The swathes of land
government acquired for residential development by Homes England offers “huge
opportunities” says the head of the regeneration agency.
Over the last four
years, Homes
England has acquired more than 70 sites from the NHS and also signed a new
memorandum of understanding with the Ministry of Defence and Defence
Infrastructure Organisation.
“The MoD and DIO are
looking to relocate on 90 sites over the next few years,” says Stephen
Kinsella, the chief land and development officer at Homes England. “There will
be huge opportunities.”
As part of the MoD
agreement, Homes England will work as a project partner on an initial seven MoD
sites as the agency becomes more proactive as part of a restructure.
In 2018/19, Homes
England supported the completion of 40,289 new homes and funded enabling works
for around 35,000 homes. Mr Kinsella says more needs to be done to help the
industry meet the government’s target of delivering 300,000 new homes a year.
“Unless we do
something about housing supply and intervening in the market, it’s going to get
worse,” said Mr Kinsella at the Housing Market Intelligence conference in
London.
He added: “We need
to unlock large sites. In certain cases, sites are stalling.
“Burgess Hill [in
West Sussex] is a good example as there was a large amount of housebuilders
there and no chance of them coming together to equalise the infrastructure
problem, so we bought the housebuilders out.”
Homes England is now
directly funding a £63 million package of infrastructure work on the site’s
northern arc, which will deliver 3,500 homes.
AECOM was recently
appointed lead consultant and Glenigan’s construction market intelligence shows
that a £9 million package for a bridge and road is due to be awarded imminently
(Glenigan Project ID: 19062158).
“We’re interested in
talking to people about difficult sites,” added Mr Kinsella. “We don’t want to
dislodge housebuilders; we want to dislodge the hard to tackle pile [of
projects].”
The agency has 600
projects at all stages of the development cycle. This includes a dozen major
strategic sites, such as the Upton Lodge development at Hardingstone near
Northampton. Morris is building the first tranche of a development that will
eventually provide 2,200 new homes (Glenigan Project ID: 18115381).
Mr Kinsella added:
“Our job is to secure a consent, deliver enabling work and get the market onto
the land to deliver new homes.”
Over the next 18
months, Homes England will sell around 180 sites and expects to invest £300
million in infrastructure in 2019.
Glenigan’s
construction market analysis shows that in the 12 months to Q3 2019, Homes
England awarded £232.4 million-worth of construction contracts. The average
size of contracts awarded by Homes England in this period was £15.5 million.
In addition to
funding infrastructure, Homes England will also break up large strategic sites
to help the ever-diminishing number of small-to-medium-sized housebuilders get
a stronger foothold and increase development.
