SPONSORED: ‘Everything starts with a good home’

SPONSORED

The nation’s health, strong communities and rising living standards start with good homes.  As Andy Burnham enters Downing Street today, housing associations stand ready to help him deliver and maintain the good homes the country needs.

Last month, in his first major policy speech since returning to Parliament, he called Britain a “housing trap” and pledged the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war period. Clarion welcomes that ambition without reservation.

He has already seen what that partnership looks like on his home turf.

Last September, as Mayor of Greater Manchester, he stood with us at Clarion, and Manchester City Council leader Bev Craig, at the former Boddingtons factory, derelict for over a decade, and watched work begin on the regeneration of a site steeped in heritage.

He said the scheme was giving something back to Manchester from what it lost when the old brewery closed, and called it the best symbol of what Greater Manchester was trying to bring about with housing.

He is right.

When we complete this new development, the former Boddingtons site will provide homes for people on the council’s waiting list, including the first new social rent homes built in Manchester city centre in forty years. It shows what is possible when local and regional leaders, government investment and a long-term housing partner work together.

There is no denying that the Labour government has taken many significant steps. Its £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme is the biggest long-term housing settlement in a generation, and our sector has welcomed the certainty.

Certainty unlocks investment, skills, land and new homes.

Clarion is also playing its part. Last year we delivered a third of all new affordable homes built in London, more than any other single organisation. Across the country we are investing in existing homes while bringing forward new neighbourhoods built to last.

But the scale of the crisis leaves no room for a slow start. Waiting lists remain incredibly high. Too many children are growing up in temporary accommodation, moved again and again, robbed of the stability every child needs, and too many young people are spending more of their income on private rent while home ownership drifts further out of reach.

That means the new PM needs delivery partners who can do more than put up buildings. At Clarion, we increasingly act as a master developer, thinking beyond the front door to the schools, transport, jobs and green space that turn homes into a community – vital infrastructure that helps people and places thrive.

In Tendring, on the Essex border with Colchester, we have submitted plans for a new garden community of 7,750 homes, built around three walkable neighbourhoods with affordable housing, schools, jobs, transport and green space from the start.

Housing associations are well placed to lead developments like this.

Mixed communities need a mix of homes. That means social rent for those who need it most, alongside other tenure types like shared ownership for people who cannot buy outright but have few other routes onto the ladder. For many young working households, it is often the first realistic step off the rental treadmill.

These tenures should not be set against one another. In a successful development they work together, letting people on different incomes and at different life stages live in the same community, and making ambitious regeneration schemes deliverable in the first place.

Clarion’s history began 126 years ago with a simple purpose – housing people who needed it most. That purpose has not changed, even as the scale of the task has grown beyond anything our founder, William Sutton, could have imagined.

Last year, to mark that anniversary, we published the Five New Giants of Opportunity, asking what stands in the way of a fairer Britain today. Its answers – Connection, Resilience, Trust, Sufficiency and Health – all come back to the same starting point.

That everything starts with a good home.

Fulfilling that purpose today requires the government to give housing providers long-term certainty, the flexibility to meet local need, and the confidence to move quickly.

It also means treating housing associations as strategic partners from the outset.

We have the land, expertise and projects ready to progress, with our pipeline standing at over 22,800 homes across the country. We support the ambition to build many more council and social homes, and know delivering it will take a balanced programme, strong local partnerships and a genuine mix of tenures.

A decade ago, the former Boddingtons site was a symbol of stalled regeneration. Today, brick by brick, it is coming back to life and emerging as a new neighbourhood in the city centre.

Prime Minister, welcome to the job. Let’s work together to build more homes across the country, so that everyone, wherever they live, gets the home they deserve.

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