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Why we are forming a housing association partnership in Leeds City Region

The Leeds City Region Housing Association Partnership had its first meeting earlier this month. Chair Helen Lennon explains what it is hoping to achieve

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Leeds, Yorkshire (picture: Getty)
Leeds, Yorkshire (picture: Getty)
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“We must co-ordinate our investment plans, focus our energies and share resources and risks.” Helen Lennon explains the thinking behind a housing association partnership in Leeds #ukhousing

The Leeds City Region Housing Association Partnership had its first meeting earlier this month. Chair Helen Lennon explains what it is hoping to achieve #ukhousing

“By coming together, we can combine our respective strengths.” Helen Lennon explains why housing associations are coming together to form a partnership in the Leeds City Region #ukhousing

As housing providers, we are all turning our business plans towards delivering more new homes.

But if we are to address the wider housing and social challenges across Yorkshire, we need to focus on more than just new supply.

Building more homes is an important part of the agenda.

Housing is infrastructure which helps underpin local economic growth. A good-quality housing offer can help to attract and retain talent to a locality, helping to sustain growing commerce and industry.

New homes also help to generate valuable additional resources for local authorities struggling to fund local services.

In Yorkshire, a new joint venture delivery vehicle focusing on market housing is in the pipeline, and two Wave 2 allocations for regionally based organisations have been announced to add to the additional supply that the national players will bring to the table in the hotspot areas of Leeds, Harrogate and York.

“We need to focus on more than just new supply”

But in Yorkshire, as in many parts of the North, we are passionate about addressing the many other housing challenges we face.

These include regenerating our struggling towns and former industrial areas, spreading the benefits that economic growth in our urban centres can bring, providing appropriately designed accommodation and support for our older and vulnerable communities, and addressing the skills and capacity gaps in construction, social care, and indeed our own industry, in a strategic and sustainable way.

How should we respond to these challenges?


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These issues are complex, and accordingly they require strategic and collaborative responses.

We must co-ordinate our investment plans, focus our energies and share resources and risks, so that we can un-stick the difficult sites and regeneration programmes that the private sector won’t address.

A collective voice will help open doors for housing organisations large and small with democratic, economic and health commissioning partners.

A robust, well organised and representative body shared by all housing association partners will provide an attractive and valued partnership vehicle for austerity-hit local authorities.

A shared communication channel will help raise housing’s profile with the local enterprise partnership to inform the local industrial strategy, reflecting our significant combined economic and community impact.

In a period where clinical commissioning groups are converging, and new sustainability and transformation partnerships and integrated care structures are emerging, an opportunity is opening up for housing and related support services to claim their rightful place in helping to address the health and social care challenges we face, and as a sector we need to be ready.

“By coming together, we can combine our respective strengths”

The diversity of the housing association sector, in organisational scale, geography and structure, is possibly our biggest strength and opportunity in terms of our offer to our regional partners.

But at the same time, it is possibly our biggest problem in terms of interacting with them in a strategic way.

Those of us that work at scale in one particular locality perhaps lack the breadth of geography and/or specialist services offered by others.

Those of us with geographically dispersed stock can lack social impact at scale in local areas. By coming together, we can combine our respective strengths across the sector to provide a compelling delivery partner in the communities where we work.

The Leeds City Region Housing Association Partnership has come together recognising that these challenges require a collaborative and co-ordinated response. The test for us all will be whether we can create a truly collaborative culture which can thrive alongside our respective business plan priorities.

Helen Lennon, chief executive, Connect Housing, and chair, Leeds City Region Housing Association Partnership

 

The Leeds City Region Housing Association Partnership

  • The partnership is open to all 20 housing associations with stock or developing in the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) and Leeds City Region (LCR) Areas.
  • It seeks to “provide a single voice for local housing associations to engage with and support West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership and Homes England to deliver their economic, housing and social objectives”
  • It comprises executives from member associations together and senior political leaders and officers from WYCA. LCR and Homes England.
  • The partnership is being facilitated by the National Housing Federation
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