Homes England New Strategic Plan to Focus on Affordable Homes

by Chelsea Bailey

Homes England has launched a new five-year plan, outlining how it will support communities through delivering more affordable and good quality housing. How will a placespecific approach be used to identify housing supply issues?

The renewed and expanded 2023 to 2028 strategic plan highlights how it is even more important that the UK responds to the challenging economic times and tackles the huge housing crisis that the country has on its hands.

At the heart of the strategy, it sets out how by working with its partners, Homes England can deliver a revitalised built environment across England that serves the needs of all communities.

It also commits Homes England to work in a more place-based way. It will focus on tailoring its powers, funding, expertise, and technical capacity to the specific challenges faced in different parts of England.

Homes England is committed to boosting collaboration in the housing sector

The new strategic plan is broken down into five interconnected strategic objectives that work together to deliver the UK’s mission.

Three of the strategic objectives focus on the distinct but overlapping categories of Home England’s work: Places, homes, and the sector. These reflect the diverse range of interventions that it has already committed to delivering on behalf of the government.

In the new plan, the first of the five objectives outlined is that Home England will encourage vibrant and successful places to be built. This can be done by working with local leaders and other partners to deliver housing-led mixeduse regeneration with a brownfield-first approach.

Following this, Homes England will aim to facilitate the creation of the homes that people need, intervening where necessary to ensure places have enough homes of the right type and tenure.

It will continue to work with affordable housing providers to deliver much-needed new homes, by: Working in partnerships with the DLUHC to provide grant funding and guarantees, supporting the affordable housing sector to access private finance, enabling access to sites for land-led schemes, helping broker partnerships between public and private sector organisations to support the delivery of housing that meets the local need. Building a housing and regeneration sector that works for everyone is a key priority for Homes England. This is crucial for the sector to boost efforts in diversification, partnership working, and innovation.

Homes England will aim to promote the creation of high-quality homes in welldesigned places that reflect community priorities by taking an inclusive and longterm approach.

The last objective is that Homes England aims to enable sustainable homes and places, maximising their positive contribution to the natural environment impact.

Progress towards achieving the strategic objectives will be monitored

Chair of Homes England, Peter Freeman, explained that the new strategic plan will enable the delivery of affordable housing: “There is no doubt that housing plays an enormous role in the wellbeing and prosperity of our country. As an Agency, we firmly believe that affordable, quality homes in well-designed places are key to improving people’s lives. And our updated strategic plan has been designed to enable us to deliver against that.”

The government must do more to support housebuilders, and Peter highlighted that Homes England will be focusing on this collaboration: “Over the next five years, we will continue to work with housebuilders of all shapes and sizes to boost housing supply. But we will also focus on the places those homes sit in, working ever more closely with local leaders and other partners to build communities as well as housing, be it through housing-led, mixeduse regeneration or new settlements.”

This collaboration will help the housing sector as it can be a powerful way of enabling those delivering new homes to share risk, resources, skills and capacity.

To measure Homes England’s performance over the course of the strategic plan period, Homes England has introduced new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In the first year of the plan, it will progress implementation of the new KPIs, gather baseline data and set performance targets where relevant.

The KPIs have been selected as the most critical overarching measures to help assess progress towards achieving objectives. These will support Homes England in understanding its performance against its mission and strategic objectives across its full portfolio, track its progress in delivering the programmes it delivers on behalf of the government, and provide evidence to support data-led decision-making.