Inside Housing tours the sites where the new Church Housing Association wants to build

This project at St Michael’s is small – but the potential for building on Church of England land is huge. Between the Church Commissioners and 42 diocese, the church owns roughly 200,000 acres of land. Church Housing Association was set up by Gloucester diocese, and it is working on 40 projects, with a potential pipeline of 1,200 homes.

Is there any kind of proselytising element to this project? Ms Evans says not. “The church just wants to do housing in a Christian way. But not religious housing.” The Church’s aims are to make best use of its assets to bring a benefit to the community, she says.

Next stop on the tour is a scrap of “glebe land” at the back of the parsonage of Bishop Latimer. Glebe land is meant to support the parish priest. “I think it was originally used for the vicar to graze his horse,” says Mr Fraser. “It was community allotments for a bit of time.” Now it’s scrappy vegetation with a layer of rubbish on top.

The church is about to go to planning to build 17 homes here, mostly three and four-bedroom houses, at a cost of about £4.4m. Nine of the homes would be built on the glebe land, and the association is hoping to be able to purchase some neglected land next door, which is the site of an illegal house in multiple occupation (HMO) that has been shut down by the courts.

The quaint parsonage provides offices for the community group Newbigin Community Trust, which runs three community hubs in the area. It provides playgroups for kids with special educational needs, holiday clubs in the park and blacksmithing courses. On Mondays and Thursdays, 80 kids turn up for roller-skating sessions.

“The secret sauce that we hope we can add to the mix here is that we’ve got groups on the ground that we can link with, which hopefully will amplify the impact of the housing,” Mr Fraser says.

Benefits Street

This site backs onto James Turner Street – the location of the controversial Benefits Street documentary that aired in 2014, where 95% of residents did not work. Eleven years later, many of the properties on the street have been turned into HMOs – some illegally.

Official statistics from Birmingham City Council in May put the number of known HMOs here in the Soho and Jewellery Quarter ward at 285, but the figure is likely much higher.

The homes on James Turner Street were originally owned by housing associations, then sold off and bought largely by private landlords. The Daily Mail went to interview residents 10 years after the programme aired and reported that life has “got worse” on the street.

“What I’d really like to do is start buying ‘Benefits Street’ properties... one here, one there, and then we own the lot,” says Ms Evans.

“There’s a promise to that community,” she adds. “If we start buying a couple of houses a year on ‘Benefits Street’, then we can really make that area different.”

More immediately, Newbigin Community Trust is enthusiastic about the idea of homes being built on the glebe land next door, which could bring much-needed affordable – and decent – housing to the area. Chief executive Megan Tucker says that the families that come to Newbigin are often living in overcrowded HMOs. There is poverty, insecurity, and lots of people being housed here temporarily as asylum seekers or after coming out of prison.

“I know a family that was placed on Beaton Road, and when they turned up, mum and two girls, there was still vomit in the bed from the previous occupant. And they were just landed there. But then they got a call about two years later saying, ‘We’re coming to pick you up tomorrow, have everything ready,’” Ms Tucker says. She estimates that “100%” of people who come to the hub have a housing issue of some kind.

“If we start buying a couple of houses a year on Benefits Street, then we can really make that area different”

We go and visit one of the Newbigin hubs, where people of all ages are chatting and doing crafts. Youth worker Dan used to work in the local school. “We had so many children coming in that were tired. Their clothes obviously weren’t clean because there was nowhere to wash them, and they were hungry,” he says. “It’s heartbreaking to be honest. And if we could just have some more housing around here…” he tails off.

But for the new Church Housing Association, it’s not so simple to start building homes that would provide better housing for this community. One problem is finance. Inside Housing has tagged along on this tour, but it was actually organised for Adam Ruffinato, head of structured finance at Charity Bank. He’s one of the financiers the church is talking to about some kind of bridging finance.

“If people like Adam will lend me the money…” says Ms Evans.

Mr Fraser adds: “The issue that the housing association has got at the moment is, although it’s got excellent leadership and the church has got a good covenant, the reality is we haven’t got a whole load of assets we can borrow against.”

The association has started buying up Section 106 homes – seven so far – to give it some assets. Ms Ireland explains: “The church is going to do some of those to begin with, to make sure we’ve got some stock while we’re waiting for the land-led stuff to come through.”

The Gloucester diocese has put in a £1.7m loan to help the association buy its first homes, as well as a £600,000 grant to get it started. The Oak Foundation has also awarded it a £200,000 grant to build staff capacity. “I think we need to prove ourselves in the church,” Ms Evans says, when I ask if the church couldn’t provide more funding. “I think we can get Newbigin off the ground and some of the other [projects], and we’ll get there.”

The first three residents of the new association were due to move in before the end of this year. They will be moving into some of the Section 106 homes, which come from a Bromford Flagship project with Taylor Wimpey. “Bromford will be managing the units until such time as we build up a portfolio,” Ms Evans says. She hopes that within two years the association will “have sufficient stock to start managing our own homes”.

For our next stop, we go a few minutes’ drive away, to Soho Road in Handsworth. A few weeks after our visit, this area made the news because of Robert Jenrick’s controversial comments that it is “one of the worst-integrated places” he had ever been to, and that he’d spent 90 minutes there and not seen “another white face”.

On our visit, the area is visibly blighted with heavy traffic and derelict buildings. But one section of the road has been transformed by the local Sikh community. A colourful and pristine gurdwara stands out from its surroundings.

Next door is the Nishkam Centre, built by the Sikh community to offer Citizens’ Advice-style services to the general public. Ninety per cent of the people using the service are not from the Sikh community, according to Nishkam’s neighbourhood forum lead, Shuranjeet Singh, who is showing us around. Later, in a post on LinkedIn, Mr Singh wrote: “It goes without saying that Robert Jenrick doesn’t understand Handsworth, our communities or our amazing city of Birmingham.”

This section of the road has been transformed by the community that came here from the 1970s onwards – without public funding. Now, Church Housing Association is hoping to partner with Nishkam and the council on a 50 to 60-home project in the area.

“One section of the road has been transformed by the local Sikh community. A colourful and pristine gurdwara stands out from its surroundings”

“We’re trying to develop a supportive environment where older people can live,” Mr Singh explains. “And there’s a pilot project that has been delivered just behind those shops over there, where we’ve got five self-contained apartments in what used to be a very badly run HMO, where you’ve got five elderly women, all of whom are widows, living in that accommodation.

“The idea is to build that type of provision to ensure that elderly folks are able to live close to where they want, and be able to access the services that they’ve contributed to, that they’ve built over the last 50 years. And then also open up that housing stock for potential other use, so that we can ensure that people who are in families, who are on the temporary accommodation list, can get the housing they need and also deserve.”

Council collaboration

We get to the last stop of the tour in Newton, where we file into St George’s, another 1970s church. This church backs onto land owned by Birmingham City Council, and Church Housing Association is hoping to partner with the council to build one of its largest projects here.

Naomi Morris, the council’s director of strategy, estate regeneration and regulatory compliance, who has met us for the last stop on our tour, is straightforward about the problem. Until recently, the council – which is also the largest council landlord in England – was building substantial numbers of homes. But in 2023, it nearly went bust. And it is facing the same quandary as much of the sector: invest in improving its existing homes, or build more.

So to get homes built, it is turning to partnerships with other organisations – and this is where the new Church Housing Association is hoping to come in.

Some of the funding for this is likely to come from Right to Buy receipts. Last year, the government slashed the Right to Buy discount available to tenants. Ms Morris says: “As much as you lose rental income from those properties that the influx of applications come through, you also have capital receipts that could help support partnerships. And we got 6,000 Right to Buy applications by the November deadline.”

Could some of that be redirected to partnership projects with Church Housing Association? Perhaps. “We reckon we can get over 100 units in that space,” says Mr Fraser, gesturing to the patchwork of green land and mid-century properties.

For a small association only a few months old, Church Housing Association has big ambitions. “We know that not all of those are going to be built, but if we started off with 50, we probably end up with 10. So, you need to cast your net big,” says Daniel Mayes, from the Church Development Agency, which supports the church to develop land and is effectively working as the development team for the new association.

“I think what we’ve got is a load of possibility,” says Ms Evans.

“And people who are prepared to work with us to figure out what’s possible, rather than just tell us what isn’t possible,” adds Mr Hughes.