West Midlands mayor Andy Street on ‘a housebuilding revolution’

COMMENT: After nearly a year of misery, the current Covid-19 vaccine roll-out is giving us great hope for a return to normality. While the NHS continues its phenomenal vaccination work at break-neck speed, local leaders up and down the country are doing their bit to try to help the UK’s economy recover as quickly as possible.  That task is harder in the West Midlands compared with most other regions. The make-up of our economy is reliant on sectors that have been so badly hit by the pandemic. But although we’ve been badly affected, we’re also in prime position to bounce back quickly, thanks to the strong economic position we were in as the pandemic struck. Our economy was growing faster than any other region outside of London, and a part of that was down to our housebuilding success. We delivered 16,527 new homes in 2019/20 and 16,938 in 2018/19. It’s a testament to the dedication of the region’s construction sector that not only was 2018/19 a 15% rise year-on-year, but an increase twice that of the UK average. What this means is that despite the impact of Covid-19, the urban West Midlands, also known as the West Midlands Combined Authority area, is still on target to build more than 215,000 new homes by 2031. Show and prove To help us maintain our momentum, we’ve recently unveiled our new housing and land recovery plan, integrating the three elements of land, housing and infrastructure. Already we are unlocking 8,000 new homes from the £100m Land Deal from government in 2017. We have a target of building an additional 7,500 homes, utilising the £84m funding we received from government as part of the Brownfield Housing Fund in June 2020. And, at the end of 2020, the government expressed further confidence in our ability to deliver, providing a £24m grant from its £40m National Brownfield Housing Fund as part of a competition involving eight of the nation’s combined authorities. We have proven to government we can deliver, and as a consequence it continues to back our plans with the cash we need. Since March, when the pandemic started to hit hard, the WMCA has invested more than £29m in housing and land renewal, providing vital resources to bring more than 37 acres of brownfield land back into use. We’ve also signed several major funding and legal agreements on high-profile projects in the former industrial heartland of the Black Country, including Caparo, Harvestime, Bull Street, Lion Court and Cable Street, while we are close to getting other significant projects over the line. Town centres across the region have benefited from our investment, including Walsall Waterfront, where 2,590 sq m of new public space was delivered.  Redefining affordability All of our immense housing work is being done with a brownfield-first approach. The region is full of old and derelict industrial sites, and they simply must be developed first before we even consider touching precious greenbelt land. Developers have historically shunned these brownfield sites due to their contamination and the extra costs involved in cleaning them up. That’s why we’ve been using the money we’ve won from government to pay for remediation works, allowing developers to make these sites work and leaving the greenbelt safe. But through all this brilliant work, we have to make sure that people can actually afford to buy the homes we’re building. That’s why we’ve done two things. First, we’ve refused to pay for the clean-up of any site where the developer isn’t pledging to build at least 20% affordable. Second, we’ve redefined affordability. The national definition is still linked to the market rate, meaning homes in our region have become more expensive in recent years while salaries have not been rising. So our definition links affordability to income, meaning the homes we are building now will actually be affordable to those who need them.  When you then start to consider the fact our work also includes the use of modern methods of construction and zero-carbon housebuilding to help the region reach its 2041 neutrality target, I would argue we are undergoing nothing short of a housebuilding revolution. And this is critical because of the impact it has on jobs – something that is so important now given the economic damage the pandemic has caused. The more homes you build and the more derelict brownfield sites you regenerate the more jobs you create, and so we need to ensure that these jobs are being filled by the local people who need them most. That is why we have set up a range of training programmes, such as the construction gateway scheme, to help train people in the practical skills employers need, allowing our residents to get the skills required to go and build our homes of the future. The West Midlands is leading the way on housebuilding, and with the government’s support it is critical we keep up that pre-pandemic momentum and let housebuilding help drive our economic recovery. Andy Street is mayor of the West Midlands Photo © West Midlands Combined Authority