“Picture a jigsaw puzzle where every piece comes from a different box, each cut to slightly different specifications. That’s our social housing landscape in 2025 – a complex tapestry of policies where every local authority seems to be playing by its own subtly different rulebook.”
In this article, Joanna Lee-Mills (Partner and Head of Social Housing Development, Shakespeare Martineau and Member of CNM’s Housing and Communities Leadership Board) explains how, as someone deeply embedded in this sector, she has watched with mounting concern as the fundamental challenge of policy fragmentation has grown from a minor irritant into a potentially serious threat to effective housing delivery.
(January 2025)
Breaking Down the Barriers: How Did We Get Here?
Our journey to this fragmented reality reads like a tale of good intentions gone awry. From the bold, unified vision of post-war council house building – when the nation pulled together to address a housing crisis – to today’s kaleidoscope of local interpretations, we’ve created a system that often feels like it’s working against itself.
The transfer of housing stock to housing associations wasn’t meant to create this labyrinth. Yet here we are, with these independent social landlords trapped in an intricate dance, trying to balance their charitable missions with a dizzying array of local requirements. Every boundary crossed adds another layer of complexity, another set of rules to navigate.
The Planning Maze: Where Good Intentions Meet Reality
If you want to understand the true impact of this fragmentation, look no further than the planning process. It’s here that the theoretical becomes painfully practical. Housing associations operating across boundaries face a bewildering array of different approaches to viability assessments. What’s deemed perfectly viable in Manchester might fail to meet the mark in Liverpool, despite identical circumstances.
The sustainable homes agenda particularly highlights this challenge. We’re all committed to building greener, more efficient homes, but the varying interpretations of what this means across different authorities creates a patchwork of standards that drives up costs and slows down delivery.
Breaking Down Barriers: The Mobility Challenge
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of our fragmented system is how it affects people’s lives. The very concept of social housing – providing homes for those who need them most – is undermined by a system that can trap residents within invisible administrative boundaries. These aren’t just lines on a map; they’re barriers to opportunity, preventing people from moving for work or family reasons simply because they happen to live on the wrong side of a council boundary.
The Cost of Complexity
Let’s be clear about what this fragmentation costs us. Every pound spent navigating different systems is a pound not spent on building new homes. Every hour spent reconciling varying requirements is an hour not spent on improving services for residents. The economic impact ripples through the entire system, creating inefficiencies that we can ill afford in our current housing crisis.
Innovation: Light at the End of the Tunnel
Yet amidst this complexity, I see reason for hope. Across the country, forward-thinking housing associations and local authorities are finding ways to bridge these divides. Digital transformation is providing real solutions to help navigate this fragmented landscape. Combined authorities are emerging as voices of reason, creating standardised approaches that respect local needs while eliminating unnecessary variation.
Regeneration: The Hidden Potential in Our Estates
Behind the complexity of our fragmented system lies an even bigger story – the transformative potential of our social housing estates. Large-scale social landlords aren’t just housing providers; they’re custodians of vast swathes of our urban landscape, holding the keys to regenerating some of our most challenged neighbourhoods. These estates, often built in the optimistic post-war era, now represent both our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity.
The scale of social landlords’ property holdings puts them in a unique position. When a housing association owns significant portions of an estate, they have the potential to drive comprehensive regeneration – not just replacing homes, but reimagining entire communities. Yet here again, our fragmented system throws up barriers to transformation.
The Regeneration Challenge: Beyond Bricks and Mortar
Estate regeneration isn’t simply about replacing tired buildings. It’s about crafting sustainable communities, creating opportunities, and ensuring that existing residents benefit from the transformation of their neighbourhoods. Social housing providers, with their long-term stake in these communities, are uniquely positioned to deliver this holistic regeneration.
However, the current policy landscape often works against this potential. When a single estate crosses local authority boundaries – and many do – housing associations face competing regeneration priorities, different planning frameworks, and varying approaches to resident consultation. What could be a coordinated transformation becomes a patchwork of different approaches, potentially undermining the cohesive renewal these communities desperately need.
The Economic Engine of Estate Renewal
Social landlords’ vast estates represent more than just housing assets – they’re potential economic catalysts for entire neighbourhoods. The scale of these holdings means that regeneration can create significant opportunities for local employment, training, and business development. Yet again, fragmented policies can hamper this potential, with different authorities taking varying approaches to social value requirements and economic development priorities.
Consider the opportunity costs: when large-scale landlords have to navigate multiple systems to deliver estate regeneration, valuable resources are diverted from the actual work of community transformation. Every pound spent managing policy complexity is a pound not invested in community facilities, training programmes, or environmental improvements.
Innovative Approaches to Estate Transformation
Despite these challenges, forward-thinking social landlords are finding ways to deliver transformative regeneration. Some are pioneering partnership approaches that bring together multiple authorities around shared regeneration objectives. Others are using their scale to create employment and training programmes that transcend administrative boundaries, ensuring that the benefits of regeneration reach across entire communities regardless of which authority they fall under.
Digital transformation is playing its part here too, with new technologies helping to coordinate complex regeneration programmes across authority boundaries. These tools are enabling housing associations to better engage with residents, coordinate with multiple stakeholders, and demonstrate the impact of their regeneration initiatives.
Charting a New Course
The path forward isn’t about imposing rigid uniformity – we’ve seen the limitations of one-size-fits-all approaches. Instead, it’s about finding that sweet spot between local autonomy and practical standardisation. We need to preserve local authorities’ ability to respond to their communities’ unique needs while eliminating the type of variation that serves no purpose beyond making life more difficult for housing providers.
A Call to Action
As we move through 2025, we stand at a crossroads. The fragmentation of social housing policy isn’t just an academic concern – it’s a real barrier to delivering the homes our communities desperately need. Every day we maintain these artificial barriers is another day we’re not operating at our full potential.
We don’t need to abandon localism to solve this problem. What we need is a more thoughtful approach to local variation – one that preserves genuine local choice while eliminating needless complexity. The future of social housing delivery depends on our ability to strike this balance.
The stakes are particularly high when it comes to estate regeneration. Our fragmented system isn’t just an administrative headache – it’s a genuine barrier to transforming communities and creating opportunities for residents. The social housing sector, with its vast estates and long-term perspective, has the potential to drive genuine transformation. But to unlock this potential, we need to address the fundamental challenge of policy fragmentation.
The future of our urban communities may well depend on our ability to get this right. Social housing providers, with their significant property holdings and community connections, are uniquely positioned to drive regeneration. But they can only fulfil this potential if we create a policy environment that enables rather than hinders transformation.
As we look to the future, the question isn’t just about housing delivery – it’s about enabling the comprehensive regeneration of our communities. By addressing policy fragmentation, we can unlock the full potential of social housing providers to transform estates, create opportunities, and build sustainable communities for the future.
The solution isn’t revolutionary – it’s evolutionary. By building on the innovative approaches already emerging across the sector, we can create a system that maintains local autonomy while eliminating the type of fragmentation that serves no one’s interests. The question isn’t whether we can afford to make these changes – it’s whether we can afford not to.
This is a personal blog post. Any opinions, findings, and conclusion or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the Centre for the New Midlands or any of our associated organisations/individuals.
ABOUT OUR AUTHOR:
Joanna heads up the Social Housing Development team at Shakespeare Martineau and specialises in affordable housing development, acquisitions and disposals. Having worked for registered providers since 2001, Joanna has frequently acted as project lead with large multi-disciplinary teams for the development of social housing, stock transfers or swaps. Her expertise encompasses s106 or land led acquisitions, and development agreements for golden brick or turnkey schemes.
Previous projects have seen Joanna as project lead on the country’s then largest tenanted stock rationalisation transaction involving a complex funding model, and also the country’s first stock swap.
Joanna’s role is instrumental in the strategic growth and direction of the social housing development team and its interface with other sector teams from around the firm. Notably, she is keen to promote collaboration and working closely with colleagues across the firm’s planning, construction and residential development departments in order to provide clients with a seamless and rounded affordable housing service offering. Joanna is heavily invested in her client relationship and profile raising role, often procuring pipeline not only for her team but other departments in the wider sector team also.
With a keen interest in knowledge sharing on sector specific challenges, Joanna has written articles on issues such as stock rationalisation, the impact of the Green agenda on the built environment and the importance of joint ventures and public private partnerships towards the housing crisis, having been published in Inside Housing, Social Housing and other specialist property publications. She is an active participant in the housing sector and local business community, being on the Board of Directors at Auxesia Homes, TAG Network Midlands Limited and Colmore BID.