BPHA chief executive: ‘Developers are coming to us with Section 106 offers’

He makes the admission as some in the sector have warned that housing associations could stop buying Section 106 due to a slowdown in landlords’ buying and building activity which could also hit volume house builders, which require a Section 106 element on their schemes to get planning permission.

From his perspective, Mr Hill says BPHA is purchasing “a little bit more Section 106 than we’ve done for a couple of years” and “we have some schemes where it’s our land or public sector land”. “We’ll see those [development] numbers go up in the next couple of years,” he adds.

On some schemes, the 20,000-home landlord has “taken on additionality”, buying more homes to turn into affordable housing. “Originally, it was going to be 20% affordable, but we’re moving that up to 30%,” he explains. “The developer wants to generate some cash. We’re interested in developing more affordable housing, so it works at both ends.”

Shared responsibility and growth

During the wide-ranging discussion, Mr Hill also reveals that BPHA was in discussions with Bedford Council about supporting the local authority with its temporary accommodation (TA) pressures.

“We’re looking at a couple of things that we own, where we have shared management in the past with Bedford… to see if we can take people into those homes more quickly,” he says.

“We’ve also started to talk to them a little bit more about how we manage the waiting list, both for TA and more generally, to see if we could share that responsibility a bit more than we have in the past.”

Mr Hill speaks to Inside Housing a year after he joined BPHA as chief executive in May 2023. “What I found was an organisation that had been really well run,” he states, with a “good local model”. BPHA took its housing maintenance back in-house in 2021.

“We want to grow,” he says. “We don’t want to grow by a huge merger that grows our geography. We want to grow in this patch through acquisition, through regeneration and through new supply.”

On the wall of Mr Hill’s office is a map of the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, with Bedford in the middle, situated as a commuter town with strategic importance for the government’s national economic growth ambitions.

Some infrastructure investment, for example in the roads between Bedford and Cambridge, is “definitely happening,” Mr Hill says. “The big thing yet to happen is east-west rail… There’s potential therefore for lots more homes.”

BPHA has 300 homes on Homes England’s Northstowe new town in Cambridgeshire. The government agency restarted a search for development partners fort the site, which has been billed as the UK’s biggest new town since Milton Keynes. 

Mr Hill points out that rising incomes and economic growth will also lead to higher demand for affordable housing. “That puts a bit of pressure on us” to step up, he says. “I’m not sure the other alternative is that brilliant. If areas don’t grow, stagnate, that doesn’t help people” either.

The chief executive grew up in Dudley in the Black Country. He joined the sector in 2006 working at the Housing Corporation (now Homes England), running its housing investment programme. He later became chief executive of Spectrum Housing Group in 2013 and One Housing in 2017.

Changing policies

Asked what he makes of Homes England’s role in the sector now, he says: “The tilt back towards regeneration is absolutely the right thing to do at this point. [I’m] keen that they don’t lose the focus on affordable housing because I still think that’s really important.”

In Mr Hill’s time, social housing investment and regulation were both run by the same organisation, the Housing Corporation. Asked what he makes of the new regulatory regime for housing associations, Mr Hill says the coalition government “made some really odd decisions”. 

Alongside the cuts to grant funding programmes and the move to affordable rent, the Code for Sustainable Homes was abandoned, the Housing Market Renewal programme in the North was stopped and it was decided that the English regulator would not supervise consumer standards. 

“I’m very supportive of the regulator getting back into consumer regulation,” Mr Hill states. “But obviously, when you make a change, and then you change something back, it takes a while to gear up.”

“Housing associations are long-term businesses and they thrive on long-term certainty”

The period from the 1990s to 2010 saw considerable investment in affordable housing, but most importantly it was a time of relative stability, he says. 

“The problem from 2010 through to now is there’s been 14 years of the absence of certainty. Policies have changed quite quickly. Things have really not stood the test of the test of time… housing associations are long-term businesses and they thrive on long-term certainty.”

Politics in Bedford are complex and contested: the town has a Labour MP with a majority of 145 and a Conservative mayor, while the council is evenly split between Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. 

“Actually, people are focused on some of the big issues,” Mr Hill says. “There’s quite a lot of consensus around what needs to happen in Bedford to make things better for people.”

Mr Hill is also interested in ‘warm rents’, where social rents are linked to the energy efficiency of a property. “If you think about what’s happened to energy prices over the past two or three years, actually, you’ve seen far more volatility than you’d ever get through a warm rent discussion.”

As an election approaches, he says BPHA must make the case for regeneration, particularly as and when the government shows appetite for investment.

In the short term, Mr Hill believes that “we should be making a more urgent case” for a long-term rent settlement. “That would give us the certainty to invest in a way that I think a new government would find tremendously helpful.”