There were so many great announcements on housing from the spending review it is difficult to know where to start. The headline announcement was a 40% increase in spending on affordable and social housing, with the emphasis on the ‘social housing’. It would be extremely easy to write about this massive investment, and a topic to come back to in the future, however I want to highlight one of the smallest allocations in the review.
The Small Sites Aggregator project is being trialled in Bristol, Sheffield, and Lewisham. This builds on proposed changes to planning rules to reduce bureaucracy and conditions. These conditions which are often so onerous that too many good urban sites are shelved before they even start. I have experienced firsthand how difficult it is to deliver small scale projects. I am proud because Bristol was one of the pioneers of thinking about these sites and it is fitting and unsurprising that Bristol is one of the incubators of this approach.
I would identify two unrelated projects which were responsible for this idea taking off. The first was located on a large 1930s council estate in the south of the city. A project called “We Can Make” identified the need for housing locally and the enormous number of un and underused spaces in the area, these were small pieces of land ignored by the original planners, including back land sites caught between gardens, the spaces between the mainly semi-detached estate and huge end of terrace gardens. A university project there identified well over 1,000 potential home plots. I convened a meeting which brought together, housing, planning, property, and urban design to develop a design code to help fast track these sites through the planning process.
Concurrently, I was approached by someone called Jez Sweetland who had the idea of a Bristol Housing Festival following a meeting with the mayor. Initially I thought he meant an event, the housing sector is not short of conferences. The proposal was a five year demonstration project promoting MMC housing. Fast forward the Housing Festival is now working nationally and has formed an alliance with Lloyds Bank to promote the development at scale of small sites, hence the aggregator project.
Small sites are often overlooked because people are looking for the big schemes. However, the collective impact of small sites can be significant. Firstly, the big schemes produce fantastic numbers, but absorption rates and infrastructure requirements can mean they take ten years or longer to deliver. Small sites tend to be in places where the infrastructure is already in place, they can address dereliction, increase density without adding height, allow people to remain in existing communities and much more. Elim Housing has recently moved a family into a property developed with Bristol City Council on a neglected plot as part of their initiative to address temporary accommodation with hopefully many more to follow.
There is a real opportunity to a big difference with small sites and its great news that the Government is investing in this programme.