Test for Homes England is quicker distribution and devolution of new AHP cash

He said: “It needs to be deployed with the kind of essence and ethos of devolution at the heart of it.”

Mr Stannard explained that the council’s balance sheets had to do a lot of “heavy lifting” to bring land forward. At the same time as the expensive intervention of land assembly and [building] remediation, this was “casting a shadow over our balance sheets”, he said.

He added: “We in local government are getting close to the top of our ability to take on additional capital risk when you combine that with revenue constraints.

“So we have to have a partnership approach that brings an interventionist public sector – Homes England, national agencies, the private sector and [registered providers] – to the table. This is really helping us to break the back of that viability conundrum.”

In the Spending Review, the government signalled that it will shift to a place-based approach. This includes a review of its Green Book rules to allow the Treasury to prioritise projects outside London and South East England.

Kate Josephs, chief executive of Sheffield City Council, said: “So, I think, in both Manchester and Sheffield, and in other places where we’ve needed to access that public funding to unlock private investment in our places and regeneration projects, in our affordable housing schemes, it’s been an absolute pain.

“It’s taken a huge amount of time to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop. It’s not pacey. It’s very centrally controlled. The difference here is that now that [responsibility] is with Homes England.

“The test for that organisation, and for us, should be that we should be able to unlock that money much more quickly in order to enable a sense of pace and momentum, which then, I think, does have a materially positive impact on the sense of confidence in the system, and on viability itself.”

Ms Josephs discussed how to deliver in a city where a third of it is surrounded by the Peak District National Park, while some old industrial areas are under-occupied. A longer-term approach taking in the entire region would deliver new towns and neighbourhoods that have a sense of identity, she said.

She added: “We’ve been operating on a year-to-year, hand-to-mouth approach, where you are having to make a case sometimes for incredibly precise and specific small sites, when actually what we want to be doing is looking at the whole long-term picture.”

Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, said the AHP cash was an opportunity to unlock capability in the private sector.

She said: “The money is there in the private sector to invest. It’s key to be part of delivering the affordable and social housing that we need as part of the 1.5 [million] in total. 

“That’s where you have to rely on regional and local government. It’s not the national government’s job to figure out how to make partnerships work on the ground in a region. So I hope that the framework we’re now going to have is one in which that’s allowed to happen: national government stands back and lets local partners get on.”