‘I could walk you down a road where the average life expectancy drops by 20 years within a mile…’ Matt Forrest on regeneration opportunities and challenges in the Tees Valley

It is with a mixture of quiet pride and frustration that Matt Forrest talks about the Tees Valley. The chief executive of Middlesborough-based housing association Thirteen Group is passionate about housing-led regeneration and tackling deprivation in the region.

“I guess a lot of your readers won’t know an awful lot about the Tees Valley?” he asks Building before immediately painting a vivid picture of the region: “We’ve got these jewels in the crown, fantastic northern towns with strong, deep industrial heritage, like Stockton, Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Redcar. 

“We’ve got everything from the railways to the steel, maritime and chemical [works] history, all of that going on. And there’s some absolutely wonderful things about these places – but they are also facing some of the biggest challenges with indices of deprivation anywhere in the country.”

We’ve got the worst record on arson in the country

Some areas in the region have crime levels “as serious as in the biggest cities in the country”, Forrest says, before reeling off child poverty statistics and high levels of people not in employment, education and training among the other issues faced.

“We’ve got the worst record on arson in the country,” he adds ruefully. “I could walk you down a road where the average life expectancy drops by 20 years within a mile,” he adds.

It is a striking way to start a discussion about the new Tees Valley Housing Partnership (TVHP), which launched in December and which Forrest chairs. It soon becomes apparent that he has a deep passion and desire to improve placemaking and outcomes for people in the region.

Forrest is hoping his appointment as chair of TVHP will enable him to influence and make a difference to regeneration on a bigger scale. So what is the partnership, and how does it work?

The TVHP consists of eight housing associations, five local authorities and the combined authority itself. Its aim is to pool members’ knowledge and expertise, attract funding and investment, and deliver better outcomes for local people.

Sharing information to align development to economic growth goals

TVHP members manage 52,000 homes, one in five of the homes in the region. They are planning to build another 3,500 homes in the next five years but want to do a great deal more.

So, what are the immediate priorities? A large part of the partnership’s work is centred around greater communication about development plans and moves are already underway for the partners to share information about their pipeline. The group is also exploring how a strategic place partnership (SPP) with Homes England could work.

An SPP is a formal collaboration between Homes England and combined authorities to accelerate housing delivery, regeneration, and sustainable growth in line with local priorities. Discussions with the agency on this are ongoing. 

For Forrest, the key is for the providers and the combined authority to not only secure bids under the new £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme but to have wider conversations about strategic sites to develop or regenerate.

“Pre-dating the TVHP, our ability to see where those strategic sites would be and have a joined-up conversation on them across the Tees Valley was much more limited, whereas now what I expect to happen is that from this strategic place partnership, there will be a handful of strategic sites where we can say, ‘this is a strategic regeneration opportunity, we can bring this cash here’. We can look with third parties to move this forward and be a bit more ambitious.”

Previously we have been individually sourcing those sites, but what those sites won’t haven’t necessarily done is join up to the overall growth ambitions for the area

Knowing which sites are important to the councils, combined authority or Homes England means that investment “becomes more predictable and more secure,” Forrest says. Sharing pipeline information also has other advantages compared to an approach of providers individually developing sites on an ad-hoc or speculative basis.

“Previously we have been individually sourcing those sites, but what those sites won’t necessarily have done is join up to the overall growth ambitions for the area,” he says.

Forrest has a vision where housing is aligned with local priorities and the region’s broader economic opportunities, such as transport links and the development of Teesworks – the former Redcar steelworks which is now a redevelopment site and freeport.

“The beauty of the Homes England funding, with the strategic affordable homes programme over 10 years in theory, is that some of the most exciting regeneration opportunities will take that amount of time. You start to be able to plan strategically over a longer period of time and then deliver more value as a result, because it is connected to the economic opportunity.”

Sharing pipeline information will help providers to come together with each other or third-party investors to take on opportunities that would be too big for individual providers like Thirteen Group on their own, Forrest says.

He is hopeful that providers will also avoid bidding against each other for the same plots of land, which “wastes everybody’s time” as well as pushing prices up.

But how do the partnership’s members ensure they can get adequate opportunities to develop if they avoid competing on sites?

“What we do is, as part of the Tees Valley Housing Partnership thinking, we grow the size of the entire pie. We make ourselves more investable, more strategic, so there’s more opportunities for everyone.”

Funding solutions

It is not just the prospect of a £39bn, 10-year SAHP that is enthusing Forrest in terms of funding. He also believes the government’s £2.5bn low-interest loans scheme will help “unlock a lot more homes” in the region.

Forrest earlier this year said that the model – first recommended in Building’s sister title Housing Today and the G15’s inaugural State of the Capital report last year – has been widely seen as a solution aimed at landlords in London with constrained interest cover. However he believes the new funding will help to make marginal sites viable and attract investment for regeneration projects across the Tees Valley.

Under the model, providers access repayable loans at a nominal interest rate of just 0.1%, reducing the amount of commercial borrowing needed upfront to develop. A total of 60% of the fund is ring-fenced for London, given the pressures there, but Forrest is hopeful that his region can benefit.

“I know there’s a big focus on London, but there’s a chunk to be spent outside, and we’re really excited about what that could mean for us,” he says.

The low-cost loans could help to get sites that are difficult to develop “over the line”, particularly when used alongside other funding. “If we have some Homes England cash, some private investment – and it might be a mixed-use site with a bit of Housing Delivery Fund to get the brownfield side moving – and some loan capital as well… I think that can unlock a lot more than we would have had previously,” he says.

The loans could help to regenerate brownfield sites for projects similar to Thirteen Group’s 145-home Union Village scheme. This saw it bring a long-derelict industrial site in Middlesborough back into use for housing.

Forrest believes the loans could also help attract investment. “The private investment, or private-partnership piece, becomes easier because you’ve got this low interest capital in there as well. I think it’s a real opportunity.”

There are “different pots of funding” and Forrest is looking at the Warm Homes Plan and also whether there are opportunities to work with the North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board, which allocates NHS budgets in the region. “The ICB has challenges, so they have people in long-term care or out of area care, and there are some emerging conversations about what capital funding might look like in that area, so we might be able to work on some of those pieces.”

For Forrest, the providers’ group provides a forum for this kind of joined-up delivery.

Social and community regeneration

But what type of regeneration is he hopeful of galvanising in the region? He breaks it down into three pillars of regeneration: physical, social and economic and community.

Talking about the first, he says the region has a lot of older housing stock – “old street housing with issues attached to it”. He says the “ambitious” towns in the region want to reinvigorate their town centres and “offer housing” within that, including affordable housing and private rental homes.

Forrest also sees opportunities with the swathes of brownfield land in the region, a legacy of much of its industrial past. Remediation of the land is often needed due to industrial contamination.

“There are still bits of land available that with a little bit of brownfield type funding, we could bring to life,” he says. “There are, for example, areas near the river where there has previously been industry for chemical works that need remediation.

“Even where you’re working on an old street pattern, or we’ve done a little bit of regeneration of tower blocks and we’ve taken a block down, and you take out what’s underneath the foundation, you find there is further stuff on the site that has been covered up years before.”

The government has various funds, including £234m via the Brownfield Housing Fund, to help remediate land for development and Forrest hopes the region can access a share of it.

He says this “physical” regeneration of areas – which is what many people would think of when they hear the word “regeneration” – is difficult but is nevertheless “one of the easier parts” compared to the other types of regeneration. In the Tees Valley, social and economic regeneration also “plays a big part in the regeneration puzzle”.

Forrest is passionate about getting people into work – or closer to work – and says the providers in the group have got 3,000 residents into jobs in the past four years and employed more than 400 apprentices. “There’s a really strong track record there of getting people back into being economically active, which, as you know, has a big knock-on, into wellbeing and health,” he says.

The final part of regeneration, says Forrest, is “community regeneration”. By this he means working with community groups to enable them to do more, rather than “going and doing things to people”.

He cites the work Thirteen is doing to support a group working on tackling loneliness as an example. “At Thirteen, we put a large number of small community groups into the communities to help seed this activity,” he says.

On tackling anti-social behaviour, Forrest says multi-agency working is key, with the local authority, police and the registered providers adopting a joined-up approach “in order to shift the dial”. 

“The housing partnership provides a good vehicle for connecting all that together,” he adds.

Forrest may have started off talking about the many challenges in the Tees Valley region, but he is certainly not content to just wring his hands about it. He is hoping that the TVHP can bring about a joined-up approach to housing and regeneration, where development is aligned with the region’s goals for economic growth.

He is also quietly hopeful that the partnership will make it easier to deliver on social and community regeneration, to make these ambitious towns – these “jewels in the crown”–  thrive as successful and vibrant places to live and work.