The pressure is on: Amy Rees on how she will deliver Homes England’s new five-year strategy

The chief executive calls from one of Homes England’s offices, with the Teams background blurred and periodically switching off her camera to deal with a dodgy internet connection. 

Ms Rees began her public sector career as a prison officer at His Majesty’s Prison Lewes in 2001. She was made governor of Brixton Prison in 2008, before rising the ranks to become chief executive of HM Prison and Probation Service in 2022. Earlier this year, she served as interim permanent secretary at the Ministry of Justice, one of Whitehall’s largest departments, before being appointed to Homes England.

As Kate Henderson, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, put it when Ms Rees was appointed, she has a “wealth of leadership experience”. But some in the sector may be left wondering: why housing? To this, Ms Rees says that her long career in the prison sector highlighted that a safe home is “literally the foundation of society”. 

“I learned very early on in my career that you couldn’t do anything with offenders – I mean help them with probation and their reoffending and basic things like help them with their medical needs – unless they had a home,” she explains.

The housing and justice sectors share some values as both are “mission-driven” with a “public service ethos”, Ms Rees says. But she emphasises one important distinction: the government’s attitude. “I think that the government is really in delivery mode on housing, and that does feel a bit different,” she says. She points to the government’s target to deliver 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament, telling any sceptics that “having a very ambitious, very clear delivery target is good news if you work in this industry. It genuinely is”. 

Three months into her new role, the chief executive describes it as a “real joy to be in a part of government where people are very wired in and clear on delivery”. She has also been struck by the “maturity of the relationship” between the government and housing sector, from housing associations to construction firms. “In my experience, that doesn’t exist everywhere – it’s a proper, mature conversation,” she adds.

What is Homes England hoping to achieve?

The agency has set out six objectives to be achieved between 2025 and 2030, and said its strategic plan responds to the sector’s consistent calls for “more tailored support, more flexibility, longer-term funding and the ability to support delivery at scale”. The objectives include significantly increasing new housing supply, with a focus on social and affordable housing, unlocking new institutional investment, improving local collaboration with its new regional model, supporting improved design and sustainability, and ensuring homes are safe and secure.

Homes England’s “early analysis” suggests that it will be able to support the delivery of 280,000 new homes over the next five years of the plan, while also unlocking land capable of supporting almost 400,000 homes. 

“I learned very early on in my career that you couldn’t do anything with offenders – I mean help them with probation and their reoffending – unless they had a home”

Ms Rees admits that 280,000 is an “ambitious target”. But she is confident that if Homes England reaches this figure, it will have “exceeded” what it needs to contribute to the government’s 1.5 million new homes pledge. “That does fluctuate a bit and it depends, as you can imagine, on the stack of other numbers. But what I can tell you confidently is that if we achieve those numbers, we’ll have done our bit of the 1.5 million plan,” she tells Inside Housing. 

How many of those 280,000 homes would be for social rent, or other affordable tenures? Ms Rees will not be drawn on our call to speculate, saying we need to wait for bidding to open for the new Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) in February. “We will do some more work on that because we’re just beginning to see the pipeline, but I can tell you it will be the majority, so a big chunk of that will come from social and affordable housing.”

Leveraging new investment

Under its objective to deliver the “biggest increase in social and affordable housing in a generation”, Homes England has highlighted the importance of bringing in new investment to the sector, alongside £27bn of grant funding via the SAHP. 

Ms Rees recognises that “there will never be enough grant” to achieve this. This leads our conversation to the new National Housing Bank, which will launch in April with £16bn of funding. The bank has the potential to unlock over £50bn of additional private capital and will “lead a step change” in the way projects are financed, according to Homes England. 

“We’ve got access to up to £46bn, which is a really good sum of money when you add up all the different bits – the bank and the NHDF [National Housing Delivery Fund] etc – but we know that the grant element of that will never be quite enough and that is the point of the bank,” Ms Rees says. Drawing on the “full range of products out there” will be crucial for closing viability gaps, she adds.

“What we’re trying to say is, ‘Look, we’re going to have to go for financial models where you layer up the money.’ There might be some grant at the bottom of it, but then we need to look at low-interest loans, guarantees, equities – the full range of what the bank will offer to try and stack up the deal,” she explains.

She encourages housing providers to “try and be more innovative” in their financing, working closely with Homes England, which she stresses is “not a commercial high street bank”. “We should have a look at their debt and assets that they have already [and see] what can we do with that because most of them are quite asset-rich.”

Simon Century, chief investment officer at Homes England, recently said the bank’s £16bn will be split roughly into thirds between equity, debt and guarantees.

The investment roadmap also revealed that the agency is exploring the development of an affordable housing acquisition guarantee. This would establish new ownership vehicles to buy and operate existing stock and Section 106 homes for tenures including shared ownership, general needs and temporary accommodation.

Moving away from the ‘short-term cycle’ of government funding

The National Housing Bank is not just about cash, Ms Rees notes, stating that it will give Homes England “much more autonomy” to be “responsive” and complete transactions “much more quickly”.

“The bank is there not just for the bank’s sake, but so that we can have more autonomy, we can make delivery decisions, not political ones, and so that we can do it much more responsively without going back through Treasury, which should just allow us to be quicker.” 

In fact, the bank – which was announced during the Spending Review in the summer – is one of the reasons why Ms Rees decided to join the housing sector after so many years working on prison and wider justice policy. “One of the things that drew me, particularly at this time, was the National Housing Bank. And that’s because I have been crying out all through my career to think about how we could do it differently, and the kind of very short-term cycle of government money just doesn’t really work for large-scale infrastructure projects.”

The bank is publicly owned and designated as a public financial institution (PuFin), as is the National Wealth Fund. Ms Rees describes the bank as a “genuinely once-in-a-generation opportunity” to think about how to “deliver some very important social services, and fabric of society infrastructure projects differently”. Being a part of this “PuFin community” will also help with regeneration and place-making, Ms Rees says, since these projects are “not just about housing”.

“You need economic growth, you need infrastructure investment – and that’s why working alongside partners like the National Wealth Fund is going to be so important to do that,” she adds.

Diversifying the sector 

In a recent interview with Inside Housing, Shahi Islam, director of affordable housing at Homes England, suggested there may be further changes to the SAHP with regards to for-profit housing providers accessing the scheme, ahead of bidding opening in February. He said the agency is looking at “the playing field” between for-profit and not-for-profit providers and that any changes to Homes England’s funding conditions would be made through its capital funding guidance.

A report by Savills, published this year, found that for-profit registered providers own an estimated 43,100 homes and this could rise to more than 150,000 by 2030. In response to the rise of for-profits, the National Housing Federation told a parliamentary select committee in January that the sector should “strongly oppose” the “wholesale privatisation of housing association homes”. 

“One of the things that drew me, particularly at this time, was the National Housing Bank. And that’s because I have been crying out all through my career to think about how we could do it differently”

Ms Rees seems to take a less adversarial view. She says Homes England will “do business and try and make it work for anyone who wants to provide high-quality social homes”. “We don’t want to make a distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit,” she adds. 

The agency will, however, ensure there are “safeguards” in how public money is spent and that the money it puts into social housing stays in social housing. Ms Rees continues: “But other than that, if you want to do business with us, our doors are absolutely open. And we see the direction of travel being that more and more people will need to diversify. We see different people coming into the sectors. We see in social housing a lot of people thinking about their debt, how they restructure their debt etc, all of which we’re very happy to help with and have conversations [about].”

‘Unapologetic’ about focus on delivery

When asked about the biggest takeaways of the five-year plan, Ms Rees says she is “really, genuinely passionate about this”. She wants to impress on social landlords that this is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” – the agency has “huge amounts” of government money to deploy, as well as “flexibility” over 10 years. It is on track to open up to SAHP bids in February and to begin deploying money pretty soon after April. 

This means the pressure is on, it seems. “We have got money, the flexibility that we asked for – we’ve really got to deliver now to make a step change in this,” she says.

The agency’s investment roadmap promises to “relentlessly focus on” maximising the delivery of new homes now, writing that it will back “shovel-ready schemes in the short term”. The roadmap says the next few years will therefore see Homes England “consistently make hard choices” about the types of schemes it supports.

Ms Rees says the agency is “unapologetic about that”, admitting that she is “almost evangelical” about the fact that the sector now has the right products, governance and people in place, as well as the money, to really deliver. 

She is careful, however, to point out that Homes England is still committed to long-term investment and is “absolutely wired into” the regeneration mission. “Don’t take from this… that we’re never going to do anything long term. We are because we know that the housing of tomorrow comes from long-term investment.

“But we are saying to people, ‘You will have to have delivery in the next four years,’ even if it’s a longer-term investment and it goes on. We need some delivery in the next four years because we’ve got these targets for good reason.”

“We have got money, the flexibility that we asked for – we’ve really got to deliver now to make a step change in this”

This laser-focus on delivery by the end of this parliament also means that some providers will not be ready to work in partnership with Homes England, the chief executive admits. “They need to have things in place in their own organisations in order to be ready for us. And we are really keen to work with those who are ready and able to get on with delivery quickly. That won’t be everyone because we can’t spread ourselves that thin and not everyone is ready.” 

As an example, Ms Rees says the agency will be looking at whether an area has a local plan in place, to which all partners are signed up.

But she also stresses that “willingness” from the sector is a big part of making this a success. “I wouldn’t underestimate attitude – the people who really want to work with us in partnership, it makes a massive difference,” Ms Rees says.

This does not mean the market is easy, however, and the chief executive recognises that “viability gaps are real at the moment”. “So that’s why, actually, proper partnership working and willingness to do this is really important because we will need to be creative… and people have to be willing and trusting us to do that.”

Ahead of the 10-year SAHP opening and the launch of the National Housing Bank, Ms Rees has taken the reins of Homes England at a busy time. In her own words, the agency is “in the best position it’s been for a long, long time”. Despite a tough market, she believes the five-year strategic plan sets out the ingredients needed to meet the government’s stretching delivery targets. 

It seems that Ms Rees’ message to the sector is simple: get going.