Helping Construction SMEs back on their feet

Boris Johnson has announced a £12bn affordable homes programme, providing up to 180,000 new homes over eight years, a slight retraction on his original five year target. Alongside this pledge however, is a sweeping liberalisation of planning regulations, which the Government are quoting to be the most radical since the end of the Second World War.

Centred on reducing the amount of red-tape surrounding planning needed, along with fast-tracking certain applications, the new regulations will give greater freedom for buildings and land in town centres to change use without planning permission and create new homes from the regeneration of vacant and redundant buildings.

With such a vast amount of building space potentially lending itself to these regulations, SMEs within the construction and home improvement trades could potentially receive a vital uplift in work, following the disruptive lockdown period.

Ben Dyer, CEO of Powered Now - an innovative off and online back office solution for small trade businesses - has commented on the implications these reforms will have for SMEs in the trades.

"The new planning regulations are indeed significant and heavily focuses on curbing the amount of red-tape that is traditionally associated with construction. However, it is important that standards within construction and building renovations do not turn into a lawless scenario.

"Whilst it is certainly true that some of those in the construction trades aren't the biggest fans of administrative work, it is important that the industry adapts to streamlining admin, which these reforms set a precedent for. If there is to be wide scale changes to the primary uses of our town centre buildings, SMEs are going to find themselves inundated with work, which is great news following the lockdown period.

"Nonetheless, SMEs in the trades should be looking to ways that their own business admin can be streamlined, and back office solution technology could be one extremely useful tool for allowing this."

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