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NHF launches commission into improving areas in economic decline
The National Housing Federation (NHF) is launching its first commission in more than 10 years investigating how housing associations can help regenerate areas in economic decline.
The Great Places Commission is part of a wider programme of work over the next 18 months that will produce recommendations on how residents, the government, councils and private companies can create better places to live across the country.
The programme seeks to address the fact that the housing crisis is playing out differently across the country. It will initially be focused on parts of the North of England and the Midlands where there are enough homes but which are often in areas of economic decline and lacking transport links or jobs.
The commission’s members, made up of leaders across the sector with direct experience of regeneration, will make their first visit to Liverpool at the end of March.
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The 12-person panel includes:
- Angela Lockwood, chief executive of Northstar
- Ian Wardle, chief executive of Thirteen Group
- Mark Henderson, chief executive of Home Group
- Steve Coffey, chief executive of Liverpool Mutual Homes
- Sinead Butters, chief executive of Aspire Housing and chair of Placeshapers
- Kevin Rodgers, chief executive of WM Housing Group
They will visit thriving and struggling communities in each region across the Midlands and the North and talk to residents, mayors, councillors and academics among others.
From these conversations they will develop recommendations on how to improve an area.
Back in 2015 the Northern Housing Consortium launched its own commission specifically looking at housing challenges in the North.
Ruth Davison, executive director of public impact at the NHF, said the sector’s focus has been on driving up housing delivery, “but lots of houses don’t a great place make”.
She added: “There are loads of places that we own and manage already and towns that we’re invested in and we need to focus on those, too.”
There are places where housing associations operate “which are great places, there are places that are clinging on for dear life, there are places that are not great and places where, frankly, wave after wave of investment appears not to have made the blindest bit of difference”, Ms Davison said.
She added: “Part of the job of the commission is to think about what are the things that will help expedite and smooth the delivery of great places so that people’s life chances are improved and they feel like places where hope thrives, rather than the opposite.”
Ms Davison said housing associations also need to understand “their own economic clout”, as well as that of their stakeholders.
She said: “If you think about somewhere like Merseyside, people talk about Jaguar Land Rover as a really totemic employer. Housing associations employ more people in Merseyside than Jaguar Land Rover but actually even housing associations would be kind of astounded by that fact.
“One of the things I’m really conscious of is the commission going with an enquiring, open mind. I’m from Hartlepool and people might walk around the places that I love in that town and think that they are a bit crummy, truthfully, and ostensibly they might be.
“But they have value to me. And only people who live in communities understand the kind of value that’s there already, the assets that are there already – historical, cultural or whatever.”
