Stalled housing sites and relationship management: Luton Borough Council

Housing Advisers Programme case study

2019/20 cohort 

This LGA Housing Advisors project was seeking to address an information gap about ongoing housing sites in the town.  We were experiencing a number of major sites stalled or recycled through the planning system without being built out, and did not have the established relationships with owners and developers to understand the reasons for this and what might unblock the development. The aim of the project was to review our current arrangements, bring in best practice from other areas and propose mechanisms to improve relationship management with landowners and developers.  We also wanted to understand the drivers of the current development pipeline.

After a delayed start we worked with Local Partnerships to review our current position and better understand how to unlock stalled sites.  Some of the key points of learning were:

• Confirmation of the churning of sites through the planning system
• Challenges to bringing sites forward especially brownfield risks and limited range of proposed house types
• Lack of relationships with land owners, SME developers and larger developers
• Opportunities to access available land for smaller schemes via SME developers

This project has only just started to impact our work in Luton as implementation was disturbed by changes of staffing and the pandemic.

However, Local Partnerships used their work on this project to recognise the potential of SME builders in delivering new homes. They subsequently launched a national project looking at collaboration between councils and SME developers: https://localpartnerships.org.uk/news/call-for-pilot-participants/

We have only recently (July 2022) regained some of our capacity to respond to the ideas and recommendations in the report.

One starting point is a new housing supply monitoring approach which is jointly managed between Housing enabling and Planning. This is a tracker of all live sites in the system which includes details of contacts for the developments.  At this point, we are starting to identify lead “account management” points of contact within the council for each site.  We recently held a housing conference and our improved record of developers meant we were able to target those leading major sites to invite to the event.

We have intentions of setting up a developer forum as recommended in the report as this meets with other strategic priorities too.

We are in negotiations to acquire a scheme from a local developer of nine homes. This is the kind of project which we think there is a lot of potential for within Luton, and could be the first of many similar infill developments.  Acquisitions such as this help the council to access homes on sites where there would not normally be affordable housing as they are below threshold. In addition it supports local businesses which employ locally, in alignment with our wealth building strategy.

Initially our lesson was to price the bid appropriately, as the funding awarded was half of what was eventually required.

The challenges in securing an appropriate consultant prompted us to consider how we work with professional companies via established frameworks.

The benefits of well-established communication arrangements with developers, RPs and landowners are made clear and this is something we are improving.

Contact:

Claire Astbury, Head of Housing Strategy & Development, [email protected]