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Inside Housing goes on site with L&Q’s development director Vicky Savage
L&Q is the housing association sector’s biggest builder. At a critical time for the future of new build affordable housing, Jess McCabe tours one of the landlord’s projects with Vicky Savage, its group director of development and sales. Photography by Tim Foster
L&Q is the housing association sector’s biggest builder. At a critical time for the future of new build affordable housing, Jess McCabe tours one of the landlord’s projects with Vicky Savage, its group director of development and sales #UKhousingFew people are more central to the building of social housing in Britain than Vicky Savage.
Since 2021, she has been group director of development and sales at L&Q, the provider which has topped Inside Housing’s Biggest Builders list every year for more than a decade.
Inside Housing has come to meet her at Prime Point, a construction site for one of those new developments, only a short walk from the O2 arena on the Greenwich peninsula in London.
We are here to catch up with Ms Savage at a critical time for the sector’s development pipeline. We’re also here to launch a series of interviews with women in housing development – a subject Ms Savage has been passionate about for years (see box, below).
Our interview took place just before the government announced a huge package of support for new affordable housing, ticking off many of the sector’s asks.
However, L&Q’s starts dropped last year, along with most of the G15 group of large London housing providers. So we wanted to find out what Ms Savage thinks it will take for the sector to ramp up development again. And we also wanted to get to know one of the key figures for new build social homes.
Developing housing associations
L&Q is particularly proud of Prime Point; I get handed a fact sheet that had been prepared for a recent visit from Matthew Pennycook, the housing minister. As the sheet boasts, seven buildings will provide 476 homes, with the first to be handed over this summer.
All this is being delivered, unusually for the sector, by L&Q’s in-house construction firm.
“We love them,” Ms Savage says. “We can control programmes, we control quality. These are our staff. They’re motivated by our vision, our social purpose. They don’t get bonuses to finish early; they’re not trying to dumb down specification at any point.”
Of the homes, 109 will be London affordable rent. Another 55 will be London Living Rent – “there’s a huge demand”, Ms Savage says. Then 170 will be shared ownership,and 142 outright sales, topping out at just under £750,000 for a three-bedroom property.
How many such developments will housing associations be able to continue to build? L&Q is the biggest builder in the sector again this year, completing 2,313 homes, but its starts have dropped by 36%, to 519. This comes after a 70% drop the year before, and amid warnings from across the G15 of a huge cut in starts in London.
Ms Savage says that L&Q has “just one bank account”.
“Just as with our own household finances, if we’re spending money over here, we can’t spend money over there,” she says. And L&Q has many bills, with fire safety remediation and repair of existing homes top of the list. It’s in the midst of a £3bn major works programme.
“I think something has to be done about restoring the financial capacity of the sector, through Decent Homes spending, through money for building safety, money for energy efficiency. I don’t think there’s a single solution. We need lots of things to happen in order to get us back motoring with large-scale developments,” she says.
We were speaking before the Spending Review, in which the government announced a £39bn grant pot. The sector also got 10 years of rent increases and a consultation on rent convergence.
“I know that many development people I spoke to this week said, ‘Oh my goodness, what a day’,” Ms Savage sums up on a call after the review. “People felt really encouraged by what they heard.”
L&Q, like others, will be waiting to hear details of the programme but it was “a great week for affordable housing”, Ms Savage says.
At Prime Point, Ms Savage is keen to showcase the quality of what L&Q is doing when it is able to build. We tour an attractive studio flat which will be among the first handed over this summer. It has underfloor heating (like all homes on the peninsula, supplied by district heating). We step out onto a large private balcony.
When finished, there will be play areas on the development, and it is next to the peninsula’s wedge-shaped Central Park.
Prime Point includes a row of 17 terraced houses, but it also has the tallest building in the area so far, at 30 storeys. L&Q is one of a number of social landlords dealing with many high rises and a significant fire-safety bill. Its last financial report said it had identified 218 buildings requiring remediation, of which 47 were complete and 60 underway. But that has not put Ms Savage off high rise.
She was part of an Inside Housing roundtable where discussion turned to keeping buildings below 18 metres in height to be classed as lower risk by the Building Safety Regulator. It’s still on Ms Savage’s mind during our conversation.
“To me, it seems crazy, because really, with the homeless issues as they are, and with land being a scarce resource, we have a duty to build to the density that a site can take,” she says.
“Some of the architects on the roundtable did say that clients were saying, ‘Let’s try and avoid building safety regulations by going another route, because it will be quicker. It seems very short term to me to be making those decisions.
“I came from a working-class family. All three of us [siblings] went to university. We got our really high-quality public housing, and it was a game changer for us. There’s a desperate need for families like mine to have a quality house,” she adds.
Building in-house
L&Q builds around half its projects through an in-house construction firm, which it set up around seven years ago.
“We were finding quality issues, and so we thought, ‘We’re outsourcing. Let’s cut out the middleman,’” says Vicky Savage.
The team comes in particularly handy when the original builder can’t come back to rectify sites.
Ms Savage adds: “It’s not easy, starting a construction company. It took us a lot longer than we thought [it would] to find our feet with it.
“Culturally, it’s quite different. And also being able to attract the very best staff, because construction workers are always concerned about what’s the next job?”
She worries about the children growing up in temporary accommodation – “spending their whole childhoods in insecure accommodation, here for a couple of months, then there for a couple of months”.
Ms Savage spots two young women in hard hats. Leanne O’Donovan is a site manager at Prime Point and has been at L&Q for six years. Rebecca Belcher, a graduate site manager, joined eight months ago. She studied sports science at university. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do after uni,” Ms Belcher says. But a friend in construction – a female quantity surveyor – suggested she apply to L&Q’s apprenticeships.
“Those young women will be running their own sites one day,” Ms Savage says later.
Skills shortage
The noise around immigration is a concern.
“We rely on non-UK workers to build our projects. If they decide that England is not a welcoming place, that they want to go elsewhere or they can’t stay here, there’ll be a real skills shortage as well,” Ms Savage says.
She points out that, generally, only around 5% of staff on construction sites are women, but the presence of women encourages more women.
“If I can see it, I can be it, and they’ve got the support for each other,” she observes.
“You do find female architects, engineers, landscape architects. In those support industries, we’re doing really well, but it’s those muddy-boots jobs [where you don’t find women]. That’s why I believe in in-school projects,” Ms Savage says. This site is right next to a school, where L&Q has gone into the classrooms to talk about construction and development careers.
Ms Savage’s daughter-in-law is a carpenter on a big construction site (not for L&Q).
“I said to her, ‘How did you become a carpenter?’ And she said, ‘I was always making things. I was just crafting.’ A lot of young girls love crafting and stuff, but then they’re not necessarily told, ‘You would be really good at construction.’”
How did Ms Savage get to her role?
“I was born on the South Kilburn estate [in the London Borough of Brent]. My mum actually had a home birth. Then I grew up in Stonebridge, another big estate in north west London.
“I’ve always had a certain amount of grit and determination. And so, with every job, I’ve always just worked my way through the ranks,” she says.
That includes L&Q, where she started in February 2018 as a regional managing director, before working her way up to the top development job.
Ms Savage did a degree in urban planning, followed by postgraduate studies in housing at the London School of Economics. She then went straight to work for a housing association connected to the learning disability charity Mencap.
“It was such fun. It was just buying single houses where we then did small construction projects to turn them into en-suite rooms. So, very small projects, but it was a great foundation for me. Right since the beginning, it’s always been such a great job.”
She pauses and adds: “Although I would say, and a lot of development people are saying it, we think it’s the hardest time in our career.” This is not least because many landlords have been making redundancies and cutting programmes. There is a risk, she says, of housing associations running down their development capabilities that may slow down delivery on the government’s housebuilding ambitions. It’s a lot quicker to lose those capabilities than rebuild them.
This brings us back to the topic of developing talent, which Ms Savage is passionate about. She set up a mentoring group for women in 2019, when she chaired the G15 development directors group. In that time, it has paired more than 100 women with mentors who are also women. The group also arranges talks and networking meet-ups (I chaired a session in the Peabody offices earlier this year, on motherhood).
“It came about from going to G15 meetings, and seeing I was the only executive lead who was a woman. It’s been like that for years. I thought, we’ve got to do something about this, because at entry level in development departments, you’ve got really good representation of women. They’re not pushing through to become directors, and they’re certainly not pushing through to become executive leads,” says Ms Savage.
As we leave the site, Ms Savage says, “I fear for people from my background. In 10 years’ time, will you be sitting here interviewing them? What can we do about working-class girls?”
In that respect, everything on this site is connected: the housing shortage L&Q hopes to address, the kids in temporary accommodation falling behind in school, programmes to bring people in and build skills, and efforts to support and mentor other women.
Women in Development – a new series
Inside Housing will be running a series of interviews and profiles of women in housing development at all levels across the sector. Sign up to our Best of In-Depth bulletin below to keep up to date on this and other key analysis of the sector.
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