Unlocking housing delivery, inclusive places and infrastructure integration

Regeneration efforts can face a range of challenges, from fragmented funding and strategies to competing priorities. At a roundtable hosted by Housing Today last month, representatives from across the sector – ranging from developers to housing associations to combined authorities – gathered to discuss potential solutions.

The roundtable, held at the UKREiiF conference in Leeds, took place at P+HS Architects’ dockside studio overlooking a sea of conference delegates from the first-floor office. Sharing ideas on how to creating truly inclusive places where people can put down roots, the panellists spoke of streets that need humanising, neighbourhoods that need stewarding, and resident voices that must be heard from day one.

They also confronted the realities that make finding a stable route to successful regeneration difficult – the funding pots that don’t align, the infrastructure that arrives years too late, and a housing crisis that continues to deepen. 

But the overarching question for those responsible for delivering new neighbourhoods is simple: what is true regeneration, and what will it take to deliver it? 

Who is regeneration for?

Across the panel, there was a clear consensus that early engagement with communities is the foundation of any socially rooted regeneration strategy. As Katie Shepherd, associate director at P+HS Architects put it, regeneration only works when it starts with “a holistic overview” that recognises the lived experience of residents. “These places are for those people,” she said. “Their voices need to be there from day one.”

Jill Thwaite, land director at Vistry West Yorkshire, agreed – and argued that true engagement avoids “death by consultation”. She said: “Regeneration is about having that community-led building to give them social agency, so [residents] can own the sites and help ensure that they are successful in the long term.”

For developer Socius, that sense of ownership is embedded directly into the design process. The firm’s director, Doug Higgins, described how it uses open design competitions and invites residents onto judging panels to create transparency and trust. “It instantly gets engagement,” he said. “People feel part of the scheme” through the inclusion of spaces for local operators, including cafes and nurseries, which can help knit the new neighbourhood into the existing one.

Regeneration is about having that community-led building to give [residents] social agency, so they can own the sites and help ensure that they are successful in the long term 

Jill Thwaite, land director at Vistry West Yorkshire

This emphasis on making regeneration for communities, not just around them, was echoed by others. Laura Broderick, programme director at the Good Homes Alliance, underscored the need to steward neighbourhoods and their housing for the long term. Regeneration, she said, must focus on future‑proofing homes “rather than just delivering what the immediate needs seem to be”. This means building to sustainable standards to avoid the need for future retrofit works.

Aïsha Butera, associate director of inclusive growth at AtkinsRéalis, added that housing affordability and service charges can undermine social inclusion if not planned for early. “It’s key for long‑term stewardship,” she highlighted.

Paul Dennison, head of development at Gleeds, advocated for the need to “humanise the streets”, using the example of 15-minute neighbourhoods. He said that breaking down the physical barriers created by car‑dominated layouts enables communities to come together.

For Leigh Stolworthy, transport planning discipline lead at Stantec UK, transport is an essential component of social infrastructure. He argued that the true value of regeneration lies in how well-connected communities are and whether residents have “access to the things that they need to live their life in the best possible way”.

Social and affordable housing

But how do these overarching ideas about social value translate into the delivery of homes?

Dennison argued that there should be no choice but to mandate social and affordable housing as part of the composition of any large mixed-use developments. “If you don’t mandate it, there’s going to be an awful lot of pressure on [social housing providers] to try and deliver social housing in competition with private, and you’re going to have friction that shouldn’t be there.”

On that point, Ed Tibbetts, regeneration programme director at Orbit Group, pointed out that the affordable and social housing sector has “got into a habit of just being a receiver of affordable homes rather than instigating it themselves”.

This dynamic, he said, is starting to change now as housing associations seek earlier involvement and greater influence over scheme design rather than providers just “coming in at the end to take section 106 units – or not even take 106 units”.

From the developer perspective, Thwaite described how the partnerships model has become fundamental to delivery. “Everything we do is partnerships‑led,” she said, with around 65% of Vistry homes pre‑sold across Yorkshire and the North-east and North-west – predominantly affordable housing. This early engagement with registered providers, she and Tibbetts agreed, reduces risk for housebuilders and increases section 106 uptake.

Melissa Flynn, head of development at Vistry North East, said this collaborative mindset must extend to the public sector. Her firm’s most successful projects have been those in which “the public sector have been involved at the outset”, through the creation of a supplementary planning document or a local plan, she said. This “sets the bar of quality, so no one can take it below that level”.

If you don’t mandate [social housing], there’s going to be an awful lot of pressure on [providers] to try and deliver it in competition with private and you’re going to have friction that shouldn’t be there 

Paul Dennison, head of development, Gleeds

In order to deliver at scale, Broderick advocated for a diversity of “players”, including more SME developers, while Katie Kavanagh, policy manager at the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA), called for further funding flexibility around regeneration.

Pointing to redundant high‑rise blocks across the region, she said there is clear ambition for full‑scale regeneration but “allowing that to then stack up with being able to fund it and demonstrate additionality in line with all the green book constraints” remains extremely difficult. Even with the new flexibilities of the integrated settlement, she said: “It’s still one of the questions we’re wrangling with. We might be able to find an answer to it, but at the moment we don’t know.”

Another way the sector can bend to “bring forward housing at pace and at a lower cost” is through a greater focus on MMC, Dennison suggested. He said MMC “potentially should be part of the solution, but because we’ve got a fragmented approach, we’ve failed to utilise that as a country.

“Many other countries do successfully use offsite manufacture in various forms to deliver homes more effectively than we do, and arguably put people into homes more quickly.”

The viability challenge: unlocking funding and the infrastructure lag

According to the experts, it is not only the strategic approach that is fragmented, but also the funding landscape.

Kavanagh noted that devolved bodies have historically been “constrained in some of the funding choices we’re able to make because of the conditions put on particular pots of money”, but is optimistic that the new integrated settlement will allow them to be more flexible in how they deploy funding and take a more “vision-led” approach to placemaking.

She said the authority is considering a “single front door” funding strategy, where “combined authority funding sits alongside housing funding and potentially local authority funding as well” to work with the public sector to deliver what communities require.

A further challenge is the difficulty of “quantifying qualitative benefits”, as Thwaite put it, including the social value, health outcomes and community stability that regeneration should aim for.

You can talk about all this great stuff, but if you can’t build it in the first place because the funding is not there, then all the other good things that flow from it become an issue 

Richard Williams, chief executive of Ringley Group

This issue came into sharp focus around the discussion of the 172,000 children (as of October 2025) in temporary accommodation, which multiple participants raised as one of the most urgent and expensive features of the housing crisis.

“What are we playing at?” asked Thwaite, sharing the outrage and disappointment felt by many around the table. She described “working out how to justify getting the money to spend” and liaising with water companies to secure the infrastructure to allow residents to move in.

“So we’ve got planning permission, but we can’t occupy the houses. We’re not helping ourselves in addressing the housing needs and making things better for those children in temporary accommodation.”

Richard Williams, chief executive of Ringley Group, underlined the futility of having a vision without the funding to bring it to fruition. “You can talk about all this great stuff,” he warned, “but if you can’t build it in the first place because the funding is not there, then all the other good things that flow from it become an issue.”

He pointed to schemes with consent for thousands of homes that simply cannot start because utilities infrastructure will not be delivered for several years. Power and water networks lagging behind in development timelines can stall regeneration before it even begins.

Williams also argued that many of today’s infrastructure challenges stem from decades of under‑investment, with the effects felt unevenly across the country. Using the South-west as an example, he said the region is “catching up with the lag of not investing” in strategic systems such as water and energy.

He added that the “sell‑off of all the energy suppliers years ago”, referring to the privatisation and fragmentation of the UK’s energy sector from the late 1980s onwards, has left the country without a co-ordinated national plan, meaning there is no “instant fix” for getting in place the big‑ticket infrastructure needed to support regeneration.

However, Dennison questioned whether the problem with utilities lies less in statutory obligations and more in confidence. He noted that providers are already required to supply water, power and drainage to new development, but often hesitate to invest ahead of need because “they don’t have the confidence that development is going to happen to put the investment in themselves”.

Because utility companies ultimately recover capital expenditure through user tariffs, he suggested that greater certainty – potentially through central government guarantees – could give them the confidence to invest in strategic infrastructure upfront, following a “build it and they will come” principle.

Here, Stolworthy added that establishing transport needs within the masterplanning stage rather than as an afterthought would help “reduce that lag a little bit in the transport space”.

A collaborative approach

Stolworthy also warned that infrastructure lag is often a product of misalignment, rendering projects “doomed to fail”. If regional and local plans, spatial development frameworks and investment programmes are not sequenced together, it means schemes don’t have “the right ingredients at the right time” to keep them progressing at a satisfactory rate.

This is particularly acute outside combined authority areas, where local authorities lack the powers to co-ordinate transport and housing at scale, he said.

Within combined authorities, however, the growing role of metro mayors was seen by panellists as instrumental to drive collaboration across complex systems. “I think we’ve got to try and get more power to those sorts of individuals to drive things through with a passion,” said Dennison, describing how regional authorities with strong leaders can influence real change.

Ben Simpson, planning director at Lichfields, agreed that mayors “can be very effective because they take ownership and they have a drive, direction and mandate to deliver”, and should be given the powers and investment to do so.

He warned that leaving regeneration to a “plan-led system” driven by indecisive local politicians generates a “lowest common denominator” output that results in failures like the “disgraceful” amount of children stuck in temporary accommodation. “One thing we’re really bad at in this country is thinking and acting for the long term,” he said, building on a point made by Stolworthy that local plans rarely survive political cycles.

Dennison argued that regeneration should focus on bringing brownfield and greyfield sites back into use so they “re‑contribute to the community” rather than pushing development to the edge of towns.

He said these sites can create better places and more sustainable local economies, but come with challenges – ageing or inadequate infrastructure, contamination, flood risk and costly enabling works. Developers are not responsible for delivering all of that, he stressed, and local authorities and agencies must help enable regeneration by de‑risking sites to kick‑start them.

At the end of the day, the developers are the ones to tell you whether it’s viable, feasible, fundable 

Aïsha Butera, associate director for inclusive growth, AtkinsRéalis

However, Butera, drawing on her experience in local government, argued that councils are often treated as the sole custodians of regeneration, when in reality, “they are facilitators to get you through governance”. She emphasised that developers and landowners must be equal partners: “At the end of the day, the developers are the ones to tell you whether it’s viable, feasible, fundable.”

Nevertheless, Butera pointed out, council-created local plans remain one of the most powerful tools for setting expectations around density, tenure mix, design quality and infrastructure, particularly around homelessness and neighbourhood visions.

For this panel, true regeneration is not a question of ambition, which exists in abundance, but of viability, strategy and long-termism. Stakeholders want inclusive neighbourhoods, long‑term stewardship, human‑centred streets, homes people can afford, and infrastructure that arrives when it’s needed. Delivering this at pace and scale requires alignment, including funding pots that work together and planning that outlasts political cycles.

As Henrietta Pissarro, residential lead at P+HS Architects, put it, regeneration depends on “large‑scale strategic thinking” because only then can developers, local authorities and the market have “confidence in a long‑term strategic pipeline”. The sector cannot wait for regeneration to happen – it must actively create the conditions for it.

But regeneration cannot be done in silos. Communities must shape it, authorities enable it, developers and housing associations partner in it, and national systems stop working at cross‑purposes. When those elements move together, regeneration can lead to places people can truly call home.