A ten-year plan for community-led housing

Dr Tom Archer argued here in May last year that we need a more diverse and competitive housebuilding industry, including more community-led housing, if the government is to hit its housing targets. The 10-year plan must make diversification a key objective.

Labour ministers have repeatedly called for a great diversity in the housebuilding industry since coming to office in July. They join a long line of ministers saying this, going back well over a decade, with the previous government even declaring the housing market broken in a white paper in 2017. But the market has only become more concentrated and broken over that period. Labour’s long-term housing strategy needs to move beyond rhetoric to reforms that get to the root of the problem.

One aspect of market diversity missing from the UK is self-commissioned homes – those built or commissioned by individuals, families or community groups. The Bacon Review noted in 2021 that these approaches account for around 4 in 10 new homes internationally, but fewer than 1 in 10 in the UK. Community projects are even more acutely underrepresented within this market sector – a mainstream approach to social housing provision in many European countries, it accounts for just 170,000 homes in the UK, or 0.7% of the housing stock.

Why so small?

As the Bacon Review put it, ‘our housing delivery system has become increasingly hard-wired in favour of one particular model of limited appeal’.

Part of the answer is cultural. Our housing system is built around paternalism and speculation. Increasingly large top-down organisations build homes for people in need, who are assumed to be incapable of playing any meaningful part in decision-making, and for consumers who will buy the same lowest-common-denominator pattern book product. You rarely hear mention of co-operative approaches. Policymakers and industry professionals tend to assume – against the evidence – that ‘self build’ means Grand Designs and ‘community’ means scrappy, slow and expensive. But look internationally and they are completely normal, integrated into the way that market, affordable, and social housing is built and managed.

At a time when public trust in institutions is so low, is it wise for those institutions and the government to write the public off as incapable blockers? Polling by Grosvenor found that just 2% of the public trust developers and 7% trust local planning authorities to make the right decisions for their neighbourhoods. Doubling down on the same broken system is a surefire way to stoke populism.

With a record number of Co-operative Party MPs in Parliament, and in key ministerial posts, there is a real opportunity to challenge this culture and to change the system, to adopt cooperative models that build trust and pride and cohesive communities, as well as housing units.

I have been working with counterparts in the UK Cohousing Network and the Confederation of Co-operative Housing, and a wider network of communities and professionals, to feed into the ministry’s work on its long-term housing plan.

We have a long shopping list of ideas connected to the current Government’s policy programme. Some have excited activists, such as implementing a Community Right to Buy that encompasses housing and regeneration.

But at the heart of our proposals is something more akin to an industrial strategy.

If you look at housing coops in Switzerland or cohousing in Denmark you mostly do not see plucky groups of people banding together to become amateur developers, using complex community rights to build on marginal sites. You see a mature market of cooperative developers and enablers working in partnership with the public and private sector. Sometimes they start with a site and build the community around the new homes. Sometimes communities commission their homes from suppliers that come with all the required skills, access to finance and industry relationships to codesign and build them.

We had some of this when the government last supported housing coops in the 1970s and tenant management organisations in the 1990s. There is a small marketplace of these enablers and developers today. But they have struggled with constant policy churn and tokenistic support, while billions were ploughed into volume housebuilders and the largest housing associations via grant funding and Help to Buy schemes.

Our discussions with the government are inspired by the approach set out in its emerging industrial strategy.

The government needs to engage in a sustained collaboration with the community sector, providing a clear direction for growth with less policy churn and stable policy decisions. This means fixing the planning system so that it is less expensive, slow and risky for SMEs, without watering down standards. It means redesigning grant and investment funds in Homes England and the Greater London Authority so they improve access to suitable and affordable finance, including flexible grants for social and affordable housing. It means using opportunities like new towns and public land to create opportunities for community-led housing.

The government also needs to catalyse activity that otherwise would not happen, and build institutional capacity and structures. This means investing in our growth lab to support the development of more co-operative developers and enablers, and using tools like financial guarantees to bring private capital into a fledgling market. It means incentivising or requiring the large housing associations to partner with and support community-led projects as a condition of funding, extending successful partnership models that are currently very concentrated in the rural South West.

The 10-year housing strategy also needs to recognise that the problems, and the barriers to the solutions, are very different in Cornwall, Bristol, Liverpool and Cambridgeshire. Community-led housing has often struggled when developing locally-appropriate solutions that fall foul of Homes England funding rules, or Treasury metrics on value for money. Policy needs to follow local needs, not the other way around.

A ten-year industrial strategy could transform the agency and power of communities in England. It could give real hope to millions that they can meaningfully shape and control house building and management. Make them builders not blockers, partners not consultees, actively engaged in our national renewal.