HOUSING

We help councils accelerate housing development to meet their regeneration and housing growth objectives.

Our work includes practical procurement and delivery expertise to bridge relationship gaps with developers, and maximise the commercial opportunities available to the public sector. We bring public and private sector experience that helps provide confidence, capacity and capability to councils and combined authorities who have housing supply and regeneration ambitions.

We work closely with the Homes England and MHCLG. We directly support a number of councils to develop and deliver their housing growth plans. Our team operates as a seamless part of the council’s local team, supplementing skills or capacity gaps to manage and deliver end-to-end estates’ renewal programmes.

In 2019 – 20 we helped our clients achieve :

Housing delivery and strategy

We directly supported over 30 councils and combined authorities, helping them realise their housing delivery ambitions. Having previously coordinated a successful £6m bid to the Housing Infrastructure Fund, we supported Wirral Council to sign funding agreements and thus commence work at Wirral Waters, the largest regeneration project in the country. This will deliver 13,500 new homes on the left bank of the Mersey.

We conducted a review of the programme for the development of the Athletes’ Village at Perry Barr for the 2022 Commonwealth Games for Birmingham City Council. This £500m development aims to deliver 1,400 new homes after the Games.

We reviewed West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s opportunities for a pipeline of sites that will meet the future housing needs of the area. This informed the recently announced devolution deal, which includes £3.2m of funding from central government to support housing development.

We supported Salford Council with the preparation of a business case for redevelopment of Swinton town centre, including a refurbished town hall with new office wings and 428 new homes on council land. We advised several councils (including Coventry, Vale of Glamorgan, and Wirral) on options for delivery of their housing growth objectives in the future. We supported various cross-boundary council partnerships (including Greater Exeter, Lincolnshire, and North Northamptonshire) in the development and alignment of their proposals for housing growth, across local authority boundaries. In total the authorities with which we worked have an annual growth target of over 10,000 houses.

We supported the Welsh Government through research on the private rented sector, to support legislation banning most lettings agents’ fees in the sector. The legislation came into effect on 1 September 2019.

Growth

We worked with the 10 local authorities in Greater Lincolnshire to agree a shared vision for the area. This was underpinned by a prioritised infrastructure plan that sets challenging growth targets whilst delivering high quality new communities, environmental protection and long-term resilience. The work centred on an agreed vision for Greater Lincolnshire that pulled together all of the issues relating to place including economy, infrastructure, growth and communities. A key success was the consensus built around shared elements of the vision and agreed outputs.

Under the Future Place Programme, and alongside the Royal Institute of British Architects, the LGA, the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Chartered Institute of Housing and Homes England, we worked with five Greater Exeter local authorities, the North Northamptonshire Joint Planning team (covering five local authorities) and Great Yarmouth, Gateshead and Barnsley councils on a range of place-based issues ranging from viability to governance. The work in Greater Exeter is continuing with the development of a delivery model and a bid to MHCLG as part of its Locally Led Development Corporation competition.

 

For more information about what we have helped our clients achieve, see our 2019-20 impact report.

IMPACT REPORT 2019 - 2020

Domestic Retrofit

Housing retrofit is a complicated and risk-laden challenge, and it is just one of the many actions required to achieve net zero carbon targets in each locality. Meanwhile, net zero is just one priority of the many social economic and environmental priorities each council is facing. Yet we know that without concerted public sector intervention to address domestic energy efficiency, legally binding national and local net zero targets will be missed.

Local Partnerships was commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) via the five Regional Energy Hubs to produce this Local Authority Housing Retrofit Handbook to provide practical advice to local authorities in England. It brings existing resources together in one place and gives a suggested order in which to work through this material.

Access the handbook & resources

TESTIMONIALS

Local Partnerships’ work at Wirral has harnessed local knowledge and created a much sharper, focused approach, which is commercially aware and which will result in more homes delivered over the next five years

Eric Robinson, Chief Executive, Wirral Council

I have found Local Partnerships supportive and knowledgeable, particularly on the technical and financial aspects of our street lighting PFI – enabling us to make informed decisions and ensuring that we haven’t wasted effort in these areas on what is a challenging and complex contract change.

Peter Woodward, Capital Programmes and Property, Manchester City Council

RESOURCES

Access the Housing Delivery toolkit here

Main Contact

Martin Walker

Programme Director – Housing

 

Mobile: 07879 443 410
Email: martin.walker@localpartnerships.gov.uk

OTHER AREAS OF OUR WORK

 
HOUSING

 
INFRASTRUCTURE

CLIMATE
RESPONSE

COMMERCIALISATION AND REORGANISATION

 
ENERGY

 
RE:FIT

 
ASSURANCE

HEALTH AND
SOCIAL CARE

PPP, PFI
AND MIM

 
WASTE

⬆️ Strategic Director Martin Forbes writes for the MJ about levelling up and how to negotiate the challenges ahead. Join members of our bid review team for a webinar on 13 December to look at these issues further. Register here: https://t.co/PTCAtzOiCM

About 3 days ago

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