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Why managing agents must finally be regulated

Nearly three and a half million British households live in their leasehold flats, managed under a service charge arrangement with a managing agent.

Managing agents go by many names: property managers, building managers, block managers, estate managers, but they all – by and large – do a similar job. They manage multi-occupancy buildings – low rise and high-rise blocks of flats – or estates. Their duties include everything from building maintenance to keeping shared areas and spaces clean and tidy. In more recent years, since the Grenfell Tower tragedy, they have also taken on an increasingly complex set of tasks around building safety. As it stands right now, however, anyone could set themselves up as a managing agent – no qualifications, no experience, no oversight.

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Residents are at the coalface of dealing with their managing agents. They pay a service charge so that day-to-day work on their buildings gets addressed in a timely manner (think everything from cleaning the hallways to fixing the roof to dealing with complex building fire and safety compliance issues).

Over the last few years there has been growing disquiet from leaseholders, that I and my colleagues have witnessed through our parliamentary inboxes, with concerns about managing agents – mainly relating to increased service charges, but also about service failures and delays, and value for money.

Whilst many managing agents operate in the right and proper way, sadly, there are still far too many who do not.

And whilst many do operate in a good way – supported with best practice and training by organisations like The Property Institute (the managing agent sector’s professional body) – the actions of the rogue and unscrupulous managing agents, as well as those who need to urgently pull their socks up and do a better job, are overtly impacting the reputation of the wider industry. There is a cross-party consensus that we need to root out the bad apples, but the question is, how?

Why statutory regulation is now unavoidable

I find it chilling that you, me, or anyone else could set up as a managing agent tomorrow. 

Multi-occupancy buildings are getting ever-more complex, and managing agents are taking on gravely serious responsibilities – at its most acute; the lives, welfare and safety of those people who live within the buildings they manage.

That’s why I’m pushing for the statutory regulation of managing agents and an Independent Regulator of Managing Agents through my Private Member’s Bill. This would mean that these individuals and companies must be trained, competent, qualified and registered to be able to operate – all things that stakeholders, including the profession itself, have been campaigning on for many years. Indeed, my colleagues in the Labour for Leaseholders group have rightly been holding the sector’s feet to the fire to improve the way it delivers for residents. And this Private Member’s Bill is to complement – not take away from – the continuing work that the Government are doing to make good on Labour’s promise of sweeping leasehold reform prior to the last General Election, through the Draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill which is currently working its way through parliament.

Of course, one remedy of regulation will be to see off the poor practice that blights some leaseholders, but it also goes far beyond that- to the very core of ensuring the safety and wellbeing of those that live in these buildings.

Regulation will have a small cost, but that is a price worth paying and after all, the costs of failure are often even higher – legal fees, wasted time pursuing redress and extortionate fees on failed services.

Whilst regulation may not currently be in vogue, due to the necessity to secure growth urgently – it’s not hard to argue that the leaseholder product has been damaged commercially by the failure of the sector of managing agents. A focused regulator can provide much needed reassurance to consumers, a boost to sales and, ultimately, housebuilding as a result. 

We regulate airlines, financial markets, dentists, and food hygiene standards – so why would we not want to regulate a sector that is about the safety of where millions of our friends, family and neighbours call home?

If you’re interested in supporting my Private Member’s Bill, why not take a moment to write to your local MP to give your views? You can find your MP’s contact details here.

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England’s Leasehold Reforms Risk Harming Community Land Trusts

Leasehold is the legal mechanism that makes the Community Land Trust model work. Without an exemption for CLTs, the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill risks unintentionally undermining one of the few proven models for permanently affordable, community-controlled land and housing.

In the slow march to end feudal property arrangements since 2017, community-led and cooperative models have been largely overlooked. That’s a mistake, as these models could better achieve some of the Government’s aims.

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Governments have been consulting and legislating on this since at least 2017. The Law Commission undertook a major study on leasehold from 2018 to 2020, and the Competition and Markets Authority looked at private estate management in 2023 and 2024.

The reform aims are right – to ban “feudal” arrangements in which homeowners are subject to unaccountable gouging by third-party landlords and managing agents.

But the Government’s solutions are narrow.

In its draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, the Government wants to replace leasehold with commonhold for blocks of flats. Separate consultations propose moving to resident management companies (RMCs) for estates. Both hand ownership and control back to homeowners. It sounds good, but there are other models that are also resident-controlled and which should be considered.

A better model for democratic local stewardship

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are already taking ownership of, and managing, blocks of flats and estates. Like commonhold they are resident-controlled and owned, and their statutory definition goes further to ensure they must be non-profit and act for the wellbeing of the community. They decommodify land and buildings in a co-operative structure.

But unlike commonhold and RMCs, their membership includes the whole local community in the neighbourhood, not just the homeowners in the block. Renters can have equal power and voice as owners. CLTs can take ownership of multiple developments across a neighbourhood, instead of setting up dozens of tiny companies and boards, one for each block of flats or new estate.

CLTs balance the interests of current occupants and future generations, ensuring that current occupants pay fair fees and that assets are looked after, while also protecting affordable homes and community assets from carpetbagging. They enable communities to act as wise stewards of their place. Many devolve day-to-day management of the homes and communal spaces to occupants, sometimes leasing them to resident associations or companies, while acting as a steward that can step in to help.

CLTs also have purposes broader than simply maintaining assets. They almost always leverage their ownership of homes and community facilities to proactively develop more, contributing to the Government’s growth and housing agendas. This in turn helps to attract more directors, make them more financially sustainable, and furthers the interests of the wider local community.

The benefit of this model over RMCs became very apparent in the CLT Network’s work on a major Ofwat-funded innovation project looking at ‘water smart communities’. We need to build more water-efficient homes with site-wide rainwater harvesting and flood mitigation. But it would be a tall order to ask small site-by-site RMCs to take responsibility for managing these complex assets, as well as the relationships with the Highways Authority, water companies and other stakeholders. It would be much more viable to do this at a town or neighbourhood scale, through adoption of potentially dozens of developments by a single local authority or CLT.

None of this is to say that commonhold and resident management companies are bad models. They’re just not the only resident-controlled model available, and have risks.

Why Community Land Trusts depend on leasehold

But the Government has largely ignored the CLT alternative. In its Draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill risks ruling them out. Leasehold is the legal mechanism that makes the CLT model work. By retaining the freehold of the land and granting long leases over individual homes and other assets, CLTs separate land value from building value and hold that land in common ownership for the long term. That legal separation is what enables the CLT to lock in affordability, prevent speculative windfalls, and steward assets for future generations.

Take two models common in the USA, There, CLTs buy the freehold of land which they lease to condominium associations (like commonhold associations), enabling occupants to self-manage under their stewardship. They also often buy flats in condominium blocks built by others, selling or renting them as permanently affordable homes. The homeowners and renters can all join the CLT, and a third of board places are reserved for them. Commonhold and CLTs could co-exist.

Ministers should protect CLTs in the Bill

In the two acts of legislation on leasehold reform to date, previous governments have recognised the value of the CLT model and enabled it by exception. CLTs have been exempted from the ban on leasehold houses and residential ground rents. But the draft Bill currently fails to carry this forward and would not permit the two co-existence models common in the USA.

The Government’s consultation on reducing the prevalence of private estate management arrangements similarly focuses on RMCs as a solution and gives little attention to community models like CLTs, though officials have shown interest.

The opportunity here goes wider than ending the feudal leasehold and estate management practices.

The Government is wrestling with the right way to help communities take back control. With the Pride in Place neighbourhood boards, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill’s unspecified neighbourhood governance arrangements, and now with commonhold and RMCs, the Government risks creating a disjointed patchwork of community voice and control. At the neighbourhood level, communities struggle to stitch these together into something like a coherent approach.

Models like the Community Land Trust offer one solution, creating a general-purpose community stewardship body with a statutory footing that can stitch together new development, regeneration funding, saving existing assets, etc. It would embed democratic, accountable resident control across these priorities with a consistent, understood and robust model. Ministers should look again at a co-operative solution that communities themselves are championing.

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Boosting housing supply in Australia and Canada: much more than planning de-regulation

‘The national project to make housing more affordable is focused entirely on increasing supply [and] … The plan for meeting the supply target is to change planning laws and allow more density in middle suburbs…’ So wrote revered Australian economic analyst, Alan Kohler in 2025.

Especially when it comes to the official narratives accompanying national housing policy in the 2020s, similar comments could be made for other countries including Canada and the UK, to name but two.

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Even so, Kohler’s pithy summary underplays the diverse range of approaches that governments are nowadays deploying in their housing supply-focused efforts.

Moreover, while largely centred on planning reform and other ‘market enabling’ measures, initiatives in Canada and Australia now include direct commissioning and funding of housing construction on a scale without recent precedent.

To identify internationally adaptable approaches to boosting housing supply, our new study compared the post-pandemic housing market challenges and policy approaches of Canada and Australia, two of the world’s most comparable nations.

Structural factors

In both countries housing affordability challenges have come to the fore in policy and political debate since the 2010s, with rising house prices and rents generally outpacing incomes. Thus, Canada’s national house price-to-income ratio rose from under 4.0 in 2003 to 7.7 by 2022, with a similar increase observed in Australia.

At the same time, the nature of the housing supply challenge in the early 2020s contrasts significantly across the two countries. Most notably, trends in apartment construction have markedly diverged. By 2024, such building starts had fallen by 48% from their 2016 peak in Australia, whereas Canadian unit commencements had surged by 71% over this period.

The main explanation for this contrast appears to be the revived vitality of Canada’s purpose-built rental (PBR) apartment industry in the post-Great Financial Crisis era. This is a sector far more strongly represented here than in Australia. Canada’s PBR construction surged more than threefold in the decade to 2024, representing a remarkable 42% of all housebuilding by that date.

As shown by the Canadian PBR industry’s relatively stable output in the immediate post-pandemic era, this speaks to the product’s resilience in the face of challenging market conditions. While abetted by favourable lending and mortgage insurance policies, the main explanation is probably the over-riding priority PBR investors place on long-term rental returns. This leaves them relatively sanguine about short-term market conditions and prospects.

Encouraging planning liberalisation

Efforts to both liberalise land-use zoning restrictions and streamline development approval processes are indeed central to contemporary pro-housing supply efforts in the two countries. However, federal administrations are constitutionally constrained here. Lacking powers to mandate planning policy (controlled by state/territory/local governments), federal influence must be transmitted indirectly.

In Australia this has been recently progressed under the Albanese government via the 2022 National Housing Accord. Central to this inter-governmental agreement was the commitment by signatory federal, state/territory and local authorities to ‘[i]mproving zoning, planning and land release’.

Accord participants also endorsed a national housebuilding goal to construct 1 million new dwellings 2024-29, later upped to 1.2 million homes within that timeframe. The federal government pledged a $AUD3B ‘New Home Bonus’ payable to state/territory governments conditional on achievement of jurisdiction-specific building targets.

Parallel Canadian efforts have centred on the federal Housing Accelerator Fund (HAF), a $CAN4B program to incentivise planning and other relevant reform by local governments. More subtly, HAF payments are intended to support municipalities growing housing supply ‘faster than [the local] historical average’.

As operationalised since 2023, Canada’s HAF program has involved federal-municipal agreements where, in exchange for pledged federal payments, lower tier governments have committed to specific planning reforms and other undertakings to expand housebuilding.

Beyond their status as ‘reward payments’ for relaxing or simplifying land use planning’, Canadian HAF subsidies fund other municipality actions on housing supply. This includes local commitments to channel such funds into affordable housing construction.

Other pro-supply measures

As unpacked in our research, though, pro-housing supply measures in both countries extend well beyond planning liberalisation. As represented to some degree in both Canada and Australia, these include:

  • Infrastructure funding support
  • Low-cost debt facilities and development de-risking
  • Federal property tax reform
  • Workforce capacity building
  • Technological development
  • Government-funded housing production
  • Identifying and allocating public land for affordable non-market development.

Generally, these interventions have been disproportionately larger and more ambitious in the Canadian case – especially when it comes to de-risking private housing development, and in financial support pledged for pre-fabricated (or ‘modular’) housing construction.

But, while ‘market enabling’ measures remain dominant, recent initiatives have seen both countries also pledging muscular interventions in the commissioning and funding of housing for both sub-market rent and sale. The new Build Canada Homes agency launched by the Carney government is tasked with ‘[constructing] affordable housing at scale’ – including $CAN4B loans and $CAN6B contributions to [non-market] ‘deeply affordable housing, supportive housing, Indigenous housing, and shelters’.

Meanwhile the Australian Government pledged in 2025 to commission 100,000 homes for (ring-fenced) sale to first home buyers over eight years. This revives a practice which contributed significantly to expanding Australian home ownership under the Keynesian consensus of the early post-war period, although subsequently absent for half a century until now.

The modern pre-occupation with expanding housing production while doing little to dampen housing demand remains highly questionable. But the range of pro-supply initiatives proceeding in countries such as Canada and Australia is far broader than the dominant ‘planning deregulation’ narrative implies. These extend to measures that, in their interventionist nature, arguably challenge decades of neo-liberal orthodoxy.

Much like its Australian and Canadian counterparts, the Starmer government’s housing reform narrative has overstated the scope for easing housing affordability through planning reform.

Lessons for the UK

As in those comparator nations, UK governments need to shift away from over-reliance on blanket efforts to boost market supply through development approval deregulation. Instead, taking a leaf out of Canadian and Australian books, the promised national housing strategy for England should embrace a wider range of pro-supply initiatives.

Emulating recent boundary-pushing measures under Premiers Carney and Albanese these measures should include more direct interventions that recall an earlier post-war era when such actions were standard practice.

Hal Pawson is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales Sydney. Steve Pomeroy is an Industry Professor at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

A version of this article first appeared on Australia’s Fifth Estate site. 

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Why the construction sector needs social housing

Two construction workers with a block of flats behind them

With 169,000 children growing up in temporary accommodation – the highest number since records began – the case for the government’s manifesto commitment to ‘deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation’ is overwhelming. This situation damages children’s health and development, and it is costing councils across England £7.7 million every day. It is a national scandal whose social and financial costs are well-understood.

But social housing does more than provide an alternative to poor-quality homes. It is also the foundation of a successful housebuilding system. Building social homes at scale – including during market downturns – can underpin the government’s response to the crisis in construction skills and innovation. Far from being in conflict, social housing and market housing can support each other.

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The inherent limitations of the UK’s development model

In a housebuilding system which relies excessively on speculative market housing, developers compete against each other to pay the most for land. Having taken on a large upfront risk through high land costs, developers then need to recoup their investment, building as slowly as necessary to maintain prices. But when sales prices soften, even moderately, market housing starts plummet. Developers are not incentivised to start new schemes if they will have to sell homes for less than they assumed when buying land.

To make matters worse, in tandem with increasing dependence on this speculative model of market supply, the UK’s social housing supply model has become pro-cyclical. Post-war social housing developments were close to 100% social housing. Most costs were covered by grant, and land was assembled at low cost outside the speculative market. This model was insulated from market cycles, allowing the supply of social homes to continue during downturns in private housebuilding. In other words, social housing supply at this time was counter-cyclical.

From the 1980s, the dominant supply model for social housing flipped: grant rates were cut, borrowing costs rose, social landlords had to start competing with private developers in the land market. As a result, an expanded range of ‘affordable housing’ tenures (with costs pegged to market prices) has become increasingly dependent on cross-subsidy from the profits of building market housing. Far from smoothing out the boom and bust cycle of speculative private housebuilding, this model of building social housing intensifies those peaks and troughs. This doesn’t just affect how many homes are built. It shapes how the construction sector itself operates.

Supporting the UK’s construction sector

Ratcheting down: Private housing completions in England since 1946

Over repeated cycles of the housing market, the total output of speculative development is ratcheting downward. As housing starts plummet, so too does the demand for skills and materials. Many construction workers simply leave the sector, often permanently. It is no coincidence that construction workers are more likely to be self-employed than workers in any other sector. Today, more people are leaving the construction sector than joining it, and productivity has remained stubbornly flat for decades. Why would housebuilders maintain a large permanent workforce, or invest in the skills of that workforce, when they know they will need to retrench supply as the market turns?

Because firms cannot predict demand, materials prices have become more volatile. Official statistics show sharp swings in construction output and brick deliveries, worsening shortages and price spikes in an import-dependent system. As the construction industry has adapted to manage the risks of cyclical demand, construction capacity has atrophied.

The long-heralded shift to modern methods of construction (MMC) has also stalled. The speculative, stop-start nature of the industry makes the expense and risks of investment in innovation unattractive. Investors are reluctant to commit to factories which will be moth-balled at the first signs of the next housing market slowdown.

From stop-start to build, baby, build

A more balanced system would combine market housing with a counter-cyclical social housing programme, alongside new market models based on stable demand such as Build to Rent.

When governments fund and enable social housing at scale, it can be built as fast as need demands and construction capacity allows. As the Farmer Review of the UK Construction Labour Model found in 2016, a major programme of social housing would support predictability of demand for labour, skills and materials, resulting in a less risky operating environment for housebuilders, developers and planners. The booms and busts of cyclical market supply are smoothed out by counter-cyclical social supply, so capacity can be maintained and increased despite housing market cycles.

In countries such as Japan and Sweden, innovations and new technologies have thrived on this certainty, creating new opportunities to expand development capacity. It is no coincidence that the last time that modern methods of construction made a major contribution to overall housing supply in the UK was during the post-war social housing boom.

Of course, the benefits of a more sustainable skills base and of innovation in construction today would be felt far beyond the developments which first enabled them. If social housing schemes keep construction workers in the sector during market downturns, those experienced workers will be available to the private sector when the market recovers. If social housing schemes provide enough stable demand to keep MMC providers in business, market housing will be able to benefit from their services, too. While construction capacity is often seen as a constraint on building more social housing, the reverse is also true. A stable pipeline of social housing would expand capacity, supporting more jobs, stronger skills, and greater innovation across the sector.

The government’s new Social and Affordable Homes Programme 2026-36 represents the most significant policy shift back towards a counter-cyclical social housing supply model in decades. A future blog will explore how this could work in practice, and what further changes are needed.

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A new generation of new towns in England

Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, one of the constituent towns which came to form Milton Keynes

80 years after the Act which launched the post-war Labour government’s New Towns programme, the current government has set out its proposals for a new generation of New Towns. Between 1946 and 1970, 32 New Towns were designated in the UK (21 in England), generating homes for 2.8 million people. It was the most ambitious urban development programme ever undertaken by a UK government and was a key element in that government’s plans for tackling the acute housing problems it faced following six years of war and all the damage that had resulted.

Although the economic and housing problems facing the UK today differ in a number of respects from those of 1946, they are no less acute and call for bold and radical responses. Recognising that a New Towns programme could make a very significant contribution to resolving today’s challenges, the government decided, soon after coming into office in July 2024, to set up a Taskforce, chaired by Sir Michael Lyons, to recommend a new generation of New Towns. This week’s announcement is the government’s response to the Taskforce recommendations. The Taskforce report covered four main themes;

  1. The rationale for a New Towns programme
  2. The placemaking principles which should underpin the programme
  3.  Proposed New Town locations
  4.  The necessary delivery mechanisms and arrangements. 
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There are strong economic as well as housing justifications for developing New Towns. Shortages of suitable and affordable homes constrain growth in many areas. Tackling the undersupply of homes requires a step change in output, which in turn depends on maximising the contribution of all potential providers, across both public and private sectors. A programme of planned developments at scale, comprising a variety of homes to meet the full range of needs, supported by necessary infrastructure, provides a real opportunity to accelerate the anaemic rates of housebuilding which have characterised recent years. It is no co-incidence that we have as a country failed to deliver over 250,000 homes a year since the 1980s when the earlier New Towns programme was wound down, along with the council housebuilding programme, by the Thatcher government.

If expanding the number of homes we build is an important objective, just as important is raising the quality of our new homes and their environment.  With this in mind, the Taskforce recommended a set of placemaking principles which should underpin the New Town programme. These are vital to ensure that the New Towns created under the new programme are exemplary places in which people will want to live, and in which they can feel proud and at home. The aim must be to create strong communities with the necessary facilities, social and physical infrastructure, attractive parks and green spaces, designed to meet sustainability and biodiversity objectives and to encourage healthy lifestyles.

The Taskforce proposed 12 locations, each suitable for developments of at least 10,000 homes, and with the potential to deliver between 250,000 and 300,000 homes. The government has given the go-ahead to seven of the recommended sites, with a combined potential for a little under 200,000 new homes. While this goes a substantial way towards the Taskforce aspirations, it does change the geographic spread, leaving a programme heavily focussed on London and the South East (Thamesmead and Enfield in London, Tempsford near Bedford and Milton Keynes), with two northern cities (Leeds and Manchester) and Bristol as the only outliers.

More peripheral sites proposed by the Taskforce (Marlcombe near Exeter, Plymouth, Heyford Park in Oxfordshire, Wychavon Town in Worcestershire and Adlington in Cheshire) are not being taken forward.  They are expected to receive support from government under other programmes, but their exclusion from the New Towns programme risks undermining its credibility as a national initiative. There is also the question of potential future sites elsewhere, which could potentially be added to the programme, as happened successfully in the 1950s and 1960s. This option should in my view be kept open, not least to ensure that the country takes the most benefit from the experience gained by the trailblazers.

The Taskforce made a series of recommendations on delivery mechanisms and arrangements which need to be put in place to enable the New Town programme to be progressed to best effect and most cost-effectively. The establishment of single-minded Development Corporations to oversee the planning and growth of each New Town, and the early public acquisition of land to enable the Development Corporations to control the pace and nature of the development in line with its approved Masterplan, are among the most important issues to be resolved. The foundations for a New Towns programme are now clearly in place and the government’s commitment this week to take it forward is very much to be welcomed. The challenge now is to ensure successful implementation.   

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Delivering 1.5m new homes: setting up new development corporations – a blueprint for success

Introduction

The government is taking decisive action to address the housing crisis by proposing new development corporations to act as master developers. This initiative supports the ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes. To aid this, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has established the New Towns Taskforce, an independent expert panel.

The New Towns Taskforce report, published in September 2025, identified 12 potential new towns and proposed delivery via development corporations. The report argues that development corporations are the most suitable delivery vehicle, recommending they have Planning Authority powers.

Temsford in Bedfordshire is considered a promising first site, partly due to its proximity to existing and planned rail routes.

The House of Lords Built Environment Committee’s report, New Towns: Laying the Foundations, published in October 2025, includes a chapter on governance and stewardship of development corporations. It states: “Development Corporations should be the default governance and delivery structure for new towns and expanded settlements and should be used in all but exceptional cases.”

The Institute for Government’s Devolution and Regeneration Report, published in December 2024, outlines the case for mayoral development corporations, reviewing their history, operating models, and governance mechanics.

Currently, only a few mayoral development corporations exist, with the London Legacy Development Corporation serving as a successful example. More are expected as devolution expands.

Fundamentals for Establishing a Modern Development Corporation

To ensure these urban development vehicles exemplify best practice, they must be founded on clear principles. Having recently helped establish a circa 400,000 home multi-site development corporation outside of the UK, I outline twelve key fundamentals as a blueprint for success:

  1. Vision and Mission
    A development corporation must define a compelling vision and mission, including targets for social, affordable, and market housing. This vision should reflect local aspirations and support regional economic growth, providing diverse housing types and tenures.
  2. Market Analysis and Feasibility
    Comprehensive market research should assess demand across residential, commercial, civic, and mixed use assets. Feasibility studies must evaluate financial, environmental, and social viability, ensuring sites align with infrastructure and gain local support. Job creation, business growth, and transport connectivity must also be considered.
  3. Regulatory Context
    Understanding statutory powers and planning frameworks is essential. This includes aligning with recent planning reforms and clarifying how planning control is exercised, especially if within the corporation’s remit.
  4. Financial Strategy
    Detailed budgeting should underpin each phase. Funding from public-private partnerships, grants, loans, and private capital must be secured, with robust financial oversight. Strategic use of public funds for infrastructure, particularly brownfield, transport, utilities, and public services, should be paired with land acquisition and value capture to reduce long term reliance on government funding.
  5. Project Delivery and Management
    Professional development, urban planning, and project management are crucial. Dedicated teams should prepare master plans, while a Project Management Office (PMO) oversees implementation, ensuring deadlines, quality, and budgets are met. Design standards ensure consistent, high quality development.
  6. Skills and Capacity
    To become an employer of choice, corporations must invest in a skilled workforce supported by external consultants and engage delivery partners through robust capacity building strategies.
  7. Infrastructure Planning
    Planning should align with the government’s long-term infrastructure strategy, covering transport, utilities, waste, water, and digital networks. Social infrastructure, including schools, healthcare, community spaces, and green amenities, should be delivered concurrently with or before housing to ensure liveable neighbourhoods.
  8. Community Engagement
    Transparent public engagement is critical. Regular consultation with residents, businesses, and stakeholders ensures the master plan meets local needs and priorities.
  9. Inter Authority Collaboration
    Strong partnerships with local authorities ensure alignment with local plans. Early engagement with transport, health, education, and utility bodies is vital. Long term stewardship models must be established to sustain services and infrastructure.
  10. Sustainability, Resilience, and Innovation
    Design and construction must support the UK’s net-zero goals. Plans should address climate resilience and economic adaptability. Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and SMART technologies can accelerate delivery and enhance quality.
  11. Marketing and Identity
    A strong, values led brand positions the new town competitively. Marketing should attract residents and investors, showcasing the town’s offer and long term vision.
  12. Monitoring and Evaluation
    Success should be measured via clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Master plans must remain adaptable based on monitoring, community feedback, and pilot initiatives such as new financing models or build to rent schemes.

A Blueprint for Success

Lessons from previous development corporations and recent mayoral development corporations can guide this new generation of development corporations. Milton Keynes Development Corporation, arguably the UK’s most successful urban development corporation, provides a well-documented example.

Milton Keynes was established in 1967 and dissolved in 1992 upon completing its mission. It had powers to compulsorily purchase 22,000 acres of farmland, acted as its own planning authority, and managed infrastructure and social amenities, including public housing.

In addition to the outlined fundamentals, lessons should also be drawn from Milton Keynes or other similarly completed new towns so that best practice can be developed and included in establishing new development corporations.

By following best practices from the UK’s strongest examples and adhering to the twelve core fundamentals, development corporations can support the government’s housing goals, delivering sustainable, inclusive communities while raising standards for future urban development across the UK.

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Blog Post Class of 2024

Standardising Section 106 agreements is overdue. Making it stick will be harder.

Anyone involved in housing delivery knows that negotiating and agreeing Section 106 has become one of the biggest drags on the system. It’s not because planning obligations are wrong in principle. Quite the opposite. Done well, they secure affordable housing, infrastructure and mitigation that make development acceptable and sustainable. The problem is the process.

I was pleased to host the recent launch of the Land, Planning and Development Federation’s work with Town Legal and Lord Banner KC on simplifying and standardising Section 106 agreements. Their report sets out a compelling case for reform, backed by hard evidence on delays. Data from the Home Builders’ Federation shows that average S106 timelines are now stretching well beyond a year, with some agreements taking several years to conclude. That’s time when homes that already have a resolution to approve are simply not being built.

There is a straightforward and sensible solution to addressing this delay. Introduce a national template for small and medium-sized schemes, reduce the endless re-drafting of boilerplate clauses and focus negotiations on what actually matters on a site; the local context and local need. A national template will deliver faster decisions and result in lower legal costs, improving viability, and removing friction from the process. For SME builders in particular, these delays can be the difference between a viable scheme and one that never gets delivered.

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But we should be clear-eyed. Standardisation alone will not fix the problem.

I have seen first-hand how even well-designed standard documents can get picked apart in practice. We have been here before in the construction sector. NEC contracts were meant to simplify delivery and drive collaboration. PAS 91 was designed to streamline pre-qualification for public schemes. In both cases, lawyers across the system found ways to add caveats, amendments and bespoke wording until the standard became anything but.

There is no reason to think Section 106 will be immune from the same behaviour.

That is why Government has a critical role to play if this reform is to land properly. Guidance matters. The National Planning Policy Framework and Planning Practice Guidance needs to go further than warm words about engagement and efficiency. They should actively promote the use of standardised Section 106 templates, set clear expectations that deviation from agreed boilerplate should be the exception not the rule, and require local planning authorities to justify where and why they depart from national templates.

Centralising this element of planning will not strip councils of discretion. Local variation will always be needed and possible. But predictability, proportionality and pace are essential if we are serious about the delivery of 1.5 million homes. A standard starting point, backed by firm national guidance, gives councillors confidence, reduces risk for developers, and helps officers manage stretched workloads.

If our Secretary of State Steve Reed MP, and Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook MP are serious about building more homes, which I believe they are, especially through SME builders, then fixing the Section 106 process is essential. Simplifying and standardising is the right direction of travel. But without Government being explicit, consistent and firm in policy and guidance, the system will default back to complexity.

The opportunity is there. We should take it, and make sure it sticks.

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Labour’s Commonhold Bill is the start of the end of the leasehold nightmare

New apartment complexes overlooking the Woodberry Wetlands, London by Geoff Henson is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Last week Labour published its Leasehold and Commonhold Reform Bill. It is an unquestionable triumph. Ground rents are capped at £250, commonhold is reinvigorated as a realistic tenure, and issues around forfeiture are put to rest.

Most importantly, it sets out a new mechanism for leaseholders to convert to commonhold without the previous requirement to have unanimity between all residents. 

This week is the start to the end of this nightmare, but it is a complex route. It will be up to leaseholders to transition buildings over to commonhold one-at-a-time, and this will be easier on some sites than others.

The Government has also clearly set out a different strategy for reform than their Conservative predecessor. While the Tories set out most of their reforms in two pieces of legislation, the Ground Rent Act (2022) and the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act (2024), Labour’s programme is running on bespoke tracks, with varied primary and secondary legislation to address the wide variety of issues within leasehold.

So, taking a step back, what is Labour doing to end the leasehold nightmare and what will these changes mean for residents?

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What is Commonhold? And how does Labour’s Bill change it?

Currently, most flat owners in the UK are leaseholders. They own everything within the walls of their home, but the overall site is owned by a ‘freeholder’, usually a larger company like a developer or a pension fund. This freeholder is responsible for shared communal areas, and the overall building.

Freeholders can appoint whatever organisation they want to manage the building (a ‘managing agent’), who often charge high fees while delivering a poor service. And freeholders themselves are often unresponsive and fail to act proactively to respond to leaseholders’ needs.

Commonhold is an alternative model introduced by Labour in 2002. Homeowners collectively own the whole site, and decide on things like which managing agents to appoint collectively.

However, a number of issues with commonhold mean that it was not widely adapted. It requires the consent of all leaseholders and their mortgage lenders, and there are a number of governance issues with commonhold that make it difficult for homeowners to manage buildings effectively.

Finally, without any incentive to build commonhold sites, developers have almost never done this, and instead can either keep the freehold to take some income themselves, or sell this off to another organisation.

Labour’s Bill fixes commonhold in three key ways:

  1. It bans all new leasehold flats except in exceptional circumstances, on which the Government is consulting currently.
  2. It introduces a new mechanism by which leaseholders can convert to commonhold with 50% of leaseholders consenting (or with unanimity if less than 50% of residents are ‘qualifying leaseholders’, such as in shared ownership blocks or where a freeholder lets out flats within a block).
  3. It has a wide array of fixes to commonhold which sort out its governance issues, from helping to appoint directors, to regulating dispute resolution and ensuring more responsible governance.

This will allow substantially more blocks across the UK to convert to commonhold, as thousands of sites have already reached the 50% threshold for other mechanisms within leasehold, such as collective enfranchisement and obtaining the Right to Manage.

What else is Labour doing on leasehold?

Within the Bill there is a lot more to be excited about. The ground rent cap will lower costs for nearly a million leaseholders paying over the £250 level, as well as eliminating the issue of homeowners being unable to sell properties with escalating ground rents. The new framework for forfeiture will prevent freeholders from being able to repossess homes for minor breaches of contracts or debts as low as £350.

The Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook also confirmed further primary legislation to make it easier for leaseholders to renew or ‘buy out’ their lease through reforms to the process of setting valuation rates.

And, outside of the Bill, Labour is acting to fix leasehold.

In order to tackle escalating service charges, new regulations are pending which will see a new regulatory regime for managing agents, increased transparency and scrutiny of costly major works, and a ‘right to veto’ managing agents which will make it easier for leaseholders to both request a change of managing agent and to decline a freeholder’s suggestion.

And a response is also pending to a consultation held over the winter period for freehold owners paying service charges on unadopted communal infrastructure (otherwise known as ‘fleecehold’).

After this – what will the challenges be?

Three main challenges exist for the Government less in enacting this reform.

First are the courts, the major residential freeholders are famously litigious and have already successfully held up delays to leasehold reform over the past year through launching a judicial review. While the appetite for further action is uncertain, the risk is present for freeholders to attempt this again, particularly over measures retroactively capping ground rent and overriding existing leases.

Second will be ensuring a smooth transition for the leaseholders who do want to move to commonhold. Getting rid of often distant, unresponsive and exploitative freeholder will be a huge improvement in the lives of millions of leaseholders. But shifting to making complex decisions about building management and safety in partnership with your neighbours also has difficulties. Reems of advice and support will be needed for new commonholders, particularly in blocks which do not have a long history of collective enfranchisement.

And finally will be what remains for the leaseholders who cannot convert. Even the reinvigorated commonhold, shared ownership will still be a separate permitted lease, and many blocks struggle to reach the threshold of 50% support for changes such as the Right to Manage because a large portion of the block are buy-to-let landlords. The Government does have an extensive reform programme to make leasehold fairer for these cohorts, but it will be worth monitoring the conversion process to see what more can be done for them.

Labour’s Commonhold Bill is the biggest change to housing law in years, and fundamentally challenges the concept of land and housing as an asset which underpins much of our problematic housing system. Such a bold change will require political will and expert attention to get right, and it is up to all of us in the Labour movement to get it over the line.

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Delivering 1.5 million homes: transforming the vision into reality with a Target Operating Model

What is a Target Operating Model and Why is it Needed

A Target Operating Model (TOM) is a comprehensive strategic framework designed to align an organisation’s structure, functions, and processes with its overarching vision and mission. It serves as a blueprint for organising resources, workflows, and capabilities in the most effective way to support long-term goals, operational excellence, and the delivery of value to stakeholders.

The Government’s New Towns Task Force’s report in September 2025 identified 12 potential New Towns and proposed these are delivered by Development Corporations. A Development Corporation charged with delivering a large-scale urban development should at the very onset put in place a robust TOM before commencing a delivery programme to ensure strategic cohesion, operational readiness, and delivery efficiency.

Key Benefits of Implementing a Target Operating Model:

In the context of large-scale urban development, particularly in homebuilding programmes that include infrastructure and community infrastructure a well-structured TOM delivers a wide range of benefits that directly contribute to the success and resilience of an urban development delivery body such as a Development Corporation by proving for:

  • Strategic Alignment: Provides vision and direction that aligns with long-term goals and investment plans.
  • Operational Efficiency: Maps out processes and procedures aligning development, planning, construction and asset management.
  • Enhanced Governance and Risk Management: Defines roles and responsibilities, compliance and risk management.
  • Better Stakeholder Management: Customer focused, improving delivery for residents, investors, and government partners with consistency of standards and transparency improving trust with public and private stakeholders.
  • Agility and Scalability: Responds to market shifts, supports growth and innovation.
  • Improved Financial Management: Implements cost control and creates investment ready opportunities.
  • Talent and Capability Optimisation: Building a workforce that is aligned with business needs, with skills development.

A Target Operating Model Framework for Urban Development

An effective Target Operating Model (TOM) for an urban development organisation comprises a set of integrated components that collectively guide delivery, performance, and long-term value creation.

1. Strategic Foundation

A strong strategic foundation anchors the TOM. The organisation must articulate a clear vision and mission focused on delivering mixed-use, well-serviced communities supported by high-quality infrastructure and amenities.

2. Core Operating Pillars

a) Business Capabilities
The organisation requires end-to-end capabilities across the development lifecycle, including planning, land acquisition, infrastructure delivery, design and construction management, procurement, marketing, and long-term asset stewardship. Effective community engagement, strategic partnerships, and sound financial structuring are also essential to creating sustainable, people-centred places.

b) Organisational Structure and Governance
A central leadership team typically sets strategic direction, oversees finances, and develops business cases, while regional or project-based units manage local delivery. A clear governance model supported by roles such as CEO, CFO, and Head of Development, along with investment, audit, and compliance committees enables accountable, timely decision making and transparent reporting.

c) Key Processes
The TOM should establish a structured development lifecycle, with stage gates from feasibility through approvals, design, construction, and post-completion operations. Supporting processes include investment appraisal, regulatory compliance, stakeholder reporting, and customer engagement.

d) Data and Digital Infrastructure
A modern TOM relies on strong digital architecture. Integrated systems including GIS, BIM, CRM, and project management platforms should feed into a centralised data environment. This enables real-time monitoring of project progress, financials, ESG metrics, and operational KPIs, supporting accurate forecasting and evidence based decision making.

e) People and Culture
Workforce strategy should blend a skilled core team with flexible, project-based resources and specialist third-party partners. The culture must champion innovation, inclusivity, and sustainability, reflected both in internal practices and in how communities are engaged.

f) Performance Management
Performance must be routinely monitored through metrics such as Internal Rate of Return (IRR), schedule and cost performance, ESG outcomes, and customer satisfaction. Monthly and quarterly reviews provide insights that enable course corrections and reinforce continuous improvement.

Target Operating Model Implementation Roadmap

A TOM will require an implementation Roadmap delivered in stages before its considered as being effected.

  • Current State Assessment: Conduct a diagnostic review of existing capabilities, systems, and workflows, supported by a gap analysis to identify areas for transformation.
  • Design of the Future-State Model: Develop a tailored TOM framework that reflects the unique context and objectives of the organisation, drawing from proven models where appropriate.
  • Stakeholder Alignment: Engage key internal and external stakeholders to validate the model and ensure their support through structured consultation and co-design.
  • Implementation Planning: Develop a detailed, phased rollout plan, potentially organised by function, geography, or project type. Pilot programmes may be used to test and refine the model before full deployment.
  • Monitoring and Continuous Improvement: Establish a feedback loop using KPIs, data analytics, and stakeholder insights to refine the TOM on an ongoing basis and embed lessons learned.

Conclusion

A well-designed Target Operating Model is essential for any urban development delivery body such as a Development Corporation seeking to deliver complex, long-term infrastructure and housing programmes effectively. It not only aligns people, processes, and systems with strategic intent but also fosters transparency, trust, and agility in delivery.

The House of Lords Built Environment Committee’s recent Report, ‘New Towns: Laying the Foundations’ published in October 2025 has a Chapter on Governance and Stewardship covering Development Corporations. The report sets out many recommendations to encourage success and establishing Development Corporations with robust TOM’s can greatly support this success.

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The Future of Home Buying: Can the government finally fix England’s broken housing transaction system?

Image by Alena Darmel licensed under Creative Commons

After years of half-measures and failed initiatives, the government has again turned its gaze to one of Britain’s most frustrating institutions: the home buying process. It’s a system that is broadly recognised as broken – and one that successive governments have repeatedly promised, and failed, to fix.

The average home move now takes a staggering 205 days from listing to completion. One in three transactions collapses before completion, and £1.5 billion is lost each year through failed sales. These figures represent families stuck in limbo, renters unable to move, and buyers forced to reapply for mortgages as chains collapse around them.

This time, though, there are hopes across industry that the government appears serious. A  consultation on reforms to the system has been launched, and with cross-party consensus that the housing market’s inefficiency acts as a brake on growth, it marks the most significant modernisation attempt in decades. Whether it succeeds may depend less on political will and more on whether the government is ready to embrace the kind of digital innovation that transformed markets abroad.

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A long road to reform

For years, the conveyancing process has been defined by paperwork, disconnected systems and inconsistent protocols. Each party – agents, lenders, conveyancers, surveyors, local authorities, and HM Land Registry – operates in its own digital silo, with limited interoperability. The result is predictable delays, duplication, and error embedded in almost every transaction, leaving Britain’s homes stuck as trapped liquidity in the housing market.

The consultation sets out an ambitious vision: a digitally enabled home buying and selling system with consistent use of upfront information, stronger regulation for estate agents, and better consumer protection. It also hints at exploring binding offers and AI-assisted conveyancing, though both remain long-term ambitions rather than immediate reforms.

Ministers argue that reform will “increase transparency, reduce fall-throughs, and improve trust”. It is language that feels familiar. In 2010, the last major reform attempt – the ill-fated Home Information Packs (HIPs) – collapsed under political pressure and technical confusion. Many in the industry fear history could repeat itself.

This time, there’s one crucial difference: the technology now exists to make reforms work.

Proven solutions from abroad?

Australia’s experience offers a compelling glimpse of what the UK could achieve. Over the past decade, the introduction of electronic conveyancing and a digital completion platform has transformed the buying process there.

PEXA is a digital property exchange platform that modernises the process of buying and selling property by allowing solicitors, conveyancers, and lenders to complete property transactions electronically, replacing traditional paper-based systems. Originating in Australia, its UK bespoke platform connects lenders and conveyancers in a secure shared digital environment, improving collaboration, automating financial settlement, and expediting title lodgement.

Through PEXA as the core infrastructure, all parties in a transaction – conveyancers, lenders, and land registries – can transfer funds securely, and validate and register title in real time.

The results are stark. The average settlement in Australia takes five weeks. [CD1] [LM2] [CD3] Settlement fraud has been virtually eliminated, requisitions (manual errors delaying registration) have fallen significantly, and there is consumer confidence in the process.

It is, in short, a working model of what a digital property market can deliver.

In the UK, PEXA has now built a platform specifically for the challenges of the UK market. NatWest is currently implementing PEXA with a view to transacting remortgage transactions by the end of the first half of 2026 and facilitating sale and purchase transactions down the line. The platform is the seventh regulated payment scheme in the Bank of England, and the first built specifically for property transactions. There is growing acknowledgement and excitement that secure, instantaneous completions are now possible on our shores too.

Whether government reforms can align with this kind of digital infrastructure remains uncertain. The consultation makes limited mention of payment and completion reform – a notable omission given that the key moment in a property transaction, when the money moves and title is transferred, remains the moment of greatest risk. Though measures like binding contracts might help prevent fall throughs, the government must ensure it focuses on fixing the act of buying and selling a home, the core transaction, not just the supporting processes.

The fraud problem

It’s a vulnerability that costs consumers and law firms dearly. Fraud is rising across the sector: 65% of law firms have faced cyber incidents and 30% of buyers have experienced property fraud, driven by payment diversion scams, bogus law practices and identity theft.

The structural problem is clear: money and title still move on separate tracks. Funds are manually transferred through generic banking rails, while title changes are lodged with HM Land Registry at some point after completion. In this gap – sometimes hours, sometimes days – the system is at its weakest.

A move towards centralised, regulated digital completion platforms, integrated directly with the banking system, would close that gap. It is a reform that goes beyond convenience; it’s a question of national financial security.

For now, though, fraud prevention appears only lightly referenced in the consultation – folded into broader ambitions around transparency and consumer protection. Many in the industry believe that’s a missed opportunity.

The politics of progress

With successive governments preoccupied with housing supply, conveyancing reform rarely tops the agenda. Yet 42% of buyers report mental health impacts from the stress of moving, and the workforce is under strain too: the number of lawyers practicing in conveyancing in England and Wales has fallen by 15% (from just over 13,000 in Sept 2021 to 11,140 in Jan 2025), reflecting burnout in a system burdened by outdated processes, extra administration, stress and delays.

The challenge, as ever, is sequencing. The financial transaction should sit at the centre of these reforms, not as an afterthought.

For the first time in years, there is genuine momentum. With digital infrastructure now being put in place, a coalition of reformers spanning government, fintech and conveyancing could finally deliver the modernisation that buyers and sellers have long been promised.

For a housing system long stuck in the 20th century, this consultation is a moment of truth.