Housing is Infrastructure. And Delivery Starts with Partnership.
Whether it’s policy announcements or roundtable discussions, the national housing conversation is shifting, and fast.
This summer, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announced a £39bn affordable housing programme, with 60% of the 300,000 planned homes to be delivered through social rent. It’s an ambitious public housing investment and marks the start of what the government is calling a “decade of renewal.”
The plan includes changes to the Decent Homes Standard, new energy efficiency requirements in the social housing sector, and a renewed emphasis on local authority housebuilding. Combined with planning reform, the launch of a £16bn National Housing Bank and the overdue increase in resources to help unblock the BSR Gateway 2 backlog, the intention is clear that the time has come to get serious about supply, delivery and quality.
But as anyone working in housing will tell you, ambition only goes so far. The real work starts now.
From pledges to projects
The Decade of Renewal report sets out five steps for social and affordable housing delivery.
Boosting grant funding, enabling borrowing, strengthening regulation, supporting council-led development and building partnerships at scale.
Each of those steps come with their own complexity, and in Greater Manchester, those complexities are already playing out in real time. Whether it’s planning policy constraints or skills shortages, funding gaps and fragmented delivery pipelines.
We’ve taken part in recent housing roundtables led by the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity, alongside housing champions like Paul Dennett and Fran Darlington-Pollock, along with representatives from AECOM, Clear Futures and the wider private sector. These sessions have highlighted the urgent need to think differently about how affordable homes are delivered.
Our view? Housing needs to be treated as essential infrastructure, and therefore, it must be approached with infrastructure thinking.
The case for partnerships
We’re advocates for an integrated delivery model, where housing associations, local authorities and experienced developers partner together from the outset to build schemes that meet community needs and make commercial sense.
It’s a model rooted in alignment, because the most effective partnerships we’ve developed don’t just tick the boxes, they solve problems, unlock land, de-risk funding and maintain momentum during shifting conditions. That kind of collaboration is critical if the sector is to scale up and stay resilient.
We’ve worked across residential, student and mixed-use schemes, and often on complex, sensitive or stalled sites. And we’ve seen first-hand what happens when partnerships are built on mutual respect and shared purpose. That’s when things start to move.
Track record meets intent
Axis-RE has amassed more than 45 years of delivery experience. Our team is currently progressing The Joinery, a 261-apartment build to rent scheme in central Manchester forward-funded by Singaporean Fund CDL, and leading the regeneration of a key 3-acre brownfield site in Lancaster with a proposed mixed-use masterplan that will not only bring a long-forgotten site back into beneficial use for the City, its businesses and residents but also help catalyse Lancaster’s own housing strategy. Both projects are coming forward in conjunction with our partners, Marco Living, with whom we share aligned long-term interests.
These projects perfectly reflect our belief in place-based development and the best approach to unlock long-term sustainable value. Value, in our view, is not simply about ‘our’ capital return; it is much wider than that. Our projects embed value to community, business, residents, environment and dare we say it, the wider developer community. After all, if we do our job right, it should give confidence to others to invest, which can only further benefit those wider values.
The role of SME’s
The challenge and opportunity for Local Authorities is in working more collaboratively with SME developers. Although it seems to be the vogue of adopting the ‘single-solution’ approach and appointment of a large, master developer or contractor to bring forward housing/regeneration on big town/city centre projects with impressive headlines of thousands of homes often this leads to a very elongated process that means nothing actually gets delivered for years and has the propensity for change.
Clearly a long-term and thought-through overall vision is required, but why should this frustrate progress on delivering much-needed housing? In general it will be known from day one which parts of a site will be suitable for housing versus commercial uses, there will often be a Strategic Regeneration Framework or Local Plan that will have already allocated land for different uses, scale and massing so with those principles already in place why not package these sites up and allow SME developers to do what they do best – ply their skills to get residential and commercial developments built quickly!?
There remain too many hurdles in place for SME developers to collaborate effectively with Local Authorities, Homes England, Local Authority Pension Funds and Registered Providers. If we are going to seize the opportunity the current government has put in place, then effective engagement and mitigation of these hurdles for SME developers is absolutely critical and fundamental to its success.
A regional moment of opportunity
Greater Manchester, as always, seeks to take a proactive approach and has put in place a number of the right foundations to lead the next era of affordable housing delivery. With tools like the Single Settlement, Mayoral Development Corporations, and a commitment to inclusive regeneration, a number of the funding, planning and structural conditions are in place.
But delivery won’t happen quickly enough without alignment with SME developers. Too often, schemes stall because the commercial, social and delivery parts of the equation do not balance as well as fundamental industry-wide inconsistencies in approach to evaluating opportunities. That’s where experienced development partners can play a crucial role. Not just by building, but by advising, adapting and educating.
It’s this partnership model that will allow Greater Manchester to meet its housing targets and reshape delivery at scale, and we would welcome proactive engagement to help drive these objectives forward.
Why the conversation matters
This blog isn’t just a response to recent announcements, it’s part of an ongoing effort to build shared language, deeper partnerships and credible solutions.
We know what the reality looks like, with resource gaps in planning and property departments, continued inflationary pressures on build costs, land value expectations, regulatory uncertainty and industry inconsistencies in evaluating opportunities. But we also know the opportunities for new funding models, public appetite for affordable housing, and a growing willingness to try a different approach.
Let’s talk
We’re continuing to speak with housing association leaders across the region who are looking for development partners. Not just to build homes, but to build something lasting.
If you’re working on a project or interested in continuing the conversation, we’d love to talk.
Reach out to nick@axis-re.co.uk or russ@axis-re.co.uk