The Blog

Read our blog for the latest thought leadership from a variety of key industry and political voices and the Housing Festival team. Never miss a blog - sign up below.

Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

New Homes in New Ways

Mixed emotions for me tonight.

It's great to be here, it feels like a party. It's great to be amongst friends and yet, I'm also quite angry. You know, it's hard to be celebrating a story together that actually looks like systemic failure.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

New MMC homes on site in Bristol in another UK first 

Four weeks ago, we were delighted to join a delegation visiting three pioneering new Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) sites in Bristol. As another UK first, we were thrilled to see these homes becoming a reality, and they will soon provide high-quality, low-carbon homes for people in Bristol. 

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

STARTING SMALL FOR SYSTEM ACTIVATION

The first component of the ecosystem solution is building homes in a new way. This will require incubating a new supply chain of factory-manufactured (MMC) homes.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Why build homes in a new way?

Jumping from our current delivery of around 8,400 homes to the delivery of 90,000 homes a year is such a step change, that the enormity of the task ahead may put us off starting altogether. We therefore recommend committing to start small for system activation and spark change by collectively delivering 100,000 social rent homes within the next ten years, through the ecosystem solution.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Case Study: Lease models unlocking new homes

Goscombe is a profit-with-purpose business deeply committed to building homes for good. They have their own MMC manufacturing facilities and a business model intent on balancing meaningful investment in social purpose and fair investor returns. As well as offering homes for sale to housing associations and local authorities they have developed a long-term leasing model for MMC homes.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Case Study: Impact-led investment unlocking homes

A three-way partnership between Resonance (Social Impact Property Fund Manager), Bristol City Council (Investor) & Developing Health & Independence (Housing Partner), is delivering 34 one-bed flats, and wrap around support, for people who had been sleeping rough/experiencing homelessness.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Case Study: PropTech Simplifying Property Acquisition With Simplyphi

Innovative technology is helping local authorities to find, appraise and acquire homes to reduce homelessness. For example, Hastings are using SimplyPhi’s search technology and project management platform to find, acquire and retrofit 60 homes, as part of their ongoing Housing Programme for Rough Sleepers and Temporary Accommodation.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Is new build the only (or best) option to increase social rent housing stock?

The ecosystem solution outlined in the Social Rent Housing at Pace Playbook is primarily focused on new build, because building social rent homes is the best way to eliminate the structural deficit in the long-term as it increases the net supply of homes. But is new build the only (or best) option to increase housing stock?’

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Trauma-informed social rent housing

The shortage of social housing, long waiting lists and numbers of households in Temporary Accommodation, or other unsuitable accommodation, is resulting in higher levels of adversity and trauma amongst future residents. Human-centric design is key to establishing trusted pathways for new social housing delivery. Here, the Changing Futures Bristol partnership unpacks what this means for the design and delivery of new social rent housing.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Embedding quality of life outcomes through design

Over the last 12 months, architects Miranda MacLaren and Polina Pencheva from Morris+Company have been listening to homeless families living in emergency accommodation, to better understand what ‘good’ design looks like. Find out more about their findings, work and human-centric housing design and delivery in this blog in our #SocialRentPlaybook series.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

The need for a human-centric approach

To address housing provision is also to address systemic poverty and build social cohesion. To tackle this and mitigate the risk of social disintegration requires public sector intervention where the current system is failing most - to provide quality homes for the most vulnerable. A human-centric approach invites us to consider how the design, handover, and in some cases wraparound support of new housing impacts residents, communities and the outlook for wider society. #SocialHousingPlaybook

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

WHY WE HAVE A STRUCTURAL DEFICIT IN OUR SOCIAL RENT HOUSING SUPPLY

We need to build 90,000 social rent homes a year in England to address the chronic shortage across the country and alleviate decades of undersupply. Instead, in 2021/22 the new homes built were outpaced by the demolition and sale of social housing stock . In effect, we’ve turned the tap of social rent homes down to a trickle, having also taken out the plug. This has led to a structural deficit in UK social rent housing.

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Andrew Stansbury Andrew Stansbury

5 Mindsets of crisis-solving innovators  

Crisis is the ground in which innovation and progress can flourish if fertilised by courageous leadership and watered by a collective commitment to embracing risk to find replicable solutions that tackle the complexity, severity, and scale of the crisis. 

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

Fixing the housing crisis together

This blog is pulled from the script of Jez Sweetland’s recent TEDX Bristol talk, which will be released in March 2023. Find out why we’re in the crisis we’re in, and how to fix it through collective leadership. We all have a part to play if we’re to build dignity back into our housing system.

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Jessie Hayden Jessie Hayden

'Home'...and the status quo?

Loo offers a unique insight into the relationship between ‘home’ and mental health and featured on the Channel 4 social experiment which explored loneliness and the housing crisis across different generations. Loo’s perspective highlights one of the reasons why building homes is not just about bricks and mortar but creating places where people can thrive.

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