COMMENT Back in July staff at the Homes and Communities Agency were asked to suggest songs for a housing playlist. Plenty could be read in to each of the suggestions.
The inclusion of Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues was clearly a reminder of the problem that the agency should be tackling. Bowie’s Heroes was surely there as a clarion call to colleagues.
But for me it was the inclusion of the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want which, ahem, struck a chord.
Not an obvious candidate for a place on a housing playlist, perhaps its inclusion was born of frustration at the HCA’s continuing quasi regulatory role when its focus should surely be on delivering homes? Or did it point to public anger at the housing crisis (“I went down to the demonstration / To get my fair share of abuse”).
The playlist was more than a bit of fun for incoming HCA chief executive Nick Walkley, it was designed to send a signal that the agency would be a different beast; a team which would work with creativity and passion to tackle the housing crisis.
Make no mistake, the HCA is changing. By the end of the year it will have relaunched as Homes England with a clear goal: “To make a home within reach for everyone”. Its purpose will be to secure “more homes for communities across all housing tenures, put in infrastructure to unlock housing capacity and attract small builders and new players to diversify the market on a sustainable basis”.
With rumours rife around how far the government will be prepared to go in the Budget to unlock housing – from abolishing stamp duty for first-time buyers to borrowing £50bn to invest in housing – it’s clear ministers are prepared to think the previously unthinkable.
It also begs the question: should reform of the HCA go further?
In August the government provided a £65m loan to support more than 6,800 new build-to-rent homes at Quintain’s Wembley Park development in north-west London, the largest BTR scheme in the UK. Quintain will match fund the loan to deliver new car and coach parking, an energy centre and the first phase of the new 7-acre public park.
The development is already backed by a loan from the government’s £3bn Home Building Fund. And last December a bond of £39.4m was guaranteed by government for the first completed private rented blocks of 141 homes at the site, under the £3.5bn PRS Guarantee Scheme.
The agency is at the heart of these new arrangements.
If the HCA is less regulator and more enabler, not a developer and more a source and guarantor of funding, it really is a different beast.
It is more like a bank than a (public sector) propco and perhaps more like an arm of the Treasury than of the DCLG. Might the chancellor go that far on 22 November?
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