Sales director to sleep rough

A Director of one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders has pledged to sleep rough for a night in November in a bid to draw attention to the nation’s housing shortage – a problem which experts predict could leave over 20,000 homeless by 2015.

Sue Warwick, national head of sales and marketing for Miller Homes, made the decision to experience a night sleeping in London’s Exchange Square following a series of reports which showed that Britain was on the brink of the worst housing shortage since the Second World War.

This bleak picture is a combination of economic and regulatory issues that have seen the lowest number of new home completions since the early 1920s, accompanied by an ongoing unease surrounding NHBC ‘new start’ registrations.

One of the more recent reports on the subject from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) stated that Britain needs 750,000 new homes by 2025 in order to house the growing population – but a range of factors including poor mortgage supply, lack of planning policy and faltering consumer confidence have stalled building programmes with all housebuilders – a problem which will begin to kick-in in earnest within the next three years.

According to Miller Homes, the housing shortage is just the tip of the iceberg – and the vast majority of Britons will feel the effects of the problem before the start of the next decade.

Sue said: “We strongly believe everybody deserves to have a place they can call home and the Government needs to ensure that future generations are able to afford what is wrongly now seen as a privilege rather than a right.”

Sue will be sleeping rough on November 10 as part of an event hosted by Centrepoint – the leading charity for homeless young people.

Miller Homes is urging as many people as possible to support Sue’s fundraiser by making a donation on www.justgiving.com/Sue-Warwick.