The conditions for affordable housing growth have not aligned like this in decades. Government grant rates at levels not seen for a generation, a National Housing Bank offering borrowing at a fixed 0.1% interest, a freshly published Social Housing Bill, and a Labour government that has, by most measures, got housing policy right. And yet, across the sector, boards are hesitating. Risk registers are growing. Development pipelines are stalling.
Stevenson opened with a deliberate return to first principles. What does "housing crisis" actually mean? Not as a policy concept, but as a lived reality.
In Stoke-on-Trent, where he has been working in an interim executive capacity, roughly 30 people sleep rough every single night. A man died of hypothermia on the city's streets before Christmas. Behind the rough sleepers sit several hundred more people sofa-surfing. A single development of 200 to 300 homes, a project entirely within the capacity of most registered providers, could, with the right wraparound support, effectively end street homelessness in a city of that scale.
The point is not rhetorical. It is a planning and delivery problem. The homes can be built. The money is now available. The question is whether organisations have the will and the board confidence to proceed.
The National Housing Bank went live in April. It offers a fixed interest rate at 0.1%, against the 5% to 5.5% most RPs currently borrow at. On a scheme of £12 million, £25 million or £30 million, the sensitivity of that gap is enormous. In simple terms, at current grant levels from Homes England, running at £50,000 to £80,000 per property on a good day, schemes that would not have stacked up three years ago now do. Add the National Housing Bank rate to that picture, and organisations of medium size could see three to five times more development headroom than their current business plans anticipate.
The Continuous Market Engagement (CME) route remains available for providers not waiting on the new programme decisions expected in October. For those with sites ready, there is no reason to delay.
Homes England's investment managers are actively engaged. Stevenson's advice from his Stoke experience: go open book with them early, show them your viability numbers, and ask directly for higher grant rates. They will say no if it is unreasonable. They will often meet you somewhere between where you are and where you need to be. Not asking is the only guaranteed failure.
Several practitioners in the session raised the issue Stevenson describes as the "pinch point": low land values, rising construction costs, Future Homes Standard requirements converging on already-marginal schemes. It is a genuine problem and there are no magic solutions, but there is a systematic approach.
The levers, in order of impact, are:
Interest rate. The single biggest dial. If a scheme does not stack up at 5.5%, run the appraisal at the National Housing Bank rate. If it stacks up there, the path forward is clear. If it still does not, move to the next lever.
Grant rate. Talk to your Homes England investment manager before accepting a viability gap as terminal. Request more. Show your workings. Where there is genuine housing need, and in most low-value areas there is, they have both the mandate and the appetite to help.
Loan period. Extending from 35 to 40 years on a residual appraisal can materially change headroom. Run the scenarios.
Construction procurement. Stevenson is emphatic: do not cut quality to close a viability gap. Cut inefficiency. Scrutinise your employer's agent selection, your clerk of works arrangements, your procurement process. The construction cost line is the most volatile input in any appraisal; managing it intelligently is preferable to underspecifying the end product.
Ground conditions. For industrial and post-industrial sites, common in areas like Stoke, Sandwell, parts of Manchester and Birmingham, Homes England holds remediation funding specifically for contaminated land. Engaging investment managers before committing to acquisition costs on a difficult site can unlock funding that transforms viability entirely.
On Section 106 and LPA tenure policies: where a local authority's tenure requirements are misaligned with an organisation's mission and corporate strategy, Stevenson's position is direct. Talk to the planning authority, explain the mismatch, and if necessary, choose to work in a different area. The democratic process will work itself out. The obligation is to build the right homes somewhere, not to build the wrong homes under duress.
At a structural level, the sector's current development hesitancy has a clear origin. The Regulator of Social Housing has held a firm grip over the past several years, appropriately in some cases where stock management failures were real. The consequence is that development teams across many well-run RPs are working inside organisations where the risk lens now dominates board thinking to a degree that is no longer calibrated.
Stevenson's recommendation, aimed directly at the regulator: for RPs that are well-run, financially sound, and managing their existing stock effectively, that grip should be released. The "concrete collar," as he characterises it, is preventing the best organisations from doing what the moment demands.
For development professionals operating within these organisations, there is a practical discipline that helps. Put risk at the top of every project meeting agenda, not the bottom. When risk is an afterthought, it surfaces as a crisis. When it is addressed first and systematically, it builds board confidence because it demonstrates that the development team has genuinely stress-tested what they are proposing. That confidence compounds over time. Boards that trust their development teams to manage risk properly are boards that approve programmes rather than defer them.
The framing that resonates: opportunities that are sufficiently strong do not require the absence of risk. They require the risks to be understood well enough that the balance tips clearly toward proceeding.
The honest assessment is that construction cost uncertainty is not going away. Fuel prices move in one direction. Conflict in the Middle East, the Ukraine war, and ongoing instability in global supply chains feed through to raw material costs with a lag that is difficult to model precisely. This creates genuine problems when taking schemes to boards that are looking for certainty.
The argument Stevenson makes, and would make in any board setting, is that housing operates on a 40-year loan horizon, not a five-year political cycle. When you take a loan over that period, you are not betting on the next five years of stability. The geopolitical turbulence of 2025 and 2026 will be resolved, succeeded, and followed by other turbulence. Housing demand is structural and demographic. That is the lens through which development investment should be evaluated.
The practical hedge on construction cost volatility is to pursue UK-sourced materials and UK-compatible construction methods wherever possible. Timber frame for low-rise schemes is now both cost-competitive and fast to deliver. It reduces supply chain exposure to import disruptions. It aligns with sustainability objectives. It is increasingly the default for good reason.
A parallel shift is underway that practitioners should read clearly. The for-profit RP sector is growing rapidly into the space that not-for-profit associations are leaving behind. Organisations like Sage have scaled to 20,000 homes. L&G's affordable arm now accounts for 12% of affordable housing delivery in the West Midlands. These are not marginal players. Not-for-profit RPs that choose to become essentially asset management organisations: managing existing stock, developing modestly, not growing, are making a legitimate choice. But they are also making themselves smaller relative to the sector, and smaller organisations face greater exposure to regulatory pressure, merger, or takeover. The stasis that feels like caution may, over a medium-term horizon, turn out to be the riskier position. The opportunity available right now: the grant rates, the National Housing Bank, the planning permissions, the policy support, is the best alignment of growth conditions the sector has seen since the post-war council building boom of the 1950s and 1960s. The organisations that move in this window will be materially larger and stronger when the window closes than those that wait for certainty that will not come.
One point Stevenson returned to with force: the homes being built now will be occupied for 60 years or more. Every viability decision, every procurement shortcut, every spec reduction to close a viability gap has an occupant on the other side of it. Someone will live in that home for five years, ten years, potentially a lifetime.
Future Homes Standard is coming. Net zero carbon trajectories are accelerating. Getting quality right in the homes built now is not a cost premium; it is the avoidance of a future liability. The homes that will need expensive retrofitting in 2035 are being designed today. The development professionals making those decisions have more influence over the long-term sustainability of UK housing stock than almost any other group of practitioners.
That is not a burden. It is the argument for taking the opportunity seriously.