A new Council Housebuilding Skills and Capacity Programme (CHSCP) has been launched by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

The new programme will be delivered in partnership with Homes England and the Local Government Association to help support councils increase their level of housebuilding.

The programme will help:

• upskill existing council workforces.
• drive engagement with the new Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP).
• recruit graduates to specialist roles.

The CHSCP has 3 elements:

 

• Council Housebuilding Support Service

This new service will be administered by the LGA and aims to work with up to 75 councils this financial year.

It will provide councils with access to training, online tools, and resources to upskill their housebuilding teams. The service will also create a peer-to-peer network to help councils work together to deliver social and affordable housing schemes.

​For more information and to register your interest visit the LGA’s website.

Councils receiving support through the Service should not also apply for grant to address the same issues through the Council Housebuilding Support Fund (see below).

 

• Council Housebuilding Support Fund

This new £5.5 million fund is available during 2025-26 and has 3 main priorities:

• ​supporting councils to bring forward bids to the new SAHP more quickly and for greater numbers of homes than might otherwise be the case without access to the Fund.
• ​supporting councils to maximise the delivery of homes for Social Rent.
• ​for councils in established Mayoral Strategic Authority areas, to ensure their bids to the new SAHP support the delivery of regional affordable housing priorities​.

For more information about the Fund and how to apply visit Home’s England’s website.

The bidding process is now open and will close on 22 August 2025.

Councils who receive grant through the Fund should not also seek advice to address the same issues through the Council Housebuilding Support Service (see above).

 

• An expansion of the Pathways to Planning programme

MHCLG has funded the LGA to create two new pathways for councils to recruit graduates to their housebuilding teams.

Councils will be supported to enable these graduates to train for the necessary accreditation to become chartered surveyors or construction project managers.

​The pathways aim to recruit up to 50 graduates in 2025-26.

​For more information and to express your interest visit the LGA’s website.

 

 

As part of the Government’s new five-step plan for social and affordable housing, published on 2^nd July, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MCHLG) have launched a new consultation on how to implement rent convergence.

The Government recently confirmed, as part of the Spending Review, that social housing rents will be permitted to rise by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) +1% for ten years from 2026. In addition, the Spending Review confirmed that there would be a new consultation on how to implement rent convergence as part of the ten year rent settlement.

Reintroducing rent convergence will be optional for landlords, but it will allow rents for properties which have never reached target formula rent to rise by an additional level each year, in addition to CPI+1%. Once the property’s rent reaches the target level, convergence will cease and rents will only be permitted to rise in line with CPI+1% thereafter.

The consultation is running until 27^th August 2025, and is seeking views principally on:

• whether convergence should be permitted at £1 or £2 per week in addition to CPI+1%.
• whether convergence should be permitted throughout the entirety of the ten year rent settlement or for only a portion of the period.

The consultation documents note that the potential impact of rent convergence would be felt differently across the country, with the average gap between actual rent being charged and target rents being by far greatest in London. In all three northern regions, this gap is lower than the English average, for both housing associations and local authority landlords, but the impacts of rent convergence will impact different providers in unique ways.

In our Spending Review submission and our submission to the Government’s previous consultation on rent policy, the NHC called for both a ten year rent policy of CPI+1% and the reintroduction of rent convergence at either £2 or £3 per week. The NHC highlighted that the reintroduction of rent convergence, alongside a long-term rent policy of CPI+1%, was the only way that social housing finances could return to a financially sustainable position in the long term, opening up additional capacity to invest in new and existing homes.

We will be working with our members between now and 27^th August on our response to the new consultation, which can be accessed here. All views and perspectives on this consultation from members are welcome. Please contact Senior Policy and Research Manager, Tom Kennedy, to discuss these issues further at tom.kennedy@northern-consortium.org.uk

If you want to find out more about the recent announcements and contribute to the NHC’s response to the consultation, the NHC Policy team will be speaking at our ​​Policy Network​ which is due to take place on the 6th August.

 

Alongside a raft of wider announcements, the Government last week provided additional details on the future of grant funding for affordable housebuilding. The next grant-funding programme had already been announced at the spending review, but taken together with last week’s announcements, we now have a clearer idea of what the next programme will look like.

The next programme will be renamed the “Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP)” and:

• Will deliver a total of £39 billion over ten years from 2026 – this is almost double the current level of per year spending (£3.9 billion vs £2.3 billion).
• At least 60% of the total funding will be for social rent.
• 70% of the funding will be outside of London reflecting a shift of funding to other areas of the country, like the North.
• Will support regeneration sites where they provide a net increase of homes on a site, maintaining the regeneration flexibilities introduced into the current programme in 2023.
• Strategic partnerships will continue through a competitive bidding round opening this winter, including bids for the entire ten-year programme.
• Established Mayoral Strategic Authorities will be able to set the strategic direction of the programme in their respective areas but there will be no ring-fenced funding allocation for specific regions outside of London.
• There will no longer be any targets for the delivery of specific types of homes e.g. rural or supported housing.

While we now know a lot about the next programme, there are still areas where we await further detail, including grant rates, how Homes England will work in its new ‘more regional model’, and exactly how strategic authorities will be able to influence programme delivery in their areas. We hope that these details and more will be provided in the SAHP prospectus, due to be published this Autumn.

The Northern Housing Consortium welcomes many of these details and many of them were included in our submission to the Spending Review, including the ability of strategic authorities to influence programme delivery in their areas, the continuation of regeneration flexibilities and ten-year strategic partnerships. We will continue to work with our members and government officials to ensure that the final SAHP prospectus reflects the needs of the North as much as possible.

 

Earlier in June, we were pleased to welcome Selvin Brown and officials from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) to see progress being made by NHC members in Greater Manchester to increase energy efficiency of homes.

This Greater Manchester tour follows a successful visit we organised with Selvin and his team to Government funded retrofit projects in South Yorkshire in May, and provided a useful opportunity to engage with DESNZ officials in the run up to the Spending Review.

The visit included a walking tour of Moss Side with NHC members MSV Housing – hearing about their Social Value initiatives, visiting a number of properties that have received successful retrofit works using DESNZ grant funding, and speaking with local residents about the positive impact of the works on their energy bills and wellbeing.

We also saw MSV Housing’s flagship ‘Cosy Home’ project which showcases how traditional, pre-war, brick-built, terraced houses can be made more energy efficient. Similar retrofit measures are being rolled out to 1200 hard-to-treat properties.

Over lunch, members of the Greater Manchester Housing Providers met and shared their experiences with Selvin and his team, including how they had experienced delivering home improvements using grant funding through the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund (WH:SHF).

Later in the day we visited Irwell Valley Homes’ £50m project in Sale West – which includes energy efficiency upgrades to existing homes, as well as multiple phases of new-build development to provide much-needed new affordable homes.

The Sale West scheme is a prime example of how multiple different funding sources can be pulled together to deliver large-scale physical improvements across an entire community. We also heard from a local resident about their experience living in the area and how the scheme has improved the estate and her family’s wellbeing.

It is part of our work to ensure future funding programmes bring maximum benefits to communities in the North, by linking up government officials with NHC members to share what’s happening on the ground.

A big thank you to all those involved!