Our Housing Offer : Local Partnerships’ Support for the Public Sector
At Local Partnerships, we are dedicated to supporting the public sector in driving housing growth and addressing housing challenges. Our housing offer provides tailored support for developing housing pipelines, unblocking stalled sites, enabling direct housing delivery, and much more.
Whether you’re looking to accelerate housing growth, navigate regulatory challenges like nutrient neutrality, or explore innovative solutions to homelessness and temporary accommodation, we’re here to help. Read the article below for more details, and if you’d like to know more, contact our team of experts listed at the bottom of the page, use our ‘Can We Help?’ form, or reach out via our contact information.
Local Partnerships Housing Offer
This overview showcases a range of projects Local Partnerships delivers as part of our housing offer to the public sector. This is not an exclusive list, and we would always be happy to discuss other areas of support to the public sector at any time – there is every chance we will be able to help!
Supporting and Enabling Housing Growth
We can support councils and combined authorities in enabling and accelerating housing growth in their areas. We can do this by:
A typical package of support may include provision of additional technical support to councils to enable them to identify, filter, prioritise, and develop sites for new homes.
Technical support would be bespoke, but could include, for example, preparation of capacity layouts, site assessment reports, topographical surveys, budget cost estimates, market assessments, financial appraisals and delivery options reports.
We can help with an analysis of the issues causing stalled sites and help the council understand the landowner/developer intentions and any impediments to developing the proposed schemes.
Subject to the individual circumstances of a stalled site, we have a strong track record of unblocking some of the largest stalled housing projects in the country, such as the 13,500 home scheme at Wirral Waters.
The issue of nutrient neutrality regulations in rivers and watercourses has made new development in much of the country more difficult.
We have supported Welsh Government with a programme aimed to unblock social housing sites across Wales which were at risk of stalling owing to issues around phosphates in rivers arising from new development. Through close liaison with Welsh Government, Natural Resources Wales, Welsh Water, developers and planning authorities, we worked to identify and address issues on a site by site basis.
From an original list of 68 sites, 902 homes on 37 sites across Wales are now able to proceed.
Local Authority Direct Delivery
Review of delivery programmes
In recent years, many councils have attempted to develop their own housing delivery programmes to boost housing delivery in their areas. There has been a dramatic increase in recent years in the number of councils who have established housing delivery vehicles. It is estimated that there are more than 200 housing delivery vehicles in existence and owned by local authorities, in the UK today.
Local Partnerships has developed a housing delivery vehicle toolkit which is available to help councils through the process, from end to end, which can be found here https://localpartnerships.gov.uk/resources/housing-delivery-vehicles-toolkit/
Specifically we have helped many councils conduct option appraisals for potential new vehicles, and reviews of progress of existing vehicles. We have also assisted councils in reopening Housing Revenue Accounts – and in deciding whether to do so.
Small site development
As a part of our work to support councils in housing delivery, Local Partnerships have worked with several councils to support housing delivery by the SME construction sector. Most council areas have a cohort of SME builders and developers, and many councils could intervene to help make this happen. Through the development of the SME Initiative, we can help them. This provides a fast-track route to getting SMEs working on building sites, whilst at the same time increasing the supply of social and affordable rented homes. Under this initiative, councils enter contracts to forward purchase newly constructed homes for social and affordable rent off-plan for a fixed price and agreed specification.
This incentivises SME developers to bring forward sites, de-risks development for the SMEs, and enables the local authorities to boost their housing stock. Through the pilots we have developed template documentation for councils, which can be amended accordingly, and we can provide end to end support for councils interested in these developments.
Temporary Accommodation and Homelessness
Options appraisals and action planning
We have assisted several councils in identifying and appraising interventions which may have a longer-term impact which would assist councils in the development of a strategic approach to achieve council objectives in homelessness – particularly around boosting supply and access to affordable housing. Examples of options which councils are considering include (but are not limited to): investments in social impact funds, levering in pension backed funds, partnerships with the third sector (leasing of bed spaces etc), acquisition of properties (from Registered Providers, the private rented sector, or on the open market), increasing direct delivery programmes, or utilising / creating delivery vehicles.
Temporary Accommodation modelling
In 2024, Local Partnerships developed a Temporary Accommodation model, piloted in Manchester. The purpose of the model is to help councils make informed decisions around temporary accommodation by assessing the data relating to likely future temporary accommodation demand and intervene accordingly. This provides councils with an order of magnitude assessment of the likely future profile, over a defined time period, of household types and numbers that will require temporary accommodation, and the consequential cost to the council’s revenue budget.
This sets the counterfactual position for ‘invest to save’ propositions and allows their impact to be estimated and subsequently evaluated and enables changes in some of the main contributory factors to rising temporary accommodation spend (i.e., housing affordability, housing demand and housing supply), to be monitored and evaluated as well as help with budget management.
Repairs and Maintenance
We can help councils with the effective management of their existing stock. This includes, for example, support with options appraisals for future repairs and maintenance works (such as whether to insource or outsource), procurement support, development of business plans for repairs and maintenance works, analysis of contractor performance, client side support for contract management of repairs and maintenance works, and assurance support for councils who are working through regulatory judgments from the Regulator of Social Housing.
Can we help with housing?
Do you have a housing project you would like help with? Can we help? Contact us using any of the contact us forms found across our website, use the contact us page or contact Martin Walker directly – Local Partnerships is here to help.
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