EDITOR’S COMMENT “I don’t believe we have emphasised this before,” Peter Denton said to me this week as the Homes England chief executive talked EG through the government’s housing agency’s freshly launched five-year strategic plan.
The emphasis in question? Social justice. It’s a Gove-ian phrase, Denton says, but one he loves too. As the plan puts it: “Even in challenging economic times, success for Homes England still means better lives for people across the country, better places to live and work and, ultimately, social justice and equity for society.”
It comes back to levelling-up, Denton told me. “How do we create equal opportunity across the country? How do we focus on Barking and Dagenham as much as Norwich, as much as Bristol, as much as the Midlands, as much as the North? How do we take places where we equalise opportunity and fairness?”
But it’s about people as much as economies. “A stat that I quote to everyone is a 13-year-old girl will go to school 52 days more a year if she’s in a permanent home than a temporary home,” Denton adds. “How do we ensure social justice and those opportunities for those children?”
That’s what drives Homes England, he argues. “The difference between the agency and perhaps some other parts of government is it’s a mission-based organisation,” Denton says. “I’m not saying this doesn’t happen in the rest of the government, but it is visceral. It’s like it’s in the DNA. People are at the agency and in the department – because I see it day-to-day – to make a difference with people’s lives.”
Shouldn’t the very best parts of the real estate industry, whether in the public or private sector, be able to say the same? By the end of this week, I know many of you will have had a lot of conversations along these lines. I’m writing this in a hotel room in Leeds as UKREiiF gets under way. All of the discussions I have had with the panellists and podcast guests joining EG at the event have at least in part come back to that topic – making a difference to people’s lives.
(Yes, I know if you’re reading this in our print edition at the weekend, UKREiiF is done and dusted – but if you’re online on Thursday morning, there’s still a day to go.)
Just look at the sprawling new masterplan launched for Birmingham, which envisions 35,000 new homes, aims to double the number of green spaces in the city and add 124 miles of walking and cycling routes. Howells managing partner Glenn Howells, whose team is providing architectural support, said the framework represented “a once-in-a-generation ambition for equitable growth for Birmingham”. If a city known for ring roads and roundabouts can find the ambition and vision for that degree of change, then is there anywhere it couldn’t work?
But doing so requires a rethink. As at Homes England, it calls for working out some new emphases, the use of phrases and ideas that might not have felt usual in the past. And above all it calls for partnerships and collaboration. As Michelle Sacks, deputy chief executive at Boston Borough Council, put it to me ahead of our panel session on reshaping our cities, “Our towns can’t be fixed by any one entity alone”.
In the coming weeks EG will be holding the inaugural meeting of our Public Sector Forum, our attempt at teasing out some fresh approaches to partnerships across the built environment, lessons from which we will be taking in alongside those from our established Investors Forum and Advisers Forum to support bond-building between the property industry and the public sector. The answers won’t always be easy to find. But I can say with certainty it will be worth the work.
