The New Year is an exciting time, one for reflection on the previous year as well as a chance to look at the opportunities ahead. The beginning of the year is also an ideal time to make wrong predictions, completely miss the mark on the year’s trends and put your cards down for all to see. So with that in mind, here’s what I’m going to be looking for during the year ahead.

Three weeks have passed since the Budget and, although I worry about whether any of the significant changes will come into action, I am heartened by one particular initiative.

This weekend, we saw another significant tonal shift in the way the Government is approaching housebuilding and infrastructure. This time it was Communities’ Secretary Sajid Javid who brought the issue centre stage when he appeared on the Andrew Marr Show to argue that the Government should borrow to invest in order to solve the country’s housing crisis.

New priorities for the government's multi-billion pound housing budget, along with the Housing and Planning Bill, are likely to reduce the planning system's role in providing affordable homes to rent, experts have said.

In last week's spending review, chancellor George Osborne reaffirmed the government's overriding objective of increasing homeownership. In his statement to Parliament, he said the housing budget would be doubled to more than £2 billion a year. "Above all, we choose to build the homes that people can buy," Osborne said.

A five-point plan for housing in the spending review is intended to deliver 400,000 affordable housing starts by 2020/21, with funding pumped into low-cost homeownership products rather than affordable and social rented housing. "Affordable means not just affordable to rent, but affordable to buy," Osborne told MPs.

Of those housing starts, the spending review said, 200,000 will be the Starter Homes pledged in the Tories' general election manifesto, available at a 20 per cent discount to the under-40s, with a £2.3 billion fund to "support the delivery of up to 60,000 of these, in addition to those delivered through reform of the planning system". Osborne also pledged 135,000 shared ownership houses and 10,000 more rented homes that will let tenants save for a deposit.

Iceni Asset Management - I.AM - is a sister company of Iceni Projects specialising in project management. As the description suggests, it manages projects and assets. Developments, infrastructure, environmental remediation, promoting strategic land. Big or small, complex or straightforward, the principles are pretty much the same: move from Position A to Position B. What is to be produced? By when? And with what budget? What could go wrong and what will you do if it does go wrong?

The main party conferences are over, and the latest Government reshuffle has quickly faded from the headlines.  Housing is a serious issue in need of attention but ministers do not appear to have a clear strategy for solving the problem.

Sadly, the situation in 2013 is like any other year. It has been about a quarter of a century since the UK was building anywhere near enough homes to meet its needs.  We are currently at around 100,000 per annum, while the estimate of need stands at 230,000 - not including the severe backlog.

This graph from the FT shows the huge decline in housebuilding since the 1950s, 60s and 70s:

http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/02/22/about-those-housebuilding-stats/housing-completions-england/

The conclusion was a Sound Core Strategy, but there is much more to the West Berkshire Core Strategy Inspectors' Report than that.