Homes England

in the short term.

I mean, we've seen Homes England give strategic housing grants out and obviously some councils there.

But I suppose my point is whether the councils, while that might be the aim, whether that's councils, council housing, social housing, and lots of different nuance in there, is whether the councils themselves have the capacity, certainly in the short term, to deliver and be your counter cyclical.

Now, they may well over a period of time.

There are multiple routes to get that grant.

You can obviously get it through local authority, combined authority, Homes England, you know, there's a range of different areas to get that.

There's slightly less diverse opportunities for other sectors that you can go out.

There's still significant sums, but in commercial, it's a lot more driven by the command authority.

So any funding for those initial stages would be very helpful.

Once you've got a st- a site and you, you can start off, you know, with the housing association and the actual building of the houses will get, uh, funded by Homes England.

However, it's those early stages which are often difficult.

So doing the housing needs survey-

... to speak to the right people.

So okay, that, that's really helpful.

You mentioned Homes England.

Who are they and what do they, how do they help in this situation?

And we were literally there on all the legals about to sign before Christmas in 2013.

And Homes England or the Homes and Communities Agency, as it was called then, made an edict to all their housing associations not to sign up to these agreements.

So we were blown out of the water.

It was the most depressing Christmas ever.

How do you do that? Grant funding?

So we call it a cocktail effectively.

So we work closely with Homes England.

We've built a really good relationship.

I'm excited to see this development progress and watch the homes taking shape.

The affordable homes have been part-funded by Homes England through Amplius Strategic Partnership.

Sophie Kendall Land and partnerships director at Allison Homes Central added, "Collaborating with Amplius on the Ibury Road development is an exciting milestone for our central region, and a brilliant step forward in meeting local housing needs.

We are immensely proud to see work getting underway on-site, and look forward to working closely with our partners to bring these new homes to life, with the first properties ready to be occupied from March 2027." Plans to convert a house into a children's care home near Peterborough have been approved.

Rayner and Pennycook cited the government recently awarding three councils, Cambridge City Council, Eastleigh Borough Council and Newcastle City Council, 390 million pounds to build 2,800 council homes between them as part of the affordable housing program.

The government also awarded those three councils strategic partnership status, which, according to its housing agency, Homes England, provides access to funding on a long-term program level basis and offers greater flexibility over the tenure and location of delivery.

Rayner and Pennycook said that this showed how some councils were stepping up to meet the government's bold housing ambition, but they now need every council to examine its ambition and to go further.

Okay.

Yeah, so the government have just released, you may or may not have heard on the news, the first wave of a total amount of...

So the bigger picture is £39 billion is going to be injected into the UK housing market from Homes England.

So that's the government and their incentives.

And £9.58 billion of that has already been allocated in this first tranche of that £39 billion.

And we are failing generations of our young people by not providing adequate social housing.

That doesn't look like it's going to change from any national policy, does it? From what I can see, it needs to be pushed down to the regions where the new housing bank from Homes England and people turning up from the National Wealth Fund to catalyse social housing in the regions with transport systems to deliver against that housing.

And that is a way of really transforming places and it's something that we're 100% behind.

Making that happen in many respects requires modernizing the whole infrastructure design and delivery process.