Inventing our future Collective action for a sustainable economy

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For the foreseeable future, most of the Region’s households will be living in the present housing
stock. While the provision of new housing appears to be the most pressing issue for the Region,
it is therefore still the case that what happens to the existing stock is likely to be of much greater
long-term importance. For this reason, another key purpose of the RHS is to set out an approach
to the improvement and maintenance of the existing housing stock.
The RHS provides a framework for decision-making and other actions at sub-regional and local
levels. The true test of its value will be the extent to which those operating at these levels find the
framework useful in providing confidence that their actions will be complementary to others’
operating at different levels and in other geographical areas. Sitting between national and local
policies, the RHS should be able to act as a link to ensure that experience at local level can feed
upwards into national decisions.
Similarly, through its ability to be linked directly to all other strategies for the East of England, the
RHS also provides a means for housing to be taken fully into account in future planning of the
Region’s economy, transport, health services, and so on. This is an area in which potential conflicts
can be readily recognised: between additional housing and protection of open countryside; in the
trade-off between quality and quantity of new housing; in decisions on spending limited public
resources on either housing or infrastructure; and so on. The RHS addresses these issues
pragmatically, on the basis of current evidence; but these are clearly areas which will need to be
kept under constant review.
More, sustainable housing provision
Over the coming years, it is estimated that the East of England will require on average an
additional 23,900 homes to be provided annually. Eleven thousand of these will probably need to
be ‘affordable‘, i.e. benefiting from some form of subsidy to reduce their cost to the consumer to
significantly below the market price. On the basis of current practice, the volume of subsidy
required will certainly be much greater than what is likely to be available from public expenditure.
Therefore the RHS sets out an approach to meet this challenge through a series of measures aimed
at: reducing land and construction costs, reducing average subsidy requirements, and maximising
the public investment resources available.
Key among these are improvements in how the land-use planning system is operated to help
provide land and subsidy for different forms of affordable housing within sustainable new
communities of the future. Although section 106 agreements are at the centre of this, the RHS is
looking to achieve greater cooperation between the actors in the process of negotiating these
agreements.
Partnership is an important theme in ensuring the required delivery of new housing, and a
partnering approach is recommended in planning and managing the supply-chain of new housing
schemes across the Region which will provide the volume of schemes required. Together with
training and similar measures, this will help bring about the improvement in confidence, efficiency
and product quality which will be needed from the Region’s future construction industry.