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 2020 – 21 we helped our clients achieve :

We supported councils, government departments and combined authorities in projects spanning SME house building, estates regeneration, housing stock retrofit, the supply of mixed methods of construction, affordable homes, public fund bid preparation, brownfield sites’ financial appraisals and town centre business plan evaluations. In total, we worked with 18 local authorities to provide expertise and capacity on 20 projects.

We provided support to Wirral Council, developing a housing growth strategy which will enable the Council to deliver its ambitious housing growth target of over 900 homes per year over the next 15 years.

We partnered with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to assess 100 business cases submitted by councils seeking support from the Government’s Future High Street Fund. Our understanding of deliverability challenges enabled us to scrutinise the financial, commercial and management features of the bids, culminating in the Minister’s announcement of £830m support for 72 successful areas. Awards included:

  • £24.6m to support the delivery of 186 new homes, road safety improvements and a permanent new space for the historic market in Birkenhead
  • £17.9m to boost Worcester town centre by renovating the Scala Theatre and Corn Exchange, transforming underused space to create new homes for first time buyers and improving connectivity
  • £25m for Swindon’s plans to modernise its town centre, including a new public transport hub and improved cycle and pedestrian routes.

We worked with Milton Keynes Council to help accelerate the construction of 200 new council homes for tenants moving from an apartment building scheduled for demolition.

We constructed and tested a detailed financial model to examine the impacts of the project on the Council’s Housing Revenue Account and how free land can be used for the provision of almost 400 new homes, all meeting the Council’s exacting climate responsible specification. We provided senior level expertise to Milton Keynes Council in the oversight of its £165m planned maintenance programme, delivering improvements benefitting 11,118 tenant households, 1,618 leasehold households, and 953 shared ownership households.

We rapidly mobilised bespoke support for Calderdale Council to commence work two weeks after the initial discussion and within a month we developed an action plan that will facilitate the short-term delivery of 750 new homes.

For Caerphilly Council we populated a viability gap fund bid to Cardiff City Region to unlock the potential for provision of 55 eco-friendly affordable homes on a former quarry site.

Working with Cornwall, Tendring and Thurrock, we delivered a three-council pilot that demonstrates how councils can work with SME builders to deliver new homes on sites not owned by the council. In total over 200 SMEs were contacted and 14 bids for small site schemes of affordable homes were generated in four weeks.

Hear more from Linda Raynor:

 

For more information about what we have helped our clients achieve, see our 2020-21 impact report.

IMPACT REPORT 2020 - 2021

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

Are you coming to #LGAConf22? Book your place now to attend the biggest event in the #localgov calendar. https://t.co/6mhb7BEW0P

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