Liverpool mayor sets out plans for new development corporation, £2bn investment and more SAHP cash

LCRCA has a 10-year plan to grow the economy by £10bn, and a £2bn development pipeline expected to deliver 64,000 homes.

The mayor has also been allocated £700m under the new Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP), as part of Homes England’s move to give mayoral authorities the ability to shape the strategic direction of housing development in their area.

Mr Rotheram told Inside Housing that this is the minimum allocation from the government, and LCRCA will be looking to get more grant funding.

He said: “That’s the least we’ll get. What I’ve been speaking with the secretary of state about is ‘what happens if we need more?’

“They’d love us to have more, because it means that we’ve delivered all the homes, and they need that target locally.”

LCRCA has a target to deliver 6,638 homes a year, according to the mayor.

“We want to go far beyond that, but still that would be 50% more than we’ve ever previously delivered. So it’s a stretching target for housing, but we know the demand is there,” Mr Rotheram said.

He explained how LCRCA is working with Homes England on a spatial development strategy (SDS), which is a high-level plan setting out where homes, jobs and transport should go over a period of at least 20 years.

The region has been working on an SDS for many years, and hopes to have it in place “at some stage later this year” or “certainly early next year”, Mr Rotheram said.

He said this would make Liverpool City Region the first in the country to have such a strategy in place.

The mayor also said he wants to boost council housebuilding in the region by exploring whether the combined authority can “get round some of the complexities of the Housing Revenue Accounts [HRAs] that were closed down” by local authorities in the past.

Mr Rotheram has previously suggested that the combined authority could set up its own HRA, but told Inside Housing this week that he is still in discussions with the government about this.

He said: “As you can imagine, these things are incredibly complex. I didn’t fully appreciate just how complex they are because of the contingent liabilities that are within those other six accounts.

“So we don’t want to do anything that would open up the possibility of local authorities having to find any money or anything like that.”

But the government has said it would “be interested in helping” the combined authority with this, according to Mr Rotheram.

“So when we do come up with firmer proposals, we’ll try to see whether we can get the secretary of state to back us, given especially that [he] was the one that announced that we weren’t getting a new town... we weren’t too pleased about that,” he said.

On this sense of disappointment, the mayor continued: “I think there’s an understanding that we’ve been let down in the past, and that all of our local authorities are saying ‘enough is enough’, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s our government or anybody else’s, we’re not going to be passed by again, as we have done by previous governments – of all persuasions, by the way.”

Mr Rotheram also emphasised the importance of mixed-tenure development, saying social landlords in the region have “been really open to it”.

On the new mayoral development corporation, the mayor said it will help provide more speed and have land assembly and compulsory purchase powers.

“It gives confidence, and that’s one of the main things, really, that if it’s underwritten by ourselves and by government, then I think it’ll fly, because people will be certain that the thing’s going to be finished and that they’ll get returns on their investment,” he added.

Mr Rotheram told Inside Housing that housing secretary Steve Reed has agreed to the plans, and that Liverpool City Region is hoping to halve the usual lead time for setting up development corporations.

He said: “Normally it takes about 18 months, two years. We think we’re going to have it done by party conference this year, which would be extraordinary if we can achieve that, but you’ve got to have those really stretching ambitions.”