Homes England actively seeking partnerships with councils
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Gareth Blacker, Rita Akushie and Jamie Ratcliff
The government’s housing delivery agency is looking to use £100m of funding in new partnerships with local authorities to deliver new housing schemes.
Earlier this year, Homes England doubled the amount of cash dedicated to its English Cities Fund, a development company set up by Homes England, Legal & General and Muse Developments, to £200m.
Speaking at last week’s Housing Finance Summit organised by Room151 in partnership with publication Social Housing, Homes England’s general manager of infrastructure and complex projects, Gareth Blacker, said he wanted to talk to councils about how to spend the money.
He said: “We have doubled the equity going into that vehicle and increased its ability to leverage finance.
“We are looking for projects – difficult and challenging schemes.
“We think we have got ways of working with authorities that might allow joint ventures to be created that might accelerate procurement. We are very open to having discussions with anyone with difficult sites that you might want to take forward in partnership.”
Blacker said that the fund is already working with councils in Newham, Salford and Plymouth to bring forward development.
Speaking shortly after the launch of the quango’s five-year strategic plan to 2023, he said that the agency is now moving from a “programme-based” to a “mission-based” organisation.
“That takes us from a programme-based way of working to one based on place and priority areas,” he said.
“We finally got buy-in from the secretary of state and the housing minister to do that. That will allow us to use all the tools we have available to us in those priority areas.”
He added that the agency was in talks with HM Treasury about next year’s spending review to ensure certainty of funding for large regeneration projects that last longer than the five-year time frame covered by the review.
He said: “You might be able to do the first bits of infrastructure in a five-year window but you have to have a plan that takes you way beyond those five years to allow certainty of delivery over a longer period.”
Also speaking during the session, Jamie Ratcliff, assistant director of housing at the Greater London Authority, said councils need to be realistic about how much housing would result from the lifting of the housing revenue account borrowing cap.
He said: “Once we start getting into the scale of what can be delivered then it is quite low levels.
“That is partly because the surpluses being generated in HRAs aren’t massive at the moment and if you are going to deliver subsidised housing you are not going to be able to borrow commercially to do that even with free land within the local authority.
“Housing associations have recognised for some time they need subsidy from other sources, whether cross-subsidy from commercial activity or higher amounts of grant.”
Ratcliff warned that land supply was another potential constraint on the ability of urban local authorities to step up housing supply, since the “easy pickings of de-industrialisation” were now in short supply.
“We are going to have much more complex sites with much more broader ranges of ownership,” he said.
He called for reform of the rules surrounding land assembly to provide incentive for landowners to collaborate on regeneration schemes.
