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Now is the time to talk about place

Quantity must not trump quality when it comes to driving housing supply. Leigh Johnson sets out how Homes England is aiming to ensure the sector gets the balance right

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Picture: Getty
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Quantity must not trump quality when it comes to driving housing supply. Leigh Johnson sets out how Homes England is aiming to ensure the sector gets the balance right #UKhousing

At Homes England, we want to create places and high-quality homes that have a reduced impact on the environment and support healthier and happier lifestyles.

But it’s about more than this. Good urban design and placemaking encourages a sense of community by creating places and spaces that people want to spend time in together.

One of our key responsibilities is bringing public land suitable for housing to the market, and with landholdings of 8,800 hectares and more than 600 active projects, we are far and away the largest residential land agent and master developer in the country.

Selling land to the market and working with partners to build out our own sites gives us a fantastic platform to lead by example by designing great places and ensuring developments on our land are well considered.

This is something the agency has committed itself to doing in our strategic plan, with one of our key performance indicators monitoring our use of design quality assessment tools when we dispose of sites.


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Welcome to Inside Housing and Homes England Development Summit 2021

Fast forward to the present, and with the coronavirus pandemic underlining and justifying the increased focus there has been on quality places, now is a good time to set out how Homes England balances our responsibility to deliver high-quality homes and communities and drive housing supply.

To cut a long story short, the headline for us is that quantity does not trump quality.

While it would be fair to say that the agency hasn’t always come down on this side of the coin for every project it has ever been involved in, we have been implementing tangible measures beyond those in our current strategic plan to change this and are set to bring more forward in the coming months.

To ensure the quality of schemes on our landholdings, rather than just sell a site, we secure the outline consent and masterplan it ourselves before the site goes to market. This means we bake in the design standards that anyone looking to take on one of our sites must adhere to.

Throughout the lifetime of a development, we use the latest iteration of Building for Life 12 (BfL12), Building for a Healthy Life as our design quality assessment tool. This 12-point design code turns what can be quite nebulous design concepts into an easy-to-use tool that grounds discussions about design in a practical, measurable framework.

This means that from pre-acquisition, right through to delivery and post construction, we have a tool that lets us set contractual and planning requirements to ensure that what is presented in the initial vision is delivered on site as promised.

“The headline for us is that quantity does not trump quality”

To complement this, we conduct regular design reviews throughout the planning stages of a development. By doing this, we’re looking to build confidence and credibility of the scheme with the local planning authority, which gives them a level of reassurance and can ultimately help to accelerate the planning process.

While events like the pandemic provide a huge drive to tear things up and start again, it’s important to recognise that decisions and processes being put in place today may not become things you can see, touch and feel for some time. They only become become tangible at the same pace as new developments take shape – often over years.

Responding to lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic is therefore a chapter that we all need to start writing now.

Leigh Johnson, head of design and master development, Homes England; a trustee, Town and Country Planning Association

Ms Johnson will be speaking at the Inside Housing, Homes England Development Summit on 30 June

Sign up to our Development Summit

Sign up to our Development Summit

Amid the housing crisis and with increasing demands on local authorities, developers and housing associations to deliver more homes, the Inside Housing and Homes England Development Summit brings together the public and private sector to collaborate towards the effective delivery of homes across England.

This is not a conference. It is a business meeting of decision-makers on delivery and how to build more quality homes.

To find out more, click here.

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