Nick Atkin: ‘I’ve spent my whole career in housing and I have never known the levels of collaboration that we’ve got at the moment’

We meet in Leeds, in the building Yorkshire Housing is temporarily using as its head office, a stone’s throw from the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and a short walk from the modular village on which Yorkshire Housing is partnering with developer Citu (Mr Atkin is also one of the sector’s most vocal supporters of modular housing delivery). With some of his new homes popping up practically outside the window, Mr Atkin is sounding optimistic about the future. Significant change is needed, though, if the full potential of the housing sector to drive growth is to be realised, he warns.

“The first [thing we need] is to take housing out of the short-term box and have a long-term plan that spans more than one government term,” Mr Atkin states. “We need a 10-year plan. If you are to develop at the scale the country needs to tackle the housing crisis, we need to have the confidence and the long-term plan in place.”

In recent years, governments have tended to approach long-term planning for housing with the strategic nous of a toddler playing Jenga. There have been good signs in recent weeks, however, with the new government indicating that a long-term rent settlement is on the way, allowing councils and housing associations to plan over a longer horizon than the current football season.

Housing reclassified

But to really change things, a much more profound shift is needed, Mr Atkins argues. He would like to see chancellor Rachel Reeves, the local MP for Leeds West, reclassify investment in housing as infrastructure spend. At the moment, major projects relating to energy, transport, water and waste are classed as nationally significant infrastructure projects. Housing, on the other hand, is perpetually reliant on shorter-term funding cycles.

Reclassification could recognise housing’s strategic importance to the nation’s growth and prosperity, helping to attract external investment. But it could also change the government’s thinking about the sector from a cost to be endured, to investment linked to the UK’s long-term success. This restriction may explain why England currently has no recognisable housing strategy or clearly defined outcomes for the housing system.

“There is no major financial impact to government of doing that [reclassifying housing as infrastructure] other than it gives longer-term certainty,” Mr Atkins explains. “The thing that it does differently for housing is that it takes it out of the comprehensive spending review cycle.”

“The first thing we need is that long-term plan that gets us out of the boom and bust cycle and just enables us to make sensible, long-term decisions”

The impact of that cycle can be seen now, and the result is ultimately worse outcomes for individuals and communities, Mr Atkin argues.

“Right now we’ve got the lowest number of housing starts for 10 years,” Mr Atkin states. “The reason for that is the [2021-26] Affordable Homes Programme runs out in March 2026. So, if you were selling me a piece of land now, I would not be able to build and complete on it by 2026 [in order to meet the terms of the current programme]. Right now, there are schemes where the pause button has been held not just by Yorkshire Housing, but by organisations the length and breadth of England.

“The first thing we need is that long-term plan that gets us out of the boom and bust cycle and just enables us to make sensible, long-term decisions to invest in the quality and quantity of homes that the country needs.”

In terms of what the system should deliver more of, during the run-up to the election Mr Atkin has been a sector cheerleader for Inside Housing’s Build Social campaign, which called on parties to commit to building substantial numbers of homes for social rent.

Like many in the sector, Mr Atkin would like to see greater flexibility to use subsidy to deliver more social homes. (Just a few weeks later, West Midlands mayor Richard Parker issued a call for the government to “loosen our funding straitjacket” and give the region “greater flexibility in how we can use our existing multimillion-pound housing war chest”.)

But it is the planning system where Mr Atkin really wants to see change (we were speaking before Labour’s plans to reform the National Planning Policy Framework were published).

“There needs to be a higher requirement for truly affordable homes to be built as part of any [planning obligations] and not to be offset,” he says, adding that he would like to be a presumption in favour of development for affordable homes.

There have been many reports of developers struggling to sell homes earmarked for affordable housing under Section 106 deals in recent times. Mr Atkin confirms that Yorkshire Housing has also been turning them down – and the reasons why are very much about both long and short-term failings.

“The quality of some of those homes just isn’t good enough,” he states.

“We get some of these opportunities and we reject them on the basis that they are the retrofit problems of the future,” he adds. “We reject more than we take. I have rejected not just on the basis of quality, but predominantly space standards – second or third bedrooms that the first thing we will do is knock down a wall to make them a proper size.”

So serious is the quality issue that the new mayoral authority, working with the region’s social housing partners, is thinking about flexing its own muscles in this area, Mr Atkins reveals.

“One of the conversations we [housing associations, councils and the mayor] have had is whether we all take a similar view on refusing properties that are going to be retrofit problems in less than 10 years’ time. There is a discussion – no agreement yet – among the partners about a unified statement around the quality of homes that we are prepared to take, as Section 106 is all disposals.”

Further funding flexibility

Mr Atkin has one further big ask of the new government, and it relates to further flexibility within the funding system. This could mean upping grant rates to allow more social housing to be delivered, but it is a technical point about benefit-cost ratios (BCRs) currently required by Homes England that are most directly in Mr Atkin’s sights.

BCRs are the calculations that Homes England uses as part of its assessment criteria for bids; the agency weighs the economic benefit of grant funding against the economic cost. It is Homes England’s application to individual projects rather than wider areas that is proving unnecessarily restrictive, particularly when it comes to the brownfield housing fund, Mr Atkin says.

There are simply some individual schemes, valuable as part of the strategic plan for an area, that will “never achieve” the required BCR score, he explains. But if providers working across a region could achieve the required BCR score across the piece, their wider work could effectively cross-subsidise individual projects that failed to make the grade, he suggests.

“We have this ridiculous system at the moment where it’s the individual [project],” he adds.

“There needs to be a higher requirement for truly affordable homes to be built as part of any [planning obligations] and not to be offset”

If those are the big three changes that Mr Atkin would like to see, then Labour’s plans to tighten Right to Buy discounts is also music to his ears. In fact, he would love the government to go further.

“Look at Leeds,” he says, gesturing towards the window. “Leeds today is full of cranes, there are loads and loads of houses being built here. The council has been incredibly successful. However, if you look at the numbers, the net additionality last year of social housing was plus-two, because of all the homes lost on the Right to Buy.”

The solution? “We would call for the new government to scrap or at least significantly amend the existing Right to Buy scheme,” Mr Atkin says.

While that is the national picture, there have clearly been equally seismic changes on a regional level in recent times. Going back just a few years, the story was one of Yorkshire and the Humber’s devolution deficit compared with neighbours such as Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region (“we weren’t getting anywhere near their level of investment”). And that greater autonomy, coupled with clear vision set out in mayoral manifestos, means that housing providers are more able to work in partnership and have the confidence to invest for the longer term.

In West Yorkshire, for example, Ms Brabin’s Green Jobs Taskforce sends a clear message that a zero-carbon future is “a key component of the strategic vision for the region”, Mr Atkin adds.

“It gives people the confidence to think that this is the reality, that this is going to be no matter what happens in Westminster. And it gives people that confidence to invest.”

Yorkshire Housing has conducted an analysis to get a better indication of “what we’ll need for green skills going forward”, partly as a result, Mr Atkin says. The government’s current tightly time-limited funding under the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) is more problematic, he says. “It’s got to the point where we’re questioning whether we’re going to bid for SHDF Wave 3,” he tells me.

Collaboration is key

More broadly, the growth of devolution across Yorkshire and the Humber has led to a step change in the way the region’s housing associations and councils work together, Mr Atkin adds. The various housing partnerships he sits on are the prime example.

“I’ve spent my whole career in housing and I have never known the levels of collaboration that we’ve got at the moment,” he says.

It is that collaboration, with each other and the combined authority, that helped Ms Brabin issue her pledge to deliver 5,000 new affordable homes over the next four years, he adds.

“Our development teams [the housing associations operating in West Yorkshire] each tell the combined authority what our development pipeline is, which is to some degree commercially sensitive,” Mr Atkin explains. “They act as the honest broker. What that means is we get to see where the duplication is, so we can have a grown-up conversation.”

This means organisations are much more likely to step away rather than compete over a site in an area where, for example, another association is already more established and planning to bid for land.

“That is a massive shift,” Mr Atkin adds. “And we’ve seen that across all three regions.”

Despite his desire for more help from the government to speed up delivery, Mr Atkin is optimistic about the future, particularly as devolution in the regions he works in begins to bed in and mature.

“Housing has loads of challenges – we can talk about them all day,” he adds. “But look around the region. For me, this is a golden era for Yorkshire and the Humber. And I think our job is to maximise the potential.”