Homes England boss aims to design Affordable Homes Programme by end of summer

He continued: “We will then need to determine what an appropriate tenure mix looks like for the programme overall, then seek to deploy appropriately in locations where the mix needs to be varied. That will be looking at things like shared ownership products, things like social rent and affordable [rent]… in the overall programme.”

Ms Ritchie said Homes England would publish a new strategic plan “towards the end of the summer” in response to the new AHP and the government’s forthcoming long-term housing strategy.

Meanwhile, Mr Boylan addressed developers’ concerns about delays at the Building Safety Regulator, which must approve fire safety plans before high-risk projects can begin.

“I’ve yet to meet a developer who believes that the regulatory regime around building safety, the regulations themselves, are unreasonable,” he said.

“What they’re complaining about is the speed at which decisions are being taken, which in some cases, admittedly, is unacceptably slow.

“This is something that government needs to resolve, and I know that there’s lots of thought being given to how that programme can be accelerated.”

Both Mr Boylan and Ms Ms Ritchie sat on the government’s New Towns Taskforce until they were appointed to their current roles at Homes England. Mr Boylan said the development of each new town would be shared between several different house builders.

“No developer in the country, I think, is of the financial muscle to be able to take on a 10,000-home contract. So it will be a series of phased contracts,” he said.

The chief executive added that new towns could help to scale up modern methods of construction (MMC) by providing a consistent development pipeline for manufacturers.

He said: “Up to now, a number of ventures into MMC have not prospered because we’re trying to introduce a factory-style production mechanism into a wildly cyclical market, and that’s very, very difficult.

“Things like a new towns programme give you a line of sight in terms of development pipeline that could help significantly.”

The leaders are both government housing veterans. In 2008, Mr Boylan helped to set up the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), predecessor to Homes England. Ms Ritchie was previously chief executive of the HCA.

Asked by Inside Housing how the agency has changed since she first worked there, Ms Ritchie said Homes England is a “more complex” organisation than the HCA.

“We weren’t, for example, doing things like building safety. We weren’t doing so much on some of the work we’re doing around direct development.”

The agency has also “gone more national, rather than as regional-focused as we were on HCA”, she said. The leaders are now focusing on “blending the national and the regional to deliver on the ambitions that the government have set out in housing”, Ms Ritchie added.

“The agency is twice the size now that it was in HCA days,” said Mr Boylan. The HCA also “never had to manage a £17bn loan book for Help to Buy, which is a fairly massive undertaking”.

Ms Ritchie said: “Our role is, I think, to see the organisation through the transition to more of a regional model.”

“We’re both deliverers, and I think that’s really important,” she added.

In March, Mr Boylan sat down with Inside Housing to discuss how Homes England will need to evolve as affordable homes programmes are devolved to combined authorities.