60% of Affordable Homes Programme top-ups going to social rent, Homes England boss says

In the past six months, the government ploughed an extra £850m into the 2021-26 AHP. Then, in March, it unveiled an additional £2bn top-up to act as a bridge between the current AHP and a future grant programme to be announced alongside the Spending Review in June.

Mr Boylan continued: “There’s a very clear emphasis in government on the importance of genuinely affordable housing and social rent.

“We have got a system at the moment that is producing what we’re describing as affordable homes that, in many places, for many reasons, are simply not affordable for large numbers of people. So we have to address that issue, come hell or high water.”

Mr Boylan added that he was not wedded to specific tenure targets, because different tenures were required in different parts of England.

“We need to do things that are appropriate to the needs of those places,” he explained.

The chief executive also quashed recent press speculation that Homes England could be folded into the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

“The ministerial response I’ve had to that was extremely strong, extremely clear, that that is not the case,” he said.

“There is a role Homes England needs to play, particularly now in the government’s priority around the delivery of housing targets. So we are determined to be fixed on that, and we will work with the mayors in order to achieve that.”

He explained that Homes England was looking to strengthen its strategic place partnerships with mayoral combined authorities to move “away from a focus on product to much more of a focus on project and place”.

Finally, Mr Boylan revealed that he was pushing the Treasury for more flexibility in the way Homes England can deploy grant funding.

“While I’m not going to speculate on quantum in the Spending Review, one of the things I can say with confidence is that our submission to [the] Treasury will be for the maximum level of flexibility in terms of our ability to deploy grant, loan, equity, financial transaction, whatever it might be,” he said.

Last month, Inside Housing interviewed Mr Boylan about how and why the agency needs to evolve and what it was like to be called back to lead the organisation he helped to found back in 2008.