Homes England boss promises quick decisions on funding from National Housing Bank

Mr Boylan said that as well as having “much more flexibility”, the bank will receive delegations that are not currently available to Homes England, which will enable it to speed up decision-making.

He said that currently, any equity deals Homes England wants to sign require approval by both the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Treasury, which “can take a long time”.

Instead, the bank will be able to make decisions without going through this “machinery of government”, Mr Boylan said.

He said: “One of the things that frustrates many of you is the length of time it sometimes takes to get decisions out of us and out of government. This should speed that up quite considerably, and I would hope that then enables [us] to support you in a much more dynamic way.”

Mr Boylan added: “So, [the National Housing Bank] should be more flexible, it should be greater in scale, and it should be able to operate faster.”

This comes after Mr Boylan previously promised that Homes England was seeking the “maximum level of flexibility” around funding from the Treasury in its submission for the Spending Review.

Similarly, speaking on a panel earlier in the day, Pat Ritchie, who has been serving as interim chair of Homes England since April, spoke of the funding flexibility that the National Housing Bank will possess.

“We already do loans and equity and guarantees, but anything that we do often has to be approved by Treasury, it’s subject to annual year spending,” she said.

“The bank allows us to look at this across a 10-year period, to blend funding, to bring in funding, alongside grant, alongside the private sector, and really kind of drive investment into the sort of long-term programmes… so that there’s a real flexibility and an ability to look over a much longer timescale.”

The boost to funding flexibility comes after a public bodies review into the work of Homes England, published in April last year, recommended the need for longer-term and more flexible funding arrangements from the government to support delivery, including considering grants, loans and equity.

Affordable Homes Programme

Elsewhere at Housing 2025, Mr Boylan welcomed a “remarkable” Spending Review, which included announcing a new 10-year £39bn Affordable Homes Programme.

He said Homes England will be “working very hard” with MHCLG to ensure that the new scheme is designed in a way that is “as flexible as it possibly can be” in order to support the sector.

“We’re hoping to get the prospectus out to the marketplace in autumn, hopefully September time, and get bidding open and up and running, and engagement up and running by the end of the calendar year,” he said.

National housing strategy and 1.5 million homes target

He said the government’s national housing strategy will place a “strong emphasis” on social housing.

“There’ll be a strong emphasis in the national housing strategy on genuinely affordable social housing as a key and substantial element of the overall programme, you can be certain of that,” he said.

“I can assure you that there will be a very strong emphasis on that… I can assure you genuine social rent is front and centre as far as the agenda for us going forward is.”

Mr Boylan said that the government’s 1.5 million homes housebuilding target is “a fantastic statement of ambition”.

“Clearly, I’m determined to try and get as far as we can towards that tide,” he said.

“But as important as that is… we are working consistently to drive up the run rate to deliver 300,000 homes a year because 1.5 million on its own is not enough to meet the housing crisis. We need to carry on at that scale and speed, if we are to be successful in the long run.”