The mayor of the Liverpool City Region has suggested that Homes England’s powers and spending should be devolved to combined authority areas.
Speaking at a Housing Community Summit panel on Tuesday, Steve Rotheram said he had “made no secret of the fact that I believe that we don’t need another body doing the similar sort of thing to what we are doing”.
Asked whether this meant Homes England’s role should be replaced by regional bodies, Rotheram accepted that the government’s housing and regeneration agency continued to be needed.
“Not every area has a metro mayor, so they will need Homes England as the accountable body to try and get housing done in those areas,” he said.
“[But] In those areas where you have a combined authority, I don’t see that there’s the need.”
It came a day after Homes England’s chair, Pat Ritchie, revealed at the same two-day conference that the agency was in the process of creating an internally devolved structure.
Ritchie said Homes England was recruiting regional chief executives to underpin a new model, which is “likely” to be divided across five regions, each with its own team and leader.
On the panel with Rotheram, Akash Paun, programme director at the Institute for Government, said that he thought the government wanted to move towards devolving Homes England’s affordable homes programme (AHP), but that “apparently it’s not moving particularly fast on that”.
Currently, only the Greater London Authority has devolved control over the AHP.
“I can’t imagine it’s going to be fully devolved – I don’t think anytime soon,” said Paun.
“[But] I can imagine they might try it in some of those leading established mayoral strategic authorities.
“Greater Manchester and West Midlands are always the trailblazers, but certainly Liverpool City Region and West Yorkshire are not far behind in terms of institutional maturity”.