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Homes England land selling reforms to make bidding faster

The government’s housing delivery agency has given more detail on its plans to change how it sells public land, including a way to speed up the bidding process.

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Picture: Getty
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Homes England has revealed plans to sell public land faster #ukhousing

Phil Collings, national senior land manager at Homes England, revealed the plans while sitting on a panel at Resi Convention 2018.

In response to a question from Inside Housing about the agency’s plans to reform its land selling process, Mr Collings said that Homes England was planning to introduce bid templates, rather than allowing bidders to produce bids in a form of their choosing.


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He told the audience: “What would happen [under the current process] is, on a panel disposal, where there’s a quality aspect to the bid, you’d get 150-page documents, which take a lot of time for a developer to prepare, a lot of time for us to read.

“We thought, there’s got to be a better way. So what we’re looking to do now is introduce bid templates. That way, it’s consistent and when we get bids back we can compare them more easily. The idea is, it takes less time for us to evaluate and it takes less time for the bidders to prepare, so it streamlines both sides.”

These reforms relate to Homes England selling land through its panel of delivery partners. This panel is comprised of 70 organisations, 14 of which are housing associations.

These organisations are Homes England’s preferred developers for building homes on the larger sites of public land in the agency’s portfolio.

Homes England also sells smaller sites to organisations not on its panel, straight to the highest bidder. It also has plans to reform its processes in this area.

Mr Collings said: “Again, we were looking at quite convoluted information that we were asking for from bidders. We’re looking at streamlining that right down, looking at things like taking out overage from those deals.

“We’ve looked at just making them straightforward freehold transactions rather than build and lease agreements and things like that.”

These reforms are set to be rolled out in the autumn.

Homes England plans to sell more than 1,250 hectares of land over the next 12 months, comprising 221 sites.

This land includes former New Town land, coalfield sites, assets inherited from the former regional development agencies and sites acquired from other public landowners.

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