter, chief executive officer of the Structural Timber Association, said: “There are two things we [structural timber] are inextricably linked with - the building of 1.5 million homes throughout the Parliament. We can contribute a third of those as a sector.

“The second thing is growth. Decarbonisation has got to be one of the planks of the growth strategy.

“It’s time for timber. The opportunity of a lifetime must be grasped in the lifetime of the opportunity. And that opportunity is now.”

The Labour government has set itself the target of building 1.5 million homes over the course of the Parliament. This equates to an average of 300,000 new homes each year—a figure never achieved by any Government in British history.

Timber frame is the material available with the lowest carbon footprint. It can deliver a 16% carbon saving during construction and takes less time to build a sustainable timber frame house than other materials.

There is existing capacity in the established structural timber manufacturing sector to rapidly double timber frame manufacturing output to achieve 100,000 homes per annum—equivalent to one in three of the 300,000 homes needed each year.