COMMENT: Our ambition to create a new type of delivery agency passed a major milestone at the end of October as we published our five-year strategic plan.
The plan, which runs up to 2022-23, sets out our ambitious new mission and the steps we will take with the housing industry to respond to the long-term housing challenges facing this country today.
Alongside launching our plan, the chancellor has announced seven more strategic partnerships with housing associations across England as part of the Budget 2018. Between them they will deliver an additional 13,475 affordable homes by March 2022.
These important steps illustrate just how much work has been undertaken over the past few months to lay the groundwork for the change of pace and direction that’s needed if Homes England, our partners and the wider industry are to tackle the housing crisis effectively.
The simple truth is that England has not been building enough of the right kind of homes in the right places. This is compounded by a shortage of land supply for housing, particularly in the least affordable areas, which has seen the average home costing buyers eight times their average income.
Boosting housing supply
We are committed to boosting housing supply, productivity, innovation, quality, skills and modern methods of construction to help make a more diverse and resilient market.
In practice this means we will focus on investing our funding and resources into sites where the private sector has been unable to do so, unlocking land and delivering infrastructure, such as roads and schools, to accelerate development where there is greatest need.
We will also work with ambitious partners in the industry – including housebuilders of all sizes – local government and housing associations, to achieve our goals.
We will disrupt the market where necessary and have extensive powers at our disposal to draw upon when needed in order to support the delivery of new homes and communities.
Significant progress has already been made by Homes England to drive change in the housing market, such as a major acquisition of land in Plymouth and Sussex. And there’s the investment of millions of pounds on primary infrastructure in Northstowe, Cambridgeshire, fulfilling a masterplan/developer function and providing value for money to the public purse.
In the summer we also launched a £1bn lending alliance with Barclays Bank.
“We will disrupt the market where necessary and have extensive powers at our disposal to draw on when needed in order to support the delivery of new homes and communities.”
We are engaged across Whitehall in providing financial and professional resources to unlock publicly owned assets to deliver to housebuilders with less risk.
Our land team is also growing significantly – having attracted a wide range of skills and expertise to support the delivery of our five-year strategic plan.
We want Homes England to be the partner of choice and we will continue to intervene and collaborate across the country as we strive to deliver the government’s housing ambitions.
This is just the beginning. Over the next five years we will continue to take bold steps to respond to the long-term housing challenges facing this country. We hope the whole of the housing sector, big and small, will join us for the next five years and beyond.
Sir Edward Lister is chairman of Homes England
