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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Under Bristol’s ‘One City’ approach, University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust (UBHW) partnered with Bristol City Council (BCC) to provide 18 flats for use as Temporary Accommodation.

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.

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.

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?’

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.

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.

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

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.

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. 

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.

At a time when we are deeply troubled by the news of thousands of children being killed in the Middle East & many more thousands displaced from their homes, the warm fuzziness that we’re ‘supposed’ to feel at Christmas seems at best irrelevant and, at worst, offensive. However, we must hold onto a vision for change that means we commit to build a route out of the emergency we are in.

The financial cost of temporary accommodation in England is huge. £1.7 billion a year in England alone, a 62% increase over the past 5 years. It’s sending some local authorities to the brink, it’s unaffordable and has an obvious knock-on effect on local services. Although we are angry it isn’t working as it should, we are also full of hope that it can change and become a short, safe and healthy experience for those who need it.