Making a devo splash

In the chancellor’s Budget on 16 March, further announcements were made on devolution, with mayoral deals being agreed with East Anglia, West of England and Greater Lincolnshire.

Most interesting was East Anglia’s deal which included access to £175m of ringfenced funding to deliver new homes.

That’s an awful lot of funding, which I’m sure comes with certain criteria, but in a period when we are all thinking about how to fund more affordable homes, making sure that our voice is heard and we get a slice of the devo cake should be a priority for us all.

For those who have already secured such a deal, that’s great. But in the South West, we still have some way to go and, dare I say, some are cynical about devolution and the potential opportunities it holds for housing.

As a board member of the Heart of the South West Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), I am delighted that we submitted a prospectus to government on 29 January for Devon and Somerset.

This was a product of six months’ hard work and it was no mean feat when you consider there are 17 local authorities, two national parks, three clinical commissioning groups and the LEP engaged in the deal.

And, yes it has been hard work. Sometimes it has felt more like a bun fight with all sides entrenched in their own agenda.

But housing is in the deal, with an ask of government to “create a flexible funding model to support accelerated housing delivery, targeting locally identified growth areas”.

For that, we are committed to delivering 179,000 homes by 2030 in greater Exeter, Hinkley, Plymouth (above), Taunton and Torbay, and a new garden town in Somerset, which will help underpin growth which is key to productivity.

I’m told by those in the know that our deal will probably take a year to negotiate and it will not be plain sailing - we have yet to go through a governance review within the region and get all partners to sign up to an elected mayor, which at best will be interesting.

But whatever the outcome, I do know that I have given housing its best shot at being part of the deal; as they say with the lottery, “you’ve got to be in it to win it”.

And I truly hope that this time next year I will be talking about the devolution deal for Heart of the South West with government.

I would urge others to follow suit so that we can all start delivering the homes this country so badly needs.

Barbara Shaw, chief executive, Westward Housing Group