How Homes England can support you
Updated 21 October 2024
Applies to England
If you’ve already been to a Homes England event, you’ll have seen just some of the different ways we can help you, and we’ve included links to further information on our key interventions below.
Ultimately, we are here to intervene where needed to accelerate the pace of housebuilding and regeneration. If your project is stalling or you are facing other challenges, please get in touch and explain the issue, it is our job to help find the right solution, bringing together the different tools and products available to us.
Send an email to enquiries@homesengland.gov.uk explaining the challenge you are facing.
Investment and Grants
We have a number of key funds, including:
- Affordable Homes Programme provides grant funding to affordable housing providers to provide social and affordable rented, supported accommodation and shared ownership homes.
- Levelling Up Home Building Fund provides development loans to small and medium housebuilders struggling to access finance from traditional routes. Funding from the Levelling Up Home Building Fund can also be deployed to support more complex funding arrangements, such as balance sheet loans to regional housebuilders, equity investment in joint ventures and lending alliances with banks or other funders.
- The Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land fund is one of our most flexible funds, with the primary objective of bringing forward strategic sites and housing-led opportunities that will support economic growth and long-term housing supply.
- Cladding Safety Scheme provides funding to remediate buildings in England that are between 11 and 18 metres with dangerous cladding.
Land
If you’re looking for a site to develop, whether for residential or commercial purposes – take a look at our Land Hub, an interactive map that features sites we intend to sell within the next 6 months. This guide provides more information on how we sell land for housing-led developments.
We can also acquire and develop land that requires complex and significant investment prior to commercial development. For more information on this, get in touch via enquiries@homesengland.gov.uk.
Place-based and partnership working
Homes England has a range of partnerships and equity investments in place with delivery partners and investors to support increased delivery across the sector. One of our great successes in recent years has been our ability to embrace the strengths of the residential real estate sector to help us deliver. As part of our new Strategic Plan, we are extending this to the commercial real estate sector and are encouraging those partners to work with on to transform places into vibrant communities. Examples of our partnership work to date include the English Cities Fund; the Greener Homes Alliance; and the Housing Growth Partnership.
Our five-year strategic plan has a clear focus on place, and while we’ll continue to help deliver the high quality, affordable homes people need, we will also work with partners to support the creation, development, and continued wellbeing of communities in England.
When it comes to place-making, our role is to support and enable local authorities and other stakeholders to achieve their vision for their area. We will work with local leaders to understand their housing and regeneration priorities and challenges, and we will use our capacity and capability to coordinate practical packages of support.
While we’ll prioritise our most intense efforts on transformative projects that will have a catalytic effect on wellbeing and prosperity, where there is strong local leadership and a clear vision and opportunity for delivery, we will continue to offer broad support across England through our wider offers and interventions.
Supporting best practice
Across all our funds and interventions, we will use our position and influence to promote, encourage and develop best practice in the industry. As our strategic plan outlines, we are committed to:
- promoting sustainable practices and good design
- minimising the environmental impact of development, and maximising its positive contribution
- supporting the use of modern methods of construction
- raising building safety standards and expectations
Our Local Government Capacity Centre develops accessible offers for local government and their partners to increase capacity and skills. This includes the learning programmes we run for housing and regeneration professionals in local government which run every six months, keep an eye on our social channels for details of our next Winter Learning Programme.
We are also undertaking a comprehensive programme of research aimed at strengthening our approach to economic appraisal and the measurement of social value. We have now published the first paper as part of this research programme, which measures the placemaking impacts of housing-led regeneration.