Meeting Place brought together house builders, councils, social impact leads, housing associations and others to an event on the political and delivery landscape for housing in Kent last week.

Natalie Elphicke-Ross OBE was the keynote speaker, passionately emphasising the importance of having a decent home on one’s life chances with the incongruous fact that newts’ homes have a higher priority in UK planning over homes for human beings.

Her key themes included welcoming the return of housing ambition with the new Government’s target for 1.5m homes this Parliament, tempering the vision with realism that planning reform alone can’t deliver these homes.

Her speech also explored:

• The importance of The Mansion House speech and Spring Budget being pivotal for the Government to signpost that ‘housing for growth’ is still a key part of their growth agenda (as little focus was evident in the Autumn Budget)
• Finding a smart way to harness institutional investment and private finance alongside government funding for financing housing delivery
• Getting the right regulatory, legal and financial frameworks to support long-term and sustainable housing investment at scale, together with partnership working

Natalie’s speech was followed by the two stimulating panels that followed. The first discussed what good engagement looks like with Stacey Robins (Wealden District Council), Kate Rowe (Barratt David Wilson) and Cllr Michael Horwood (Sevenoaks District Council), chaired by George Kup (Meeting Place). Early, continuous, and meaningful engagement was agreed upon as best practice among the panellists, with a variety of interesting examples mentioned.

They agreed that the traditional village hall consultation event does not ensure engagement with a wide audience, missing out on those harder-to-reach age groups and demographics. Instead, ideas around online meetings, pop-up events and even the use of AI were mentioned as tools that could help to further engage with a broader audience of local stakeholders. The discussion moved on to identifying the ‘silent majority’ and how important it is to help politicians get to hear from not just the vocal few.

Cllr Michael Horwood was then joined by Vivian Wall (Motionspot), and Etienne Robinson Sivyer (Keltbray) on the second panel chaired by Ruth Skidmore (Meeting Place), for a discussion and workshop on the importance of designing and creating inclusive business and home environments and community spaces.

The panel brought tangible examples of how to ensure that we are creating places that are equitable and accessible, focusing as much on the spaces in between as the buildings themselves. The conversation opened up to explore how we can bring local communities and elected members on a journey to say ‘yes’ to development and how social impact can be the catalyst for this.

The workshop session then asked the room to think about how we level the playing field, exploring whether this could be achieved through incentives or penalties. The common theme of the discussion was legacy. Building on the previous panel it was clear that engagement needs to go beyond a one-off event and build genuine trust between the industry and local people through long-term social impact.