The council whisperer

Natalie Elphicke does not give much away. “Officially my hobbies are Scrabble and kayaking,” she jokes, when she lightly demurs at the suggestion that Inside Housing might reveal her talent for opera singing – a fact she lets slip only during a post-interview photoshoot in an elegant Westminster hotel garden, once recording devices have been safely stowed.

The chief executive of the Housing & Finance Institute (HFI) – a body set up on the recommendation of a government-backed report the former lawyer fronted along with Eastleigh Council leader Keith House – isn’t tight-lipped, exactly. But she is certainly in control. Ms Elphicke says she can talk for hours about her work and about housing. And that’s evidently true; she is also wryly funny, sharp, and genuinely passionate about what she does. Yet she remains resolutely in charge of her message.

Currently, the message is that councils can play an important role in delivering new homes and that the organisation she leads can provide the tools to help make that happen.

The HFI launched 18 months ago, supported by, but independent of, the Treasury, with the remit of bringing councils together with private finance to get more spades in the ground and, ultimately, make inroads into the affordable housing shortage. But critics would argue the work the institute is doing is not always immediately visible and its impact difficult to judge.

As recently as January, shadow housing minister John Healey wrote to communities secretary Sajid Javid to ask what progress the government had made on implementing the Elphicke-House recommendations, including the establishment of the HFI. While the question may reveal as much about the Labour Party’s ability to use Google as anything else, it certainly suggests that the HFI hasn’t exactly been pulling up trees so far.

Mr House himself admits that it “has taken a bit longer to get going than either of us would have liked”, before adding that there is now “clearly momentum behind it”. A senior figure at another council says they were “not sure it was ever clear about its purpose” and that it’s “hard to show whether it’s delivering”.

Business ready

Ms Elphicke baulks at the suggestion from Inside Housing that an organisation set up to make deals happen between councils eager to build and investors has morphed into something more opaque.

“It’s not just on the council side, it’s also about helping businesses and investors understand where there are opportunities.”

Natalie Elphicke, chief executive, Housing & Finance Institute

“I don’t think we ever saw ourselves as directly brokering one deal to another,” she replies. “Our objective is to ensure that there is better visibility and opportunity to know more, and to engage and do more.

“It’s not just on the council side, it’s also about helping businesses and investors understand where there are opportunities. It’s very much fulfilling the role of working in that space. We will continue to expand.”

And it has expanded, boasting a staff headcount “six times bigger than it was when we started”, according to Ms Elphicke, who laughs as Inside Housing attempts a quick bit of mental arithmetic: two times six equals 12, in case anyone is wondering.

Ms Elphicke is equally reluctant to name all the local authorities with which the HFI has worked, although more questioning later does elicit an edited list of councils, concentrated generally – though not exclusively – in the South of England. So far, the one major scheme at which the HFI has publicly acknowledged its role is at Jaywick Sands in Essex, where 950 homes are planned (see box below).

So far, around 50 councils have worked with the organisation in one way or another, most visibly by taking part in its Housing Business Ready (HBR) Programme. This offers bespoke advice to town halls, based on local needs, with the intention of helping them overcome the specific barriers that have prevented them delivering new housing. Typically, seven councils are going through the programme at any one time.

“When Keith and I set up the institute we had some very detailed conversations to identify how it could be most useful; that was to sit between the public and private sectors and helping at a grassroots level to inform and enable delivery to take place,” Ms Elphicke explains, when asked where she sees the HFI’s role.

“The appetite and demand for that is much greater than we anticipated.”

Although the HBR Programme includes an assessment based on 18 metrics, the process of getting councils ‘business ready’ is different for each participant. Sometimes it can be simply a matter of knowing the people to talk to, or making sure councils are aware of the financial mechanisms available to them. Sometimes it can be more complicated.

“There is appetite from institutional investors to engage more directly with the assets than they used to.”

Natalie Elphicke

For Ms Elphicke, it boils down to matching councils’ desire to deliver housing with her know-how. “It’s funny how in the knowledge economy we seem to care so little about knowledge,” she muses.

Essentially, the premise is that the appetite might be there on the part of councils, but the expertise to deliver is sometimes missing. One local government expert with links to the HFI says that only around “15-20% of local authorities are at the top of their games” when it comes to housing.

Despite that challenge – and despite a number of false dawns in previous eras – Ms Elphicke firmly believes the time is right for private finance, institutions and pension funds to play a part in delivering housing. “There are market reasons why housing is attractive,” she explains. “We have seen since the credit crunch that there is appetite from institutional investors to engage more directly with the assets than they used to. That change is driven out of that broader economic environment: low interest rates and asset yields, and so on.”

Rocketing activity

Ms Elphicke says activity from what she describes as the “larger institutions” such as Legal & General has also “rocketed in the past 12 months” and cites new funders from the private sector, such as Cheyne Capital, as contributing to the feeling that there is momentum behind housing.

Indeed, her own transition from partner in the banking practice at law firm Stephenson Harwood to being one of the most prominent figures in housing finance is a sign in itself that there has been a step change.

“I’m a great believer in doing the job in front of you as well as you can.”

Natalie Elphicke

Having grown up in a council house in Stevenage, Ms Elphicke describes social housing as something that “has always been an important part of my life”. Inside Housing asks about her decision to quit the lucrative world of City law in 2013, when she launched Million Homes, Million Lives. “It feels so long ago now,” she laughs. “It happened that I had become more involved in the housing delivery and policy side; I wanted to make more of a contribution.”

Having made that decision, Ms Elphicke – who is married to Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, with whom she has two children – saw her star rise quickly, being appointed to lead the Housing Review in 2014 and the HFI a year later. Since then, there has been a change in occupant at both Number 10 and Number 11 Downing Street and, some believe, a change in emphasis on the housing front. So does the HFI still have the ear of the Whitehall power brokers?

“The work of the institute needs to sit in a space which is working across all political groups. The councils we work with are the full range: Conservative, Labour, UKIP, Lib Dem. The governments we’ve worked with have obviously been coalition or Conservative but we’ve also worked with Labour in the past and we’ve got a broad political spread on our board.”

And has she ever considered running for office? “I’m a great believer in doing the job in front of you as well as you can,” she replies. So, not quite a categorical ‘no’. Mr House, co-author of Ms Elphicke’s report, describes her as “a bundle of energy” and it’s hard to imagine her not embracing an even bigger challenge at some point. If she does, opera singing’s loss could turn out to be housing’s gain.