Brickmaker’s woes deepen the UK housebuilding gloom

With John Healey’s Your First Home scheme on the way, is the mood improving in the housebuilding sector? A couple of the builders have results later this week, so can speak for themselves. In the meantime, though, here’s a thumping profits warning from Ibstock, the country’s biggest brickmaker, to spread a little more gloom. Demand hit a brick wall in the summer, as the company could have put it.

Industry data, said Ibstock, show UK brick market volumes down 17% year-on-year in July and August. For the whole of the third quarter, it said, sales were 22% below expectations, forcing a one-fifth cut in its production volumes versus plans set out as recently as August.

Cue an 11% fall in the share price to virtually its lowest level since the firm relisted on the stock market in 2015. Top-line earnings for the whole of 2026 will be “in the mid-£40m range” versus a figure close to £60m expected by the City.

The short moral from Ibstock’s woes is that the sector’s slowdown is pretty entrenched. Across the board, we’ve heard shareholder-friendly vows from housebuilders of “financial discipline”, corporate-speak for saying expansion is off the table and the job is about hammering away at costs. Berkeley Homes, focused on the south-east of England, even said six months ago it will stop buying new land and hiring new staff.

Everybody knows one deep cause: the turnaround in interest rate expectations with the Iran war. The Bank of England will probably raise rates this week (finally); then we’ll be on to wondering how many more increases will follow. In addition, housebuilders complain about costs of regulation that are harder to lose when the prices of new houses are going sideways.

So is Healey’s Your First Home a reheat of Help to Buy, a gamechanger? From the point of view of housebuilders, the scheme is clearly welcome – they had been lobbying for action for ages. But there are a couple of caveats. First, the caps on the size of the transactions means it is not a copycat scheme for the very good reason that Healey can’t be seen to be adding too much inflationary pressure at a time like now.

Second, it will only be launched next April, the chancellor said in his budget last week. The delay “may weigh on demand in the intervening period”, Ibstock chief executive Joe Hudson said, echoing others. He is surely right: for many qualifying buyers, it will make sense to wait five months for the discounted loans.

Healey also said there will be no more changes to building regulations in this parliament (except where critical for safety), a nod towards the sector’s other grumble. On the other hand, he’s not proposing to remove existing regulations.

So one suspects 2027 – a year of 1% growth in the economy, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecasts – is probably not going to move housebuilding volumes meaningfully. Your First Home should be “modestly helpful”, reckons Peel Hunt, but “lower interest rates remain key to a pickup in sector activity”. Yes, it all comes back to borrowing costs. And the upturn, when it comes, will surely be too late to save the government’s ambition of 1.5m new homes this parliament. The target isn’t officially rubble, but it may as well be.