The ambition in the UKREiiF 2026 programme around housing and development is striking. New towns, strategic masterplanning, housing delivery at scale, and unlocking the planning system. What I keep coming back to, looking at it through the lens of what we actually work on day to day, is the distance between the strategic conversation and the site-level reality.
That distance is not a failure of intent. It is a structural feature of how land and planning decisions work in practice. Acknowledging it clearly is a more useful starting point than the conference conversation always manages.
What the site-level reality looks like
Policy intent matters. A planning framework that supports housing delivery and a local authority culture that treats development as a positive both make a genuine difference to outcomes over time. The current policy environment is, in many respects, more favourable to development than it has been for some years.
What it cannot do on its own is resolve the site-level constraints that determine whether a specific scheme happens or does not. Land value that does not support the viability appraisal. Infrastructure delivery dependent on funding commitments that have not been confirmed. Community engagement that takes longer and is more complex than the programme assumed. These are the things that unlock or block individual schemes, and they do not yield to policy change alone.
Viability as the central constraint
Development viability sits behind more stalled schemes than any other single factor. The relationship between land value, build costs, affordable housing obligations, infrastructure requirements, and the return needed to justify development risk is not a simple calculation. It plays out differently on every site and at every point in the economic cycle.
The current moment is particularly complex because several inputs to that calculation have moved against development viability simultaneously. Build cost inflation has not fully unwound. Finance costs remain higher than in the pre-2022 environment. The land market has been slower to adjust to those changed inputs than the viability calculations require. The sessions at UKREiiF that address this honestly are the ones worth attending closely.
What I am looking for in Leeds
The land and planning community is, in my experience, more candid about the gap between strategy and delivery than the broader property industry sometimes manages. The best conversations at UKREiiF on these themes are those where practitioners who have worked through the hard parts of getting a site started share what it actually took. Not the headline narrative about planning reform or government ambition, but the specific relationships, structures, and decisions that moved a scheme from aspiration to construction.
Those conversations tend to happen at the edges of the formal programme. Finding them is worth the effort.
Let’s talk town planning at UKREiiF
If you are attending UKREiiF and want to discuss a specific site, a planning challenge you are working through, or how the current policy environment is affecting your development programme, let’s catch up.
Contact [email protected] to arrange a meeting, or join us at our fringe event at the Black Cat Club to discuss your challenges whilst enjoying some food and drinks on us. Email [email protected] or complete the form below to register your interest.
Get in touch with the BTG Eddisons team
Please contact us for more details and information.
