Devolution offers real opportunities for affordable housing – but are we prepared for the transition?

Bringing housing decisions closer to the communities they affect allows for nuanced understanding that national programmes struggle to achieve. When you’re serving areas as diverse as urban cores, rural villages and coastal towns, local knowledge makes the difference between programmes that work and those that miss the mark.

At the same time, increased scale creates new opportunities. Instead of housing associations having fragmented conversations with dozens of individual district councils, combined authorities provide a strategic level where meaningful co-ordination can happen.

“These partnerships allow decisions to be driven by people who really know and understand their area and can work together collectively rather than competing”

In the North East, we have been able to use the North East Housing Partnership as an opportunity to bring the skills and expertise of regional housing providers and stakeholders together as a singular voice.

It’s the same in South Yorkshire too, where the regional housing partnership saw us bring together the Combined Authority, Homes England, four local authorities and 14 registered providers to work together on a pipeline of future homes, with 1,300 homes delivered last year by partners.

These partnerships allow decisions to be driven by people who really know and understand their area and can work together collectively rather than competing. We have seen a level of co-ordination that would have been near impossible when working individually.

The practical wins are tangible. For example, in Sheffield we have seen changes made to the planning approach to better support affordable housing applications, directly responding to issues raised by providers at senior-level forums with council officers and Homes England representatives. This specialist capacity means applications move faster and more consistently.

In York & North Yorkshire, registered providers, the combined authority, the local authorities and Homes England have formed a partnership focusing on three key areas: right homes in the right place, low-carbon homes and workforce capacity. A total of 23 housing associations make up the partnership and work together to scale up the delivery of affordable homes across the region.

The group have worked together to create an Affordable Homes Standard – a shared specification for affordable housing in the region. By setting mutually beneficial standards, the aim is to streamline delivery, reduce risks, and enhance outcomes for future developments, supporting the York and North Yorkshire mayor’s ambition to deliver high-quality, affordable homes.

Developers now know exactly what’s required for affordable homes across the region, and we taking a co-ordinated step toward consistency and quality of affordable homes delivered.

Devolution is also changing how housing associations relate to each other. We’re moving from competition to collaboration.

Providers in York & North Yorkshire now share development pipelines openly. This allows us to spot gaps in the delivery of tenures, types or geographies of homes, and seek to better align with local authority priorities. Meanwhile, such strategic forums ensure smaller associations without dedicated development teams get an equal voice alongside larger providers.

Strong leadership drives this progress, but that can also be where the greatest risk lies. Housing requires generational thinking. We’re custodians of assets that will serve communities for decades, making investment decisions with 30-year consequences. Devolution layers electoral cycles onto that long-term responsibility.

“Our ask of government and local authorities is straightforward: plan for housing consistency during periods of change”

What happens when mayoral priorities shift after an election? We’ve seen this play out in York, where a change from a Liberal Democrat/Green coalition to a Labour majority shifted the focus of how brownfield grant funding was prioritised from mixed-tenure development to all-affordable provision.

While flexibility has value, sudden strategic pivots create uncertainty for providers planning multi-year programmes and securing long-term funding.

Geographic inequality within larger authorities presents another challenge. Combined authorities naturally focus resources on strategic priorities and major population centres. That risks leaving behind rural areas, coastal communities and smaller pockets of deprivation that don’t fit headline regeneration narratives.

These are often where affordable housing is hardest to deliver and most needed. Establishing local housing partnerships to inform and shape housing delivery aligned to these regional priorities is key.

The formation period itself carries risk. Creating new organisations is difficult, particularly when local authority restructuring happens simultaneously. Uncertainty about roles and responsibilities leads to delays – we’ve seen infrastructure funding decisions appear to stall because nobody wanted to overstep unclear boundaries.

New authorities often default to risk aversion: complex grant agreements covering every eventuality, and intervention rates set so low they don’t justify the bureaucratic burden of accessing the funding.

York & North Yorkshire benefited enormously from engaging registered providers before the mayor was elected. Housing associations produced a SWOT analysis and met with mayoral candidates ahead of the election. That early dialogue meant we shaped what the new authority needed from us, and what we needed from them, before structures were set.

Indeed, governance structure often determines whether collaboration delivers. South Yorkshire has a formal decision-making board with clear routes for housing providers to feed into strategic decisions. It includes representation from the combined authority, Homes England, local authority portfolio holders and housing association leadership.

York & North Yorkshire is still developing equivalent structures. Without these formal mechanisms, collaboration relies too heavily on relationships and goodwill – valuable but fragile when people move on.

The housing partnerships forming across Yorkshire prove what sector collaboration achieves. Shared pipeline analysis, joint approaches to difficult sites, collective voice when raising issues with authorities... these delivered concrete outcomes.

But this requires commitment from senior leadership. By this we mean dedicating time to forums that might not show immediate returns, and sharing information some would prefer to keep confidential.

Our ask of government and local authorities is straightforward: plan for housing consistency during periods of change. Development cannot stall while new structures bed in or political transitions play out.

Authorities pursuing devolution need transition plans alongside transformation plans. How will development decisions continue? Who maintains relationships with delivery partners? What happens to funding programmes already underway?

Effective devolution work – with strong leadership, clear governance, genuine collaboration and commitment to continuity – unlocks opportunities that centralised approaches may not be able to achieve. Where these fundamentals are missing, devolution becomes another obstacle.

We know what’s possible. The question now is whether other regions can learn from it.

Kitson Keen, director of development, Home Group