Homes England boss reveals timeline for rent convergence and launch of new AHP

The head of the government’s housing and regeneration agency praised June’s “remarkable” Spending Review settlement, which allocated £39bn to a new AHP over a 10-year delivery period.

“We are looking forward very much to getting the new programme underway. We’re hoping to get the prospectus out to the marketplace in autumn, hopefully September time, and get bidding open and engagement up and running by the end of the calendar year,” he said.

Alongside the Spending Review, the government also announced that it would launch a National Housing Bank. This will be a publicly owned subsidiary of Homes England and will receive £16bn in cash to crowd in private investment and deliver 500,000 new homes.

Inside Housing asked Mr Boylan what new powers Homes England will have under the National Housing Bank that it did not have before.

Mr Boylan replied: “Not only will we have access to significantly more resource to support guarantee, equity and loan, we’ll have it on a much more flexible basis because of the way the government’s choosing to fund it.”

This would allow Homes England to move funding from year to year with “much greater ease”, he said.

He continued: “The bank will have delegations which at the moment are not available to the agency. So, any equity deal that I want to do with anybody has to go not only through the [Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government], it has to go to Treasury for approval… That can take a long time.”

The National Housing Bank, therefore, “should be more flexible, it should be greater in scale, and it should be able to operate faster”.

Asked about the tenure of new homes that will be built under the AHP, Mr Boylan said that social rent would be “front and centre”.

However, he said: “What I don’t think will happen is the government will come forward and say, ‘It is that percentage of social housing’. That won’t happen. There will be a need for it to be nuanced appropriately to meet local needs… but there will be strong support for social housing.”