Corporate report

Homes England Annual Report 2024 to 2025 — Chair's Foreword and Performance Report, accessible version

Updated 19 November 2025

Applies to England

Homes England Annual Report and Accounts 2024/25

For Homes England ^{[footnote 1]}

Presented to Parliament pursuant to Paragraphs 11 and 12 of schedule 1 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008.

Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 15 July 2025.

HC 1063

ISBN: 978-1-5286-5826-3

1. Chair’s Foreword

Pat Ritchie CBE
Chair

I am honoured to introduce this year’s Annual Report and Accounts, having assumed the role of Chair on 1 May 2025, shortly after the end of the financial year.

This report covers the period during which Homes England was led by my predecessor, Peter Freeman. I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge his exceptional leadership and invaluable contribution to furthering the mission of this Agency throughout his tenure.

Peter served as Chair of the Homes England Board for nearly 5 years. During this time Peter – alongside Peter Denton who also concluded his role as Chief Executive in January 2025 – has helped to advance social equity across England through the creation of more homes and communities. Through his dedication and unwavering commitment, Peter has helped ensure more people can access quality homes in thriving communities.

As Deputy Chair, alongside the Board, we are really proud of the Agency’s achievements across the year outlined in this Annual Report and Accounts.

We are very pleased to be working with Eamonn Boylan who took up the role of Chief Executive following Peter Denton’s departure.

With 4 decades of public sector leadership experience and exceptional expertise in place- based regeneration, Eamonn has brought precisely the skills needed to guide Homes England.

I am particularly pleased that Homes England has already made significant strides to deliver against the priorities the Housing Minister set the Agency in September 2024, shortly after the election.

During 2024/25, Homes England:

• beat its housing delivery targets, ultimately helping towards realising the government’s 1.5 million homes target

• sped up delivery on sites which needed extra support, helping to unblock the creation of over 20,000 new homes, through the Advisory Team for Large Applications (ATLAS) service, run in partnership with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the New Homes Accelerator (NHA)

• supported the government’s work on new towns and other major schemes by providing expertise and advice to the New Towns Taskforce

• allocated all its affordable housing funding during the year, delivering 28,370 homes (up 15% from 2023/24), and starting the build of a further 30,087

• continued to promote market diversification, supporting hundreds of Small and Medium- sized Enterprises (SMEs) with a Home Building Fund, championing Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) with 22% of our supported completions on the Affordable Housing Programme delivered using MMC, and reinforcing our commitment to net zero home building; I am particularly pleased that 90% of the completions Homes England enabled have achieved an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of B or above

During the year the Agency’s role was recognised in a recent Public Bodies Review, an independent review which all arm’s-length bodies must undergo periodically to assess their performance, relevance and value for money. The review was published on 8 April 2024.

As well as recognising the strong move towards placemaking and regeneration already underway, the review affirmed the Agency’s key role as a national public body of scale, also noting its effective delivery and stewardship of vitally important home ownership and building safety schemes, on behalf of government.

The review made a number of recommendations for improvement, many of which were implemented in year.

I want to express my deep appreciation for the dedication, energy and hard work of our colleagues. It’s because of them – and the many partners we collaborate with – that we’ve made real strides toward building communities where people can live, work and flourish. We’ve helped more families move out of temporary housing, and we have taken important steps toward a fairer and more inclusive society.

Since my appointment as Chair, I have been working closely with the Board and Executive Leadership Team to ensure a smooth transition and to build on the strong foundations laid over the past year.

Looking ahead, I am committed to ensuring the Agency continues to create more homes, helping deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation, ensuring that high-quality, well-designed, and sustainable homes become the norm, not the exception.

A key priority will be to ensure that the commitments made in the June 2025 Spending Review, including a new Social and Affordable Homes Programme and the development of a national housing bank, are ready for launch in April 2026.

By working with local communities, we will ensure everyone – no matter their background – has security, a place to call home, and the opportunity to thrive.

2. Performance Report

The Performance Report provides a summary of Homes England and how we have performed during the year.

The report is broken down into two areas:

• Performance Overview, which sets out an overview of Homes England, our purpose, strategic direction, performance and risks.

• Performance Analysis, providing detail of our delivery performance, risks impacting delivery, a financial review, and work being undertaken in relation to sustainability and our climate-related financial disclosures.

2.1 Performance Overview

This section provides an overview of Homes England, our purpose, strategic direction, performance and risks.

It also explains adoption of the going concern basis in preparation of this Annual Report and Accounts.

Chief Executive’s Statement

Eamonn Boylan
Chief Executive

I am pleased to present Homes England’s Annual Report and Accounts for 2024/25, a year in which the Agency made significant progress toward meeting the government’s ambitious housing delivery and place-making targets, helping to realise the ambitions of communities across the country.

I joined Homes England in January 2025 as the Agency’s interim Chief Executive with a clear mandate to build on the strong foundation laid by Peter Denton – strengthening our partnerships, empowering local leaders, and driving the delivery of housing that makes a real difference to lives.

It has been 15 years since I was Deputy Chief Executive of the Homes and Communities Agency (the predecessor of Homes England) and while a lot has changed for all of us between then and now, the Agency’s mission remains as critical as ever.

Indeed, this year has been a pivotal year for Homes England as we aligned our work with the government’s commitment to build 1.5 million new homes during this Parliament. We have embraced this challenge with determination and innovation, working across the sector - nationally, regionally and locally - to accelerate delivery and the regeneration of places.

We have also actively facilitated the government’s desire to progress devolution, establishing strategic partnerships with combined authorities and local leaders, providing crucial technical expertise and funding to deliver place-based housing solutions that empower communities to make local visions a reality.

Driving housing delivery

We made impressive strides in accelerating housing delivery across the country, in many places beating our targets. This includes:

• enabling the completion of over 36,850 new homes versus a target of 36,484

• facilitating the start of construction for an additional 38,300 homes, exceeding expectations by over 5,200 homes

• unlocking land that is capable of delivering more than 79,000 further homes, versus a target of 59,956

This strong performance represents real progress in addressing the nation’s housing needs, creating communities and delivering homes where they’re needed most.

Ensuring more people have a place to call home

Affordable housing remains at the heart of our mission. This year, we maximised the delivery of social rent homes through the Affordable Homes Programme, bolstered by an additional £500 million announced in the government’s first Autumn Budget and a further £300 million in February 2025. The Chancellor’s Spring Statement in March 2025 included more good news for affordable housing with a further £2 billion top up for affordable home creation.

During the year we supported over 230,000 households with managing their Help to Buy equity loan accounts, including guiding over 27,000 households in redeeming their loans, and supporting nearly 200,000 customer calls.

As well as shepherding government investment into affordable home creation and ownership, the Agency also continued to use its expertise and influence to drive public-private partnerships that will deliver thousands of affordable homes across many years. For example, Homes England’s equity investment in Habiko, a partnership with Pension Insurance Corporation plc and Muse Places Limited, will enable the creation of over 3,000 low-carbon, low-energy affordable homes for rent.

Supporting devolution

Homes England’s role as a placemaking catalyst has seen us expand our Strategic Place Partnerships (SPPs) to 7, welcoming Cambridge & Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA), North East Combined Authority and Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. These partnerships are vital in supporting the government’s devolution agenda and ensuring local communities shape their own future.^{[footnote 2]} For example, our partnership with CPCA is already helping to further accelerate plans to develop Station Quarter in Peterborough, one of the country’s fastest growing cities, and in Cambridge, where average house prices and land values are amongst the highest in the UK.

Homes England has also committed considerable funding to accelerate the Waterbeach New Town development, with the potential to deliver 11,000 homes. This includes over £23 million to relocate a railway station to directly unlock 4,500 homes, in partnership with Waterbeach Development Company. These plans are in addition to the existing £61 million loan at the former Waterbeach Barracks and airfield site, led by Urban&Civic, with plans to deliver 6,500 homes on completion.

We continued to work with leaders to bring to life the housing and infrastructure visions of local communities, driving the creation of more homes and supporting hundreds of local regeneration projects. Across the country, Homes England is catalysing the visions of local cities, towns and rural areas, creating not just more homes, but also thriving communities with access to healthcare, education and jobs.

Building partnerships with the market to catalyse housing growth

In November 2024, we connected over 375 leaders from domestic and international institutional investors, with developers, housebuilders, regeneration specialists, housing associations, and local authorities at our Investment Symposium. This event created new partnerships to drive the scale of housebuilding and urban regeneration needed across England.

We’ve excelled in creating innovative finance solutions to help all parts of the market. For example, we expanded our partnership with Invest & Fund Limited to £45 million, extending it to 2030 to support SME developers with the potential to deliver an additional 600 homes.^{[footnote 3]} Our £250 million master developer joint venture with Oaktree Capital Management and Greycoat Real Estate will unlock and accelerate large-scale development sites across England. And our £50 million investment in Schroders Capital’s Real Estate Impact Fund will address the shortage of social and affordable accommodation and support town centre regeneration.

Ensuring home safety

As a delivery partner for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) cladding remediation programmes, Homes England has made substantial progress enhancing resident safety following the Grenfell tragedy.

Through the Building Safety Fund (BSF), we’ve completed remediation on 123 tall buildings (over 18 metres in height), with work underway on a further 45 sites, distributing £947.5 million in grants to date.

2024/25 marked the first full operational year of the Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS), expanding our remit to include buildings over 11 metres tall (11-18 metres in London). Despite challenges from evolving safety regulations, we’ve significantly improved safety for thousands of residents. Royal View in Brighton exemplifies this success – a 15 metre residential building housing 33 flats that received £3.54 million for comprehensive remediation completed between May 2024 and April 2025.

Looking ahead

As we move into the next financial year, we remain committed to playing our part in getting Britain building again, creating jobs across England and helping the government deliver on its ambition to create 1.5 million homes across this Parliament - ultimately ensuring many more people have access to a home in a thriving community.

We have a very clear and ambitious future. But we must adapt to the changing environment we are in, both nationally and regionally.

The government’s forthcoming Long-Term Housing Strategy will further clarify the Agency’s important role in supporting the needs of an increasingly devolved country, as well as the new tools and mechanisms we will have to help accelerate housing delivery.

We must adapt our operating model to ensure our structures, systems, and processes are robust and efficient.

In particular we will further strengthen the Agency’s spend controls after irregular expenditure was uncovered during the year. Detail is provided in the Risk Events and Near Misses Reporting section of the Governance Statement within the Accountability Report.

Our new, 5-year strategic plan, due to be published in Autumn 2025, will set out our vision and roadmap for how we will work together with our partners across the public and private sectors to continue to innovate, invest, and inspire to deliver the homes that England needs. This will include our plans to stand up a national housing bank and deliver the new Affordable Homes Programme from 1 April 2026, priorities set out by the government in June 2025.

Organisational Overview

Who We Are

Homes England (also referred to as ‘the Agency’) plays a central role in delivering on the government’s promise to build 1.5 million new homes and driving economic growth by getting Britain building again. Our 2023 to 2028 strategic plan sets out our ambitions not only to help deliver the homes the country needs but how we will also work with partners to support the creation, regeneration, development and continued wellbeing of communities in England. Our aim in this is to bring confidence, pleasure and pride back to our towns, cities and rural communities.

We are a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). Our Statutory Objects are contained in the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008, the legislation creating the Homes and Communities Agency, which in 2018 adopted ‘Homes England’ as its trading name to underpin its mission and purpose.

We are governed by a Board, appointed by the Secretary of State for MHCLG, and welcomed 5 new Board members during the financial year. During 2024/25, the Board was led by our Chair, Peter Freeman CBE, succeeded by Pat Ritchie CBE in May 2025. Our Executive team includes specialists in housing, regeneration, land and development, investment, finance and risk management.

Our ambition is to deliver the homes people need by working in collaboration with equally ambitious partners to deliver homes and places that our communities need. In line with the government’s devolution agenda, we will make place-based working central to how we operate.

We work in collaboration with partners from across the country who share our ambition. These include local authorities, private developers, housing associations, lenders and infrastructure providers. Our activities are designed to respond to local needs and make a difference where the market alone cannot do so.

Our new strategic plan, due to be published in Autumn 2025, will set out how we will bring together our unique blend of skills, experience, land and financial support (equity, grant, debt and guarantees), to help enable local leaders to deliver their visions for towns, cities and rural communities.

We also manage a number of important government programmes, such as the Affordable Homes Programme and support the social housing sector which is central to the government’s Plan for Change.

More detail on our organisational structure and the composition of our Board and Committees can be found in note 11 of the Financial Statements and in the Corporate Governance Report of this Annual Report and Accounts.

Our Statutory Objects

These are set out in the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008, and are:

• to improve the supply and quality of housing in England

• to secure the regeneration or development of land or infrastructure in England

• to support in other ways the creation, regeneration or development of communities in England or their continued well-being

• to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development and good design in England

All with a view to meeting the needs of people living in England. Our Objects do not permit us to operate in Greater London and where we do so, this is under powers of the Greater London Authority, delegated to us by the London Mayor.

Our Role: How Homes England Supports Government Priorities

We intervene in many ways to boost housing supply. Our strategic plan also places an emphasis on placemaking, regeneration, sustainability, design quality and safety, and creating a sector that works for everyone.

In 2024/25, our interventions played a vital role in supporting delivery of the government’s growth and housing ambitions, enabling us to respond to the government’s immediate priorities for Homes England.

Government Priority – Accelerate housing development and increase delivery

Role of Homes England – Support the government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament

Government Priority – Support the New Homes Accelerator

Role of Homes England – Accelerate delivery on large sites that are stalled or building out too slowly

Government Priority – Support work on new towns and other major schemes

Role of Homes England – Support the government’s New Towns Taskforce

Government Priority – Maximise the number of homes for social rent

Role of Homes England – Support delivery of social and affordable housing

Government Priority – Support the reform and diversification of the housing market

Role of Homes England – Grow the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector and increase the adoption of mixed tenure delivery
– Boost productivity
– Attract new investment partners

Government Priority  – Achieve best value for money

Role of Homes England – New regional and place-based operating model

Our Activities: How Homes England Supports the Creation of More Homes and Communities

The Agency has a range of tools and support to accelerate the delivery of new homes - particularly affordable - and the regeneration of places. These range from flexible and targeted investments and innovative financing solutions to access to land and strategic partnerships with investors, developers and local leaders.

We manage and administer building remediation and safety programmes and we play an important stewardship role for over 230,000 Help to Buy customers. We also support the housing sector to progress the critical themes of productivity, sustainability and design, together with supporting the curation of places through master development.

How Homes England supports the housing and regeneration market

Low and Medium Volume Builders (LMVBs)

Development finance
Structured real estate finance
Land Hub
Equity investments

Large Housebuilders/Master Developers

Grant funding
Infrastructure loan
Land Hub
Multi-functional teams
Master development
Advisory Team for Large Applications (ATLAS) service
Equity investments

Affordable Housing Providers

Grant funding
Land Hub
Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme
Equity investments

Building and Home Owners

Stewardship of Help to Buy equity loan portfolio
Cladding Safety Scheme
Delivery Partner on Building Safety Fund

Lenders and Institutional Investors

Lending alliances
Equity investments
Guarantees

Local Government

Strategic Place Partnerships
Grant funding
Cladding Safety Scheme
Delivery Partner on Building Safety Fund
Capacity to local government
Advisory Team for Large Applications (ATLAS) service

The following table gives more detail on some of the support and services which Homes England provides:

Interventions	Our Services
Affordable Housing: grants or financial incentives to build affordable housing units	Affordable Homes Programme 2021 to 2026 – A £7.4 billion investment programme that provides grant funding to support the capital costs of developing affordable housing for shared ownership, social rent, affordable rent or sale Shared Ownership and Affordable Housing 2016 to 2021 – £4.9 billion grant programme (closed to new bids in 2021)
Land and Development: acquiring land or facilitating its preparation for development	Single Land Programme – Accelerates disposal of public sector land for housing Land Assembly Fund – Acquires and develops land requiring complex and significant investment Land Hub Portal – Online tool, featuring land available to buy from the Agency
Infrastructure and Regeneration: funding to unlock housing development and support regeneration in areas facing market challenges	Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) – £3.5 billion capital grant programme for local authorities outside London for roads, schools, utilities, and other infrastructure supporting new housing Home Building Fund: Long Term Fund – £1.7 billion loan finance for non-housebuilding activity to unlock large sites (closed to new applicants in 2021) Home Building Fund: Infrastructure Loans – £1.5 billion for private sector loans to transform brownfield land, improve public transport, build schools and provide infrastructure to accelerate new homes Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land – £1 billion to tackle market failure in building housing on challenging sites Local Authority Accelerated Construction Fund – £137 million supporting local authorities to develop surplus land holdings
Market Diversification: support for developers to drive housing delivery	Home Building Fund – £2 billion supporting small and medium sized housing developers, establishing lending alliances and creating joint ventures for institutional investment Home Building Fund: Short Term Fund – £2.2 billion for developer loans and equity investments (closed to new applicants in 2022)
Building Remediation: helping to make buildings safe	Building Safety Fund and Private Sector Cladding Remediation Fund – Acting as a delivery partner to provide grants to replace unsafe cladding systems Cladding Safety Scheme – Formally delegated by MHCLG to Homes England to address fire safety risks associated with cladding on residential buildings over 11 metres in height (11-18 metres in London)

Our Key National Projects and Strategic Place Partnerships

This map shows Homes England’s key projects, Strategic Place Partnerships (SPPs) and current regional structure. View map on page 22 in the Annual Report (PDF).

Strategic Place Partnerships
7. Bristol Temple Quarter
9. Bushbury Estate Regeneration
11. Central Docks
13. City Centre DDP - Bristol
14. City West (Ph1)
15. Dewsbury Riverside
16. Digbeth Active Travel
17. Druids Heath
18. Ellington Garden Village
19. Forth Yards
20. Frome Gateway
21. Furnace Hill & Neepsend
25. Hind Street Urban Village (PhA&B)
26. Horseley Fields
28. Ladywood
29. Land South of Hindley
31. Langley SUE
34. Moorfoot
35. North Keynsham
36. Northstowe
41. Riverside Sunderland
42. Salford Crescent Adelphi
44. Smithfield
46. St George’s
48. Stoneyard Digbeth
50. Temple Works
53. Victoria North
54. Waterbeach New Town

Mayoral Strategic Authorities
2. Alexandra Docks
4. Barking Riverside
8. Broad Marsh
27. Infinity GV
39. Project Nimbus
47. Station Quarter
52. Thamesmead Bus Link
55 Western Growth Corridor (Ph2)
57 York Central

Foundation Strategic Authorities
30. Langarth Truro
33. Millbay Docks

Emerging Mayoral Strategic Authorities
1. Albion Waterside
3. Bank Quay Gateway
5. Barrow Waterfront
10. Carrow Works
24. Harlow-Gilston GT
45. St.Cuthbert’s Garden Village

Homes England Regional Structure
6. Bedford Station Quarter and TC Regeneration
12. Chalgrove Airfield
22. Hanley City Centre
23. Hanley Priority Sites
32. Lutterworth East
37. Otterpool Garden Town
38. Packmoor
40. Pyenest Street
43. SG1 Stevenage
49. Stretton Hall
51. Tempsford
56. Worcestershire Parkway

Note: West of England of Combined Authority Strategic Place Partnership was signed in May 2025.

Our Values

It is crucial that Homes England is a place where everyone can flourish personally and professionally. The Agency is a supportive environment which provides colleagues with opportunities to develop their skills, learn from others, and have access to the tools and infrastructure they need to deliver.

We know that our colleagues are our greatest asset; we recognise that our diversity will enable us to best understand the housing and place needs of the communities we serve and in turn help us achieve our mission to drive regeneration and housing delivery to create high-quality homes and thriving places.

Our values framework is at the heart of our Agency, representing our core beliefs and what we stand for.

We are…

Respectful
As the core principle, this runs through all our values and behaviours

Impactful
We combine our commercial expertise with social purpose to deliver value for money and maximise our positive impact

Accountable
We are empowered to lead by example, take responsibility for our actions and speak up for what’s right

Innovative
We are bold, creative thinkers who embrace change, never stop learning and always look for a better way to do things

Inclusive
We recognise and value everyone as individuals and draw strength from our differences

Collaborative
We share information, align priorities, and use our collective knowledge and experience to achieve great results

Overview of Performance and Risk

Overview of Performance

We monitor our performance through a suite of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which reflect the breadth of our strategic mandate. The KPIs:

• include measures of housing delivery

• gauge the degree to which we enable our partners and the sector to deliver

• track the support we provide for place-based regeneration and the wider socio-economic benefits stemming from our activities

• assess the corporate health of Homes England and promote further improvements in design quality and sustainability

Our performance highlights for 2024/25 are set out on this and the following page. A detailed overview of performance against our KPIs is included in the Detailed Performance Review later in this Annual Report and Accounts.

Enabled the completion of more than 36,800 homes

Facilitated the start of construction for an additional 38,000 homes

Unlocked land that is capable of delivering more than 79,000 further homes

Established 3 Strategic Place Partnerships (SPPs) with North East Combined Authority, Liverpool City Region and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority.
By the end of 2024/25 we had established 7 SPPs spanning a quarter of the population in England

Supported over 230,000 households with managing their Help to Buy equity loan accounts, including guiding over 27,000 households in redeeming their loans, and supporting nearly 200,000 customer calls

Forecasting to deliver £2.25 of social value for every pound invested

Achieved an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of B or above on 90% of the completions we enabled

Exceeded our targets for affordable housing with 28,370 completions and 30,087 starts

Enabled 104,400 jobs across the sites we are supporting or investing in

Overview of Risk

Robust risk management is a fundamental priority for the Agency, enabling informed risk-taking within an environment that demands a measured and proportionate approach.

With significant internal and external changes presenting both risks and opportunities we have remained proactive and vigilant, continuously reviewing the effectiveness of our mitigation measures.

Navigating change through well-informed, risk- aware decision making is crucial whilst sustaining momentum on delivery.

During 2024/25 our principal risk profile increased from 8 to 13 risks, with 5 risks outside of appetite at the end of quarter 4, 2024/25.

Four of the additional 5 risks are new in 2024/25, while Capacity and Capability Risk has been split into 2 separate risks during the financial year.

Principal risks are owned by the Executive Leadership Team, overseen by the Audit, Assurance and Enterprise Risk Committee through quarterly reporting, and reviewed and approved bi-annually by the Board. Our 13 principal risks are set out in the table below:

Principal risk	Q4 2024/25	Q4 2023/24
Business Continuity – capability of the Agency to continue operating and delivering services and products at acceptable predefined levels during a disruptive incident. The capability and capacity to restore operations to normalised levels within acceptable timeframes.	Risk within appetite	Risk outside appetite
Capability – risk that capability challenges may arise as a result of not fully aligning our Target Operating Model and of failing to attract, develop or retain appropriately skilled colleagues. This challenge may be exacerbated by the systemic constraints we operate within, the markets in which we compete for staff and the funding we have available.	Risk within appetite	Risk outside appetite
Capacity – risk that capacity challenges may arise as a result of failing to attract or retain appropriately skilled colleagues or by having systems and or processes that do not enable us to operate at optimum productivity. This challenge may be exacerbated by the systemic constraints we operate within, the markets in which we compete for staff, the funding we have available and our overall attractiveness as an employer.	Risk within appetite	Risk outside appetite
Change Delivery – risk of failing to deliver the prioritised and planned portfolio of activities.	Risk outside appetite	Risk outside appetite
Culture* – risk that the Agency’s organisational structure, processes, and ways of working may inhibit development of an agile and resilient culture, limiting the organisation’s ability to adapt effectively to change and respond to emerging priorities.	Risk outside appetite	Risk added during 2024/25
Cyber Resilience – risk of a breach of security to gain access to information for the purpose of espionage, extortion or embarrassment leading to business disruption and system failures.	Risk outside appetite	Risk within appetite
Data* – risk of data being inaccurate, inaccessible, or unreliable due to inconsistent data management practices within the Agency.	Risk outside appetite	Risk added during 2024/25
Delivery Partners – risk that our delivery partners do not have the capacity, capability or willingness to work with us in delivering housing and regeneration outputs and initiatives.	Risk within appetite	Risk within appetite
Funding – risk that there is a misalignment between the Agency’s capital, resource and admin budgets, and the government’s policy objectives.	Risk within appetite	Risk outside appetite
Macroeconomic Conditions – risk that the Agency has not monitored or is insufficiently prepared and empowered to respond to changing macroeconomic conditions, which affects our ability to achieve strategic objectives, recovery expectations and to prevent customer detriment.	Risk within appetite	Risk within appetite
Sustainability* – risk of the Agency failing to deliver an integrated and effective approach to sustainability, encompassing climate, environmental, social, and economic objectives. This could lead to adverse impacts on people and the natural environment, reputational damage, or failure to meet statutory responsibilities and government targets, including Net Zero by 2050.	Risk within appetite	Risk added during 2024/25
Third Party Supplier* – risk of reliance on Help to Buy and other Equity Loans third party supplier disruption to operations, leading to inadequate service delivery and poor customer outcomes.	Risk outside appetite	Risk added during 2024/25
Value for Money – risk that we are unable to demonstrate Value for Money on public resources invested by the Agency.	Risk within appetite	Risk within appetite

* New principal risk added in quarter 4 of 2024/25.

Further information on these risks, including the current position and risk mitigations, are detailed within the Principal Risks Impacting Delivery section within the Performance Analysis of this Annual Report and Accounts.

Additionally, the Agency’s Risk Management Framework is set out in the Governance Statement within the Corporate Governance Report of this Annual Report and Accounts.

Going Concern

The Financial Statements of Homes England have been prepared on a going concern basis, in accordance with the Government Financial Reporting Manual.

The Agency’s net asset position takes into account liabilities falling due in future years which, to the extent that they may not be met from the Agency’s other sources of income, may only be met by future grants or grant in aid from our sponsoring department, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG). Grants may not be issued in advance of need.

MHCLG’s budget for the year ending 31 March 2026, which takes into account the amounts required by the Agency in that year, has been approved by Parliament.

Additionally, as set out in the Homes England Framework Document, the Agency is required to produce a rolling 5-year business plan. The Agency also has delegated authority limits in place.

As a result, the Board considers it appropriate to adopt a going concern basis for preparation of the Agency’s Financial Statements.

2.2 Performance Analysis

This section highlights Homes England’s performance against our strategic plan and key performance indicators. It expands on the Performance Overview and outlines any factors which have influenced our delivery performance within the context of the market sector and wider economy.

The section also describes the principal risks impacting delivery of our objectives, provides a review of financial performance during the year, and highlights the work being undertaken by the Agency in relation to sustainability and our climate-related financial disclosures.

Detailed Performance Review

Our mission is to drive housing delivery and regeneration to create high-quality homes and thriving places. This supports greater social justice, and the creation of places people are proud to call home.

In 2024/25, we continued to support partners to boost housing supply, exceeding our delivery targets for the year. We supported the most vulnerable through investments in affordable and specialist housing, providing more families with a home they can call their own and mitigating the risk of children living in temporary accommodation. We agreed a further 3 Strategic Place Partnerships with local leaders, commenced work on major housing and mixed-use schemes across towns and cities, secured greater operational and financial leverage through partnerships with the private sector, and completed the first full year of the Cladding Safety Scheme.

Looking ahead, 2025/26 brings exciting opportunities and complexities. We are poised to play a pivotal role in further accelerating house building, while also supporting regeneration and placemaking, particularly in areas facing market challenges. We will continue to work closely with our delivery partners to provide capacity and capability. This includes supporting the New Homes Accelerator to unblock and accelerate delivery of large-scale housing developments.

We will also remain dedicated to supporting local leaders, affordable housing providers, and the private sector in generating tangible benefits for communities. This sits alongside our focus on championing changes to the housing sector that will improve design excellence, sustainability and safety.

The ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the Parliamentary period means that boosting housing supply is a priority. The challenge will be to sustain high levels of delivery at a larger scale, while adapting to the evolving devolution landscape and addressing the needs of diverse communities.

A Strategic Refresh

The government is progressing development of a new Long-Term Housing Strategy (LTHS). This new strategy will put forward a vision for a new housing system and set out a cross-government plan for delivering this vision over the next 10 years. Homes England will play a critical and pivotal role through its interventions, for example, in assembling land, scaling up market capacity, delivering the government’s Affordable Housing Programme, and securing new private investment into the sector.

In December 2024, the government published the English Devolution White Paper, setting out how it will deliver on its manifesto commitment to deepen and extend devolution across England. The policies it introduces will have a material impact on Homes England in terms of how we operate to support the delivery of local housing ambitions, alongside wider efforts to drive economic growth. At the core of the White Paper is a new devolution framework which sets out requirements for how we will need to work with strategic authorities.

The work we have undertaken over the preceding 3 years to adopt place-based working means that we are well placed to respond to these requirements.

We will continue to strive for good placemaking, while working with the government to deliver against its ambition to deliver homes the country needs. During 2025/26 we will refresh our strategic plan, overarching objectives and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to reflect our critical role in supporting the delivery of government housing and regeneration ambitions, including greater devolution, the delivery of 1.5 million homes before 2030, wider reforms to the planning system, and the LTHS.

Our Strategic Mandate

We will…

Support the creation of vibrant and successful places that people can be proud of, working with local leaders and other partners to deliver housing-led, mixed-use regeneration with a brownfield first approach.

Facilitate the creation of the homes people need, intervening where necessary, to ensure places have enough homes of the right type and tenure.

Build a housing and regeneration sector that works for everyone, driving diversification, partnership working, and innovation.

Promote the creation of high-quality homes in well-designed places that reflect community priorities by taking an inclusive and long-term approach.

Enable sustainable homes and places, maximising their positive contribution to the natural environment and minimising their environmental impact.

Our mission
We drive regeneration and hosing delivery to create high-quality homes and thriving places. This will support greater social justice, and the creation of places people are proud to call home.

Our strategic plan sets out our mission, objectives and KPIs. While continuing to increase housing supply, our strategic plan also places an emphasis on regeneration, sustainability, design quality and safety, and creating a sector that works in partnership to deliver. It sets out the critical need for place-based working to support local leaders in delivering their visions for their towns, cities and rural communities.

Performance Framework

A comprehensive performance management framework underpins delivery of our strategic mandate, ensuring progress is actively steered towards achievement of our objectives. The framework connects strategy to execution by linking strategic planning, business planning, performance reporting, management reviews and evaluation activities. The processes are also underpinned by a common set of KPIs, which reflect the breadth of our mandate. These KPIs extend beyond measures of new housing supply to encompass wider socio-economic benefits created by our activity. They also gauge the degree to which we enable partners to deliver, our impact on the sector and the organisational health of Homes England.

For 2024/25, performance targets were set for 10 KPIs. The remainder were baselined, providing an average level of performance as a starting point for comparison. The KPIs are set out in the following table:

KPI	KPI description	2024/25 target	2024/25 performance	2023/24 performance
1	Brownfield land reclaimed	Baselining	27 hectares	Not reported
2	Employment floorspace created	Baselining	680,000m2	Not reported
3	Number of jobs created	Baselining	104,400	Not reported
4a	Total number of local and strategic authorities receiving in-depth capacity support	23	31	21
4b	Total number of local and strategic authorities receiving in-depth support who report improved capacity to deliver their place-based ambitions	Greater than 90%	65%	94%
5	Social value per pound of investment	£1.50 to £2.00[footnote 4]	£2.25	£1.98
6	Number of homes completed	36,484	36,872	32,320
7	Number of homes unlocked[footnote 5]	59,956	79,011	26,273
8	Number of households supported into home ownership	N/A for 2024/25	N/A for 2024/25	622
9	Share of supported completions by LMVB builders	20% to 25%	15%	19%
10	Share of supported completions using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC)	Baselining	22%	Not reported
11	Total value of private sector funds leveraged through Homes England’s support	Baselining	£7.4 billion	Not reported
12	Share of supported schemes that meet or exceed the agreed standards for design quality (in line with Building for a Healthy Life)	Baselining	N/A for 2024/25	N/A[footnote 6]
13	Share of supported completions[footnote 7] that are Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating B or above	Greater than market average	90%	87%
14	Average percentage biodiversity net gain planned on supported schemes	Baselining	N/A for 2024/25	Not reported
16	Share of partners who report overall satisfaction	Greater than 65%	66%	68%
17	Employee rating for diversity and inclusion	7.3 (out of 10)	7.3	7.2
18	Number of principal risks outside appetite	0	5	4

Reporting for KPI 15 is planned for 2025/26, with a methodology agreed and implementation underway.

KPI	KPI description
15	Percentage of homes within the embodied (upfront) carbon target range

Delivering on Our Strategy: Vibrant and Successful Places

We aim to support the creation of vibrant and successful communities that people can be proud of, working with local leaders and other partners to deliver housing-led, mixed-use regeneration with a brownfield-first approach.

Our place-based approach focuses efforts where they will have the greatest impact and policy alignment. We provide support to enable local leaders to plan, unlock and deliver on housing growth, regeneration and placemaking ambitions.

Our support brings together Homes England’s skills, expertise, funding, powers and assets, alongside that of our public and private sector partners, to ensure the right tools and capabilities are in place to address local priorities and deliver value for money.

During 2024/25, we strengthened our place-based approach, informed by the findings of the recent Homes England Public Bodies Review, the 2024 English Devolution White Paper, and a refreshed mandate from government.

Desired outcomes

• more land reused and made available for regeneration
• key enabling infrastructure in place to unlock development
• local places supported to deliver on their regeneration ambitions
• mixed-use places that create value and benefit local communities

2024/25 focus

• accelerating the housing and regeneration agenda of priority places
• developing a holistic approach to new settlements
• supporting local and strategic authorities to increase capacity and build capability
• demonstrating the wider social benefits delivered by Homes England

Establishing Strategic Place Partnerships

The Strategic Place Partnership (SPP) is a model developed by Homes England to enable greater collaboration and partnership with Mayoral Strategic Authorities (MSAs). SPPs are recognised by government as central to its devolution offer.

We agreed 3 new SPPs during 2024/25 with the North East Combined Authority, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and Cambridge & Peterborough Combined Authority. This brings the total approved to 7, with an additional 5 in development at 31 March 2025.

The SPPs in development include East Midlands, Greater London, Tees Valley, West of England^{[footnote 8]} and York and North Yorkshire. These 12 SPPs will span 48% of the population in England and 47% of local housing needs.

These partnerships aim to drive the acceleration of good-quality, affordable housing delivery to create and grow sustainable, healthy neighbourhoods, contributing to net zero carbon and biodiversity net gain ambitions. Each SPP facilitates collective commitment to a place’s housing and regeneration ambitions by aligning priorities and outcomes, bringing together the strengths of each partner and pooling available resources and developing a robust list of opportunities to progress into programmes. The tables in this section summarise the agreed set of partnership objectives for each SPP, together with highlights of our interventions in the SPP areas in 2024/25.

The SPP model will be rolled out to further MSAs in 2025/26, with work taking place to ensure we are positioned to respond effectively to the government’s ambition to agree new MSAs at pace.

North
Combined Authority	Agreed partnership objectives	2024/25 intervention
Greater Manchester (GMCA)	– Accelerate new homes and additional affordable homes delivery. – Align place-based engagement and resource around key priorities. – Gain a collective view of housing delivery opportunities.	– Progressed joint strategic projects in 6 identified growth locations across the 10 constituent local authorities including supporting delivery of the next phase of projects at Victoria North, the largest brownfield residential development opportunity in Greater Manchester. – Enabled successful allocation of GMCA’s Brownfield Housing Fund (BHF) to 38 projects. – Completed the Eastern Gateway Neighbourhood Regeneration Framework and launched the Strategic Regeneration Framework for Strangeways. – Led a Multi-Functional Team (MFT) to secure £1.5 million for business case development for a new metro link stop as part of Victoria North.
West Yorkshire (WYCA)	– Improve the supply of good quality and affordable homes. – Develop investment ready proposals to unlock and accelerate housing delivery and regeneration. – Realise opportunities to create and grow sustainable neighbourhoods.	– Contracted £29 million Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land (BIL) investment for Bradford City Village delivered by English Cities Fund (ECF), a strategic joint venture between Homes England, Legal & General and Muse Places Limited, to co-fund infrastructure works to unlock 3 council owned sites for development. – Contracted £93 million further investment for focus area projects including Kirkstall Road in the West End Riverside neighbourhood in Leeds.
South Yorkshire (SYCA)	– Develop investment ready proposals to unlock and accelerate housing delivery. – Increase the supply of high- quality, energy efficient and affordable homes. – Support local areas in developing area-based growth and regeneration solutions around places.	– Identified catalyst regeneration sites in all 4 local authorities, building on advanced work in Sheffield where we’ve committed £67 million BIL investment for land assembly at Furnace Hill and Neepsend. – Completed delivery plans for 183 sites across all 4 districts, with capacity for up to 31,710 homes. – Progressed a range of affordable housing interventions, including £12 million of affordable housing programme funding for new social rent homes in Sheffield.
North East (NECA)	– Accelerate the delivery of high-quality, affordable homes. – Unlock housing led regeneration through innovative funding and investment. – Create fairer, healthy, well- connected and resilient places where communities can thrive.	– Confirmed £29.5 million BIL investment in Riverside Sunderland to create around 1,000 new homes, new community infrastructure and 93,000 square metres of employment space. – Enabled £4.5 million allocation from NECA’s BHF for Phases 1 and 2 of the Horden Estate regeneration project. – Building on the acquisition of Quayside West, we developed a bespoke package of interventions via a business case for £120 million to progress Phase 1 delivery at Forth Yards.
Liverpool City Region (LCRCA)	– Develop investment ready proposals to unlock and accelerate housing delivery and regeneration. – Realise opportunities to support place-based growth to create and grow sustainable neighbourhoods. – Improve the supply of high- quality, energy efficient and affordable homes.	– Approved £29 million BIL investment, alongside £22 million from LCRCA, to unlock delivery of Hind St Urban Village (Phases A & B) with plans for over 1,500 homes, a new park, improved transport links, commercial space and leisure facilities. – Secured £56 million BIL investment to accelerate delivery of Central Docks.

Through our Strategic Place Partnership with Homes England, we’re accelerating transformational projects like Hind Street, turning derelict land into vibrant, sustainable communities that our region deserves.

Steve Rotheram
Mayor of the Liverpool City Region

Midlands
Combined Authority	Agreed partnership objectives	2024/25 intervention
West Midlands (WMCA)	– Maximise the quality, pace, and number of new homes. – Improve and develop infrastructure, including transportation, utilities, public spaces, and amenities. – Maximise the delivery of affordable homes. – Use the leverage of the partnership to bring in additional investment.	Advanced local regeneration priorities, including: – £430,000 deployed to accelerate near term opportunities. – a £37.5 million loan to Oval Real Estate for regeneration of an extensive southern portion of Digbeth. – a development agreement, through our partnership with ECF, to bring forward plans for City Centre West– the largest regeneration opportunity in Wolverhampton city centre.

South
Combined Authority	Agreed partnership objectives	2024/25 intervention
Cambridgeshire & Peterborough (CPCA)	– Explore creative ways to deliver more high-quality homes that will support economic growth, placemaking and regeneration. – Develop investment ready proposals to unlock and accelerate housing delivery, economic growth and regeneration. – Realise opportunities to support place-based growth and holistic regeneration solutions. – Improve the supply of high- quality, energy efficient and affordable homes.	– Invested over £115,000 to support near-term opportunities, including an integrated strategy for Peterborough City Centre renewal and estate regeneration projects in Cambridge. – Brought forward strategic projects in the region, including committing £23.8 million BIL grant funding to unlock the eastern element of Waterbeach New Town in South Cambridgeshire with the potential to deliver 4,500 homes. This complements the further £61 million loan provided for the redevelopment of the former Waterbeach Barracks and airfield site, led by Urban&Civic, with plans to deliver an additional 6,500 homes at Waterbeach New Town.

I’m delighted that the signing of this SPP shows our commitment to driving forwards regeneration and growth in a collaborative and streamlined way.

Peter Freeman
Chair of Cambridge Growth Company

Accelerating the Housing and Urban Regeneration Agenda

During 2024/25, in addition to the SPPs, we supported the urban regeneration priorities of 24 individual local authorities, providing support ranging from investment and funding, to advice.

Examples of our locally led approach included the joint £79.7 million funding package with Sunderland City Council to implement the Riverside Sunderland masterplan. This funding underpins numerous interventions, including delivery of critical infrastructure. The development will create around 1,000 new homes and one million square feet of employment space. Contributions from Canada Life, Legal & General, and Placefirst Limited form part of the £600 million already invested in the Riverside Regeneration Programme.

We are also bringing together multi-functional teams to support new approaches to local delivery. These include Growth Companies, the Locally Led Urban Development Corporation which plans to deliver 15,000 new homes across North Liverpool, and bespoke delivery models such as the Bristol Temple Quarter Limited Liability Partnership and Cambridge Delivery Group.

Sunderland is growing its reputation as one of the most ambitious and innovative local authorities in the country, leveraging public and private sector investment to deliver a world-class place to live, work and play.

Councillor Michael Mordey
Leader of Sunderland City Council

Supporting Authorities to Build Local Capacity and Capability

During 2024/25, some local authorities experienced challenges in providing sufficient planning capacity and capability to support housing delivery and regeneration. We worked closely with local government and their partners to increase capacity and capability. This included our local government capacity learning programme, and planning support through our Advisory Team for Large Applications (ATLAS) service. The ongoing delivery and development of the ATLAS programme, delivered collaboratively with Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), will be a key enabler of this support in 2025/26. For further information see Expanding our Interventions section later in this Detailed Performance Review.

Across our SPPs and urban regeneration priorities, we provided in-depth support to 31 local and strategic authorities in 2024/25. Thirty of these were surveyed through our 2024 partner perception survey, of which 65% reported improved capacity to achieve their place-based ambitions.

They’ve really plugged our capacity and really helped on both capacity and expertise… we’d like to thank them for what they’ve done so far, and we hope that long may that continue.

Stoke City Council

Without the financial support and leveraging their role as an Agency, the scheme that we’re working with them on would have stalled.

Partner Perception Survey, local authority response

KPI 4
a) Total number of local and strategic authorities receiving in-depth capacity support from Homes England….

b) ….of which share who report improved capacity to deliver their place-based ambitions as a result.

Purpose: To demonstrate our contribution and perceived effectiveness of our in-depth support to local and strategic authorities to deliver their place ambitions and local housing priorities.

31 local and strategic authorities receiving in-depth capacity support, of which 65%* report improved capacity to achieve their place-based delivery ambitions.

2024/25 target: 23 local authorities of which >90% report improved capacity.

*The 65% relates to 30 local and strategic authorities, compared to the 20 local authorities surveyed in 2023/24. The sample of eligible organisations surveyed and the number who respond, changes year on year and hence, the percentage result is susceptible to significant shifts each year. In 2024/25, new partners were included in the survey with the result reflecting the different levels of maturity of the partner relationship, precluding a direct comparison with the 95% reported in 2023/24.

A Holistic Approach to New Settlements

We continued to support new settlements and urban extensions through our programmes. This included garden communities where we provided delivery support and capacity funding under the Garden Communities Programme. The programme supported 47 projects, 12 garden towns, and 35 garden villages across the country, with potential to deliver close to 300,000 homes and 200,000 jobs by 2050. As an example, on completion, Otterpool Garden Town in Kent will have up to 10,000 homes, up to 10 schools, and multiple workspaces, while half of the town will be green space with 20% biodiversity net gain.

We also supported the government’s work on new towns and other major schemes by providing expertise and advice to the New Towns Taskforce. In 2025, the taskforce aims to identify a shortlist of the next generation of new towns with potential for at least 10,000 homes. During 2024/25, our experience was harnessed to establish and progress work in relation to Greater Cambridge. Another successful Homes England led development is Brookleigh in Burgess Hill. Upon completion, the town will have 3,500 homes, 3 new schools, and a further 3 neighbourhood centres.

Maximising Delivery on Brownfield Land

Prioritising brownfield development is a crucial element in supporting the government’s housing ambitions. Repurposing brownfield land reduces the demand for greenfield sites, encourages redevelopment and brings economic and social benefits. However, developing on these sites is more difficult and brings higher levels of risk, creating site viability issues and difficulty in attracting investment. We provide the sector with the investment, long-term stewardship and technical capability needed to progress brownfield schemes.

The brownfield site in Barking, East London, formerly occupied by Barking Power Station, is one of Europe’s largest placemaking projects. In 2024/25 we approved a further £124 million funding package for vital infrastructure to unlock the development of 20,000 homes. Upon completion, the mixed-use development will provide affordable family homes, enhanced green spaces, 7 new schools of which 5 have been completed, better access to the River Thames, as well as a significant amount of retail, employment and community space.

Barking Riverside has delivered thousands of vitally needed new homes for Londoners, on brownfield land that has already seen a significant investment in infrastructure. However, the support from Homes England will enable this project to move into a new era—increasing the level of ambition and unlocking housing at the scale needed to truly make an impact.

Matthew Carpen
Managing Director of Barking Riverside

Since reporting on KPI 1 started in July 2024, we have reclaimed nearly 27 hectares of brownfield land on our schemes, helping bring brownfield sites back to life.

KPI 1
Brownfield land reclaimed.

Purpose: To support decisions to maximise delivery on brownfield land.

Measure: The number of hectares of brownfield land on schemes supported by Homes England.

We reclaimed just under 27 hectares of brownfield land for supported schemes.*

*Reporting from July 2024

Benefiting Local Communities by Creating Jobs and Social Value

Our place-based interventions not only deliver homes and unlock housing capacity, but create employment opportunities, provide vital local facilities and generate wider social value. Increasing social value is core to our purpose and underpins our delivery. We continue to approve projects that have high value for money and foster long-term productivity in places.

In 2024/25 we enabled the delivery of an estimated 680,000 square metres of commercial floorspace and created 104,400 employment opportunities, including jobs created through construction, infrastructure and new commercial floorspace.

KPI 2
Employment floorspace created.

Purpose: To evidence how we are building productive places and communities by tracking the scale of commercial property space that will be created in sites supported by Homes England.

Measure: An estimate of the amount of employment floorspace that will be created as a result of our funding.

We enabled delivery of 680,000m2 of commercial floorspace.

The transformation of Middlewood Locks in Salford, a key brownfield development backed by our SPP with Greater Manchester Combined Authority, will deliver 2,215 homes and 84,000 square metres of commercial space upon completion. This includes offices, a hotel, retail outlets, and leisure amenities. Moulsecoomb Hub in Brighton and Hove, a 212-home neighbourhood brownfield regeneration project, is creating 310 jobs for local people with a new urban district centre providing shops and public facilities.

KPI 3
Number of jobs created.

Purpose: To evidence how we are building productive places and communities by tracking an estimate of the number of full time equivalent jobs that could be created in sites supported by Homes England.

Measure: The number of jobs we anticipate will be created as a result of funding deployed over the life of our strategic plan.

Homes England funded activity created 104,400 employment opportunities through the construction of new homes, spend on infrastructure and new commercial floorspace.

In 2024/25, we undertook an assessment of the social value generated through Homes England investments made in 2023/24. As a result, we project that £5.6 billion of social value will be delivered from the £2.5 billion invested in 2023/24, yielding £2.25 of social value per pound of investment. This means that for every £1 we approved in 2023/24 we expect to generate £2.25 in social value. This builds on the 2022/23 baseline figure of £1.98, demonstrating our continued investment in projects that deliver high social value.

KPI 5
Social value per pound of investment.

Purpose: To quantify and value the expected impact on people’s wellbeing as a result of our funding.

Measure: A forecast of expected social value impacts per pound of investment calculated bottom-up, project-by-project, as a result of Homes England funding approved in 2023/24. We aggregate the forecast social value across the lifetime of all our projects approved during the financial year to estimate Homes England’s impact. We consider social, environmental, and economic impacts, both positive and negative, that are evidenced and attributable to our interventions.

For every £1 of funding we approved in 2023/24 we expect to generate £2.25 in social value.

Target: £1.50 to £2.00 (Range per HM Treasury guidance on what constitutes good value for money.)

Our equity investment in Habiko, a partnership with Pension Insurance Corporation and Muse Places Limited, is projected to generate £1.70 of social value per pound of investment over the next 12 years. This is through the planned completion of 3,000 affordable low-carbon, low-energy homes on brownfield sites, and the creation of new public open spaces. Our grant funding to Central Docks, within the emerging Liverpool Waters district, is projected to generate £1.50 of social value per pound of investment. This is driven by the planned delivery of 2,350 homes, 61,000 square metres of office, leisure and retail space, the benefits of affordable homes, a new public park, and the impact of regeneration on the wider area. Our interventions are helping transform the former dockland into a thriving, inclusive and sustainable waterfront neighbourhood and community.

Devolution and a Greater Focus on Significant Place-Based Delivery

The English Devolution White Paper sets out how the government will deliver on its commitment to transferring power out of Westminster and into local communities. At the core of this commitment, is the view that the most successful outcomes for places will be achieved when local leaders are empowered to deliver locally mandated solutions that address the priorities and challenges of their communities.

The White Paper is clear that the support of Homes England is central to the government’s offer to local leaders and that our resources will be a key part of local leaders’ toolkits to achieve their housing growth, regeneration and placemaking ambitions.

During 2025/26, we will continue to roll out and strengthen our SPP model and deliver place-based regeneration and placemaking activity to unlock housing delivery. Working with MHCLG and local partners, we will develop and deliver a mixed portfolio of strategic growth ambitions, urban regeneration and extension priorities and new settlements. Established MSAs will have a greater role in steering and monitoring our activity in their areas. We also anticipate playing a greater role in leading the delivery of New Towns and other major schemes, including pan-regional growth initiatives such as the proposed Oxford-Cambridge Corridor.

Delivering on Our Strategy: Homes People Need

We aim to facilitate the creation of the homes people need, intervening where necessary to ensure places have enough homes of the right type and tenure.

We work to

• create more homes of the right type in the right places
• ensure more land is available for new homes and barriers to development are removed

2024/25 focus

• delivering strong in-year programme performance

• supporting delivery of lifetime programme targets and place priorities

• optimising the experience of homeownership customers

Homes England has a vital role in supporting the government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes before 2030. We deploy a range of interventions to deliver the homes people need. During 2024/25, we enabled work to start on 38,308 homes, facilitated the completion of 36,872 homes and unlocked capacity for a further 79,011 homes.

A More Optimistic Housing Market

2024/25 began on a positive note for the UK economy, with optimism bolstered by the Monetary Policy Committee decision in August 2024 to cut the base rate for the first time in 4 years, after being held at a 16-year high since August 2023. This decision was driven by improving inflation, which had fallen to below 3% by the start of the financial year, from a peak of 11% in October 2022.

As inflation levels eased and the cost of borrowing fell, the housing market experienced a notable boost to demand. Through calendar year 2024, house prices grew by 3.3% and the number of residential transactions increased by 5.7%. The sharpest increase in house prices were witnessed in the Midlands, North West and North East, and data from HMRC indicated residential property transactions in England were 18% higher in December 2024 than in December 2023.

Increased activity was accompanied by a healthy increase in the number of new homes listed for sale, up 11% in 2024 compared to the year before. Mortgage approvals also increased to over 66,000 in December 2024, a 28% increase on the same month a year earlier. Alongside this, private rents surged to record highs, increasing by 9.2% in 2024. This growth was primarily driven by high demand and a shortage of new landlord instructions entering the market, the latter due to the imposition of new stamp duty rules on second homes and concerns regarding the enforcement of Decent Homes Standards, which outline the minimum requirements for social housing.

Development cost inflation slowed significantly through 2024. Nevertheless, after years of rising costs and structural challenges in the housing market, just over 4,000 construction companies failed. This represented 17% of all business insolvencies in the year and was the highest since the 2008 financial crisis. This created significant disruption for the sector with many years of contractor and house building experience lost. However, with declining borrowing costs, lower cost inflation and rising house prices, the sentiment among housebuilders was optimistic at the end of 2024.

Delivering Strong Programme Performance

Although volume developers^{[footnote 9]} reported a slight improvement in demand compared to the previous year, the downturn in housing output continued.

Rising labour costs, labour skills shortages and planning delays continued to present challenges to increasing housing supply. The development of affordable housing also slowed due in part to uncertainty on future funding levels. Also contractor insolvencies reduced sector capacity, extending build timelines. Overall, new housing starts in England declined by 28% by the end of calendar year 2024 compared to 2023, and completions by 6%.

Chart: Year on Year % change in housing starts and completions in England

Year	Starts	Completions
2019	-9%	7%
2020	-15%	-18%
2021	37%	19%
2022	3%	2%
2023	-17%	-8%
2024	-28%	-6%

Source: MHCLG: permanent dwellings started and completed, England, data snapshot 8 April 2025.

Despite the challenging market context, our housing delivery performance for 2024/25 exceeded our central targets. Our activity enabled 38,308 housing starts, and facilitated 36,872 completions. Starts were up 5% compared to 2023/24 and completions by 14%^{[footnote 10]}, comparing favourably with sector performance.

Table: 2024/25 Outturn

Housing Delivery	Performance Metrics	Outturn	Target	Outturn v Target
Starts	Total number of housing starts directly supported	38,308	33,095	116%
Completions	Total number of housing completions directly supported (KPI 6)	36,872	36,484	101%
Housing Unlocked	Total housing unlocked by Homes England interventions (KPI 7)	79,011	59,956	132%

To support the construction of new homes, we played a vital role in acquiring land and progressing stalled developments. We invested in roads, utilities and other essential infrastructure, necessary to unlock housing development opportunities for our partners to build more homes on these sites. In 2024/25, we unlocked 79,011 homes. This strong performance was driven in part by several large schemes, including Barking Riverside, Waterbeach New Town and Liverpool Central Docks.

We worked with partners to bring challenging sites to market and acted as a catalyst for housing development and urban regeneration. A prime example is the former Royal Navy Dock in Chatham, Kent. The new residential community at Chatham, was originally a sports facility for the Navy. It required extensive remedial and decontamination works, and new infrastructure including the Medway Tunnel, link roads and flood defences. A joint venture between Homes England and Countryside Properties took on the 150-acre site. Completed in 2024, this regeneration delivered a multi-award winning, new mixed tenure neighbourhood with 1,700 high-quality homes, a new community hall, doctor’s surgery, pharmacy, 2 schools, 20 acres of public open space and over 160 square metres of employment space. In addition, our partnership with Kent, Greenwich and Canterbury Christ Christchurch universities, delivered Medway Campus, providing facilities for 10,000 students.

The regeneration of the brownfield site formally home to Rock Ferry High School in Birkenhead, Wirral, was supported by a £5 million grant provided to our strategic partner Torus. Their investment delivered 178 homes, including an extra care facility, Spinnaker House, which provides 102 independent living affordable rent apartments for older adults.

Spinnaker House is the key part of this large-scale brownfield regeneration project supported by over £5 million Homes England grant that has rejuvenated a disused site into what will be a thriving community that meets the needs of local people.

Steve Coffey
Torus Group’s Chief Executive

Providing an Affordable Place to Live

The housing outputs offer a glimpse into the impact that our interventions have on improving people’s lives. As a result of our investment in affordable housing during 2024/25, more families have a home they can call their own. We allocated all our affordable housing funding during the year, delivering 28,370 homes (up 15% from 2023/24), and starting the build of a further 30,087 homes.

East Midlands Housing Association, one of our affordable housing strategic partners, used our funding to redevelop a brownfield site in Leicestershire which contained crumbling warehouses, vandalised workshops and areas of overgrown vegetation. Henson Park provides 38 homes for social rent and 39 homes for shared ownership. The development meets critical housing needs for Blaby and Leicestershire County Council.

Our grant funding also supported Cottsway Housing Association to deliver 30 social rent apartments at St Mary’s Court in West Oxfordshire. This scheme involved redevelopment of an outdated sheltered housing scheme. Designed for people aged over 55, the apartments are generously sized, with balconies and patios, and communal gardens.

To help accelerate the delivery of affordable homes, we launched a Section 106 clearing service in December 2024. The aim of the service is to connect housebuilders and housing associations to address the problem of uncontracted and unsold affordable homes across England. The service was launched in response to an increasing lack of bids for affordable homes from housing associations, due to various financial and policy constraints. Almost 300 organisations, including local planning authorities, registered providers and house builders, and over 700 individuals registered for the service.

To support the continuation of our strong delivery of affordable homes, the government announced in March 2025 a further £2 billion investment for social and affordable housing (including London). This was the third top up to the Affordable Homes Programme to be announced in 2024/25. The additional funding provided a welcome boost to the sector, giving partners the certainty needed to progress new developments.

Providing a Secure Place to Live

Alongside the provision of affordable housing, we also supported the delivery of specialist housing to help the most vulnerable in society. In 2024/25 we supported delivery of over 650 specialist homes for people with a history of rough sleeping and young people at risk, through the Single Homelessness Accommodation (SHAP) and Rough Sleeping Accommodation Programmes.

These homes, along with revenue funding support, addressed gaps in homelessness pathway provision, providing opportunities and support to vulnerable people. Delivered schemes in 2024/25 include Curzon House in Cheshire West and Cheshire and Hewmar House in Gloucester.

Curzon House is a transformative housing scheme, providing 36 high-quality homes for people who have experienced homelessness. This initiative offers 24/7 support, accessible facilities, and training opportunities, aiming to help residents rebuild their lives and transition to permanent housing.

Hewmar House, developed by Gloucester City Homes, provides 8 homes and on-site support services for young people who have found themselves without a place to call home. Key features include ensuite bedrooms, communal living area, and a separate break out room. The building is completed to a high standard specification encompassing space, energy efficiency and warmth.

Delivering Lifetime Programme Targets

Our interventions are delivered through a range of programmes, which have lifetime performance targets. An assessment of programme performance as of March 2025 showed that we are tracking to achieve the lifetime targets for the majority of our 11 largest commissioned programmes.

Only the Local Authority Accelerated Construction programme, which funds infrastructure development to help local authorities advance housing projects on surplus land, is expected to deliver fewer homes than targeted. The programme faced setbacks as a result of the economic climate post Covid and some local authorities, who were unable to complete the infrastructure within the allocated funding or timeframe, withdrew their schemes. The Shared Ownership and Affordable Housing Programme and the Home Building Fund (Short and Long- Term) have achieved their lifetime delivery targets.

Funding for the Land Assembly Fund and Single Land Programme is secured through the government Spending Review. Funds are managed to an agreed annual net position and as such they have no fixed end point or budget. Income generated through these programmes is used to fund expenditure and reinvest in new acquisition activity.

Table: Lifetime programme performance

					Delivery			Financial
	Investments	End	Lifetime objective	Delivery to date	Lifetime forecast	Funding allocation	Actual expenditure	Forecast outturn
Affordable Housing	SOAHP 2016-21	2023/24	130,000 starts	133,622 starts	133,622 starts	£4.9bn	£4.9bn	£4.9bn
	Affordable Homes Programme 2021-26	2026/27	89,000 to 103,000 starts	77,207 starts	107,000 starts	£8.0bn	£6.08bn	£8.0bn
Market Diversification	Home Building Fund	2033/34	54,000 starts 9,300 homes unlocked	8,874 starts 8,500 homes unlocked	67,239 starts 9,000 homes unlocked	£2bn	£543m	£2.1bn
	HBF Short Term Fund	2028/29	43,000 homes	52,969 homes	58,239 homes	£2.2bn	£2.0bn	£2.3bn
Infrastructure	Home Building Fund - Infrastructure Loan	2026/27	100,000 to 116,000 homes unlocked	39,153 homes unlocked	107,465 homes unlocked	£1.5bn	£145.5m	£1.5bn
	HBF Long Term Fund	2022/23	160,000 homes unlocked	161,187 homes unlocked	161,187 homes unlocked	£1.7bn	£1.51bn	£1.7bn
	Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land	2028/29	40,000 homes unlocked	39,206 homes unlocked	40,000+ homes unlocked	c£1.025bn	£186.6m	£1.068bn
	Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land - London	2028/29	To be agreed	11,863 homes unlocked	To be agreed	£150m	£25.7m	To be confirmed
	Housing Infrastructure Fund	2028/29	283,496 homes unlocked	285,850 homes unlocked	285,850 homes unlocked	£3.5bn	£1.95bn	£3.5bn
	Local Authority Accelerated Construction	2028/29	Up to 10,000 starts	6,021 starts	9,679 starts	£137m	£137m	£137m
Land	Land Assembly Fund	N/A	34,000 starts	6,123 starts	38,000 starts			Recycling fund - £657m secured at Spending Review 21
	Single Land Programme	N/A			No targets set post Public Sector Land			Recycling fund - £817m secured at Spending Review 21

Accelerating Delivery Through the New Homes Accelerator

The New Homes Accelerator (NHA) aims to speed up the delivery of large-scale housing developments across England. The NHA is a collaboration between the government, Homes England, the Greater London Authority, local authorities, developers, and other key stakeholders. It aims to unblock and accelerate the delivery of housing developments that have, for various reasons, become delayed, or which are not progressing as quickly as they could be.

Homes England is helping accelerate identified sites. Worcestershire Parkway was announced as a NHA site in July 2024. The site, on which we own 22 hectares, is a complex, large-scale project involving multiple landowners, developers and stakeholders.

The land forms part of the proposed Worcestershire Parkway new settlement progressed by the South Worcestershire Councils, Malvern Hills District Council, Worcester City Council and Wychavon District Council. The NHA interventions at the site will ensure planning, phasing and infrastructure strategies are in place to enable the different parts of the site to be brought forward to unlock over 10,000 new homes, accelerating delivery.

In 2024/25, we also provided funding support to the councils to assist with technical aspects of the development of the vision, masterplan and delivery strategy. When fully complete, the settlement will also have a new town centre, 50 hectares of employment space, healthcare, retail and community facilities, 7 primary schools, up to 2 secondary schools, sports and leisure provision and a major country park.

Optimising Our Homeownership Customer Experience

Over the last 12 years, we helped over 387,000 households secure their own home through Help to Buy equity loans totalling £24.7 billion, of which almost 85% were first time buyers. By the end of 2024/25, over 180,000 of these loans had been repaid.

Following the closure of the final Help to Buy scheme to new applicants in 2023/24, we focused on a stewardship role, ensuring value for money through custodianship of the remaining Help to Buy portfolio of £15.9 billion. During 2024/25, we supported over 230,000 households with managing their Help to Buy equity loan accounts, including guiding over 27,000 households through redeeming their loans, and supporting nearly 200,000 customer calls. For further information refer to the Financial Statements section later within this Annual Report and Accounts.

In 2025/26, we will continue to find ways to support our customers, as we strive for excellent customer service. We will work on a customer self-serve approach, through improved digital capabilities, and provide customers with more accessible ways to manage their loan accounts. Other areas of focus include aligning our terminology to make it easier for customers and conveyancers to communicate with us, and improving the guidance published on GOV.UK.

Delivering on Our Strategy: A Housing and Regeneration Sector That Works For Everyone

We aim to support the development of a housing and regeneration sector that works for everyone; driving diversification, productivity, partnership working and innovation.

Desired outcomes

• a more diverse sector with greater competition
• a more productive housebuilding sector with more private sector investment in housing and regeneration
• more private sector investment in commercial property and mixed-use regeneration in urban centres

2024/25 focus

• increasing sector capacity
• leveraging greater institutional investment
• supporting SMEs and increasing productivity

As the government’s housing and regeneration agency, we play a significant role in tackling the housing challenges the country faces, but we don’t do it alone. We work with over 5,000 partners and organisations, including local government, housebuilders, housing associations, infrastructure providers, landowners and institutional investors. Our ambition is for a competitive, diverse, resilient and efficient sector.

During 2024/25, the housing sector continued to experience issues around planning, capacity and access to investment. It also faced challenges associated with contractor insolvency, addressing building safety, skills and labour supply. Where the sector did not work efficiently, smaller developers restricted by their scale of operation, faced barriers to entry.

Increasing Capacity by Supporting Diversification of the Housing Market

With the government’s ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes over 5 years, it is important that we continue to focus on creating a diverse and inclusive market that adds capacity to the sector. This includes attracting institutional investors and supporting new entrants and low and medium volume builders (LMVBs).

An average of 12 housebuilders accounted for approximately 40% of new home delivery between 2020/21 and 2023/24, each building more than 2,000 homes per annum. Alongside these volume builders, over 1,000 LMVBs built fewer than 50 homes each across the same period. The market, however, is challenging for LMVBs, who face a range of issues from attracting investment, accessing finance, increased competition in accessing and acquiring land, planning risk and site viability.

We operate multiple programmes that seek to provide a range of financial products for the LMVB sector. Our £2 billion Home Building Fund is designed to support LMVB housebuilders to access funding, and develop the track record needed to successfully obtain private sector finance. The Home Building Fund performed well in 2024/25, contributing to over 3,800 housing starts and over 1,350 completions.

In 2024/25 we also extended our partnership with Invest & Fund Limited. This collaboration provides residential development debt funding to LMVB developers. The alliance is projected to facilitate the construction of an additional 600 new homes, building on the 107 homes already supported through the original lending alliance.

In the last 5 years, we have supported over 350 LMVBs to grow their business and over a sixth of our housing completions are being delivered by smaller builders. This was below the target range of 20% to 25% set in our Annual Business Plan, due in the most part, to the majority of completions being affordable housing delivered by registered providers who are not classed as LMVBs. Despite this, in 2024/25 alone we targeted funding to 119 LMVBs who, in total, delivered over 5,500 homes. Efforts to increase the share of supported completions by LMVBs will focus on identifying opportunities during joint development with local authorities, improving access to smaller land parcels,^{[footnote 11]} providing preferential loan terms and supporting LMVB consortiums.

KPI 9
Share of supported completions by low and medium volume builders (LMVBs).

Purpose: To measure the share of homes delivered through contracted schemes in the current financial year, where we contract directly with LMVBs.

A LMVB is a developer who delivers fewer than 2,000 homes per year and is not a subsidiary of a parent company delivering more than 2,000 units per year.

15% of homes delivered in 2024/25 were delivered by LMVBs, where we contracted directly withthe LMVB.

2024/25 target: 20% to 25%

Our innovative approach to LMVBs is increasing capacity to deliver homes. An exemplar is Esquire Developments Limited, an award-winning small and medium enterprise (SME) housebuilder established in 2011. We originally provided the developer with a £2.68 million loan to build 9 homes at Millers Field in Maidstone, Kent, and supported their second scheme, Hill Farm in Sittingbourne, made up of 30 homes. Through our support, Esquire Developments now deliver around 120 to 150 new homes annually across Kent and the South East.

The relationship has become so much more because we look at other things with Homes England in terms of unlocking difficult sites, larger opportunities that we wouldn’t be able to necessarily look at without that assistance … it’s really been a game changer for us as a business in terms of how we’ve taken things forward.

David Braddon
Director Esquire Developments

Unlocking Capacity Through Innovative Land Solutions

The price of land, and unlocking land for use by developers, remained a barrier to delivering new housing in 2024/25. We supported the government ambition to release surplus public sector land, and significant progress was made in bringing sites to market. Our land portfolio changes on an annual basis. At the beginning of 2025, we had around 9,000 hectares of land across 1,400 parcels, excluding land under contract. Our efforts to support LMVBs included increasing access to suitable parcels of land through freehold disposal, including closed competition. Ten freehold disposal sites were contracted in 2024/25, unlocking capacity for 500 homes.

We also deployed a tailored, site-specific approach across our land portfolio to overcome capacity and capability constraints in the sector. Our innovative approach is demonstrated in East Bank Urban Village in Hull, a 3 hectare riverside site which will become one of the city’s largest regeneration projects. We created a joint land strategy with Hull City Council, combining our land holdings with theirs before formal sale. This unified approach has created a single ownership structure, making the site more attractive to developers by eliminating the complex legal issues that typically come with multiple ownership. This development will deliver 850 new homes, commercial and retail space, and enhanced public areas, alongside the delivery of critical infrastructure improvements.

Enhancing Productivity by Supporting Modern Methods of Construction

We support the market to innovate in how it delivers new homes and enhances productivity. Initiatives include greater adoption of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC). Through our land, investment and grant programmes, we enable the industry to explore how MMC can help deliver better housing outcomes.

2024/25 marked a significant milestone as we published MMC data from our Affordable Housing Programme for the first time. Just over 22% of our supported completions on the Affordable Housing Programme 2021-26 were delivered using MMC, reinforcing our commitment to innovative delivery.

KPI 10
Share of supported completions using Modern Methods of Construction (MMC).

Purpose: To demonstrate the impact of our support for MMC delivery and better housing outcomes.

Measure: The number of supported home completions through the Affordable Housing Programme 2021-26 that have been delivered using MMC, with the focus on MMC categories 1-5 only.

22% of our supported completions on the Affordable Housing Programme 2021-26 were delivered using MMC.

Little Kelham in Sheffield includes an affordable home development using a Category 2 MMC timber-framed system built by Citu. The development is delivered by Great Places, a strategic partner in the Affordable Homes 2021- 2026 programme, in collaboration with Citu. The 16 homes follow a fabric-first approach, integrating smart technology to monitor energy performance and air quality. Shapland Place in Tiverton, Devon is another MMC affordable housing scheme encompassing 8 social rent units. This MMC net zero scheme, completed in May 2024, also features a fabric-first approach, as well as providing ultra-low utility bills for residents.

Holywell Meadow, St Ann’s Chapel, was completed in July 2024. South Hams Council and Bigsbury Parish Council worked in collaboration with Homes England to develop the mixed scheme of 8 affordable rented homes and 3 open market purchase homes.

Designed around an orchard area that creates a low-density open development, and built using MMC in the form of offsite timber frame construction, the homes benefit from state-of- the-art energy saving technology. This includes highly insulated triple-glazed units, air source heat pumps, a mechanical ventilation with heat recovery system, underfloor heating and electric charging points.

The case for MMC remains clear. It boosts productivity, tackles skills shortages, enables faster delivery, enhances energy performance, and lowers embodied carbon. We will continue to support our partners in harnessing MMC to expand housing capacity required to deliver the government’s 1.5 million homes ambition and advance wider government policy objectives.

Maximising Our Role as Master Developer

We continue to play a key role in enabling the sector to deliver new housing at scale, as one of a few organisations with the skills, expertise and resource to take on the role of master developer. The role supports the curation of places, putting social and community values at the heart of new place developments. It also provides the opportunity to increase the pace of delivery, embed design quality and bring in stakeholders at the right stage of the project.

We are master developer on Phases 2 and 3 of Britain’s largest new town under development, Northstowe, near Cambridge. In July 2024, we signed a collaboration agreement with Keepmoat and Capital&Centric to accelerate delivery of 3,000 homes and build a new mixed-use town centre. Half the homes will be affordable and the new town centre will provide local people and businesses with up to 50,000 square metres of commercial floorspace, including shops, workspace and community facilities. Working with partners, Homes England as master developer, remains at the forefront of delivering and supporting key projects for the benefit of the community.

It’s an incredibly exciting time to be involved in delivering the UK’s newest town. Working closely with Capital&Centric and Homes England, we know this collaboration will deliver transformational change at Northstowe, building on the significant infrastructure Homes England has delivered to date on the scheme. Bringing forward the new town centre, to be delivered by Capital&Centric, is the catalyst for this change and will be instrumental in placemaking at Northstowe.

Tim Wray
Group Development Director at Keepmoat

Attracting Institutional Investment and New Investment Partners

We provide significant access to finance for housing developers through direct lending, lending alliances, equity investment and equity partnerships. These partnerships have the potential to unblock effective urban regeneration and accelerate housing delivery. We have a range of partnerships and equity investments in place with delivery partners, investors and registered providers. These include English Cities Fund (ECF), the Greener Homes Alliance and the Housing Growth Partnership. Many of our partnerships involve investor groups focused on high sustainability and design standards, and a willingness to build delivery capacity through master planning and LMVB developers, and accelerate delivery using MMC.

In 2024/25 we leveraged £7.4 billion of private sector funds in support of housebuilding. We entered into a joint venture with Barratt Developments and Lloyds Banking Group, to create the MADE Partnership. We also launched a partnership with Oaktree Capital Management and Greycoat Real Estate. Both joint ventures focus on master development of large-scale, complex sites and will take early-site assembly and infrastructure work to deliver serviced parcels of land for LMVB housebuilders.

In February 2025, we committed £50 million to Schroders Capital’s Real Estate Impact Fund (SCREIF) to predominantly focus on addressing the shortage of social and affordable accommodation and the regeneration of town centres. SCREIF aims to raise £200 million, primarily focusing on residential-led investments. Our contribution is intended to deliver on-the-ground impact and stimulate further investment from the private sector.

KPI 11
Total value of private sector funds leveraged through Homes England’s support.

Purpose: To quantify the value of private sector funding.

Measure: An estimate, at the point of project approval, of the funds that will be provided by private sector partners to support any project that is sponsored, funded or contracted by Homes England.

We leveraged £7.4 billion of private sector funds in support of housebuilding.

This investment by Homes England is a clear indication of the absolutely vital role this fund is looking to play in the UK by delivering real and tangible change. Our homes, and the built environment around us, impact our daily lives. We believe this allocation from the public sector will be catalytic in unlocking further institutional investments, boosting broader confidence and interest in this key sector meaning the fund can enable more communities to thrive across the UK.

Chris Santer
Schroders Impact Fund Manager

Leveraging Government-Backed Financial Credibility

During 2024/25, we worked with MHCLG to expand the Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme 2020. The scheme enables housing providers to access low-cost financing to decarbonise and improve the decency of their existing homes, as well as build much-needed new ones. This change was welcomed by the sector and resulted in increased demand for scheme funding in 2024/25, with £658 million of loans advanced in to support the delivery of over 3,100 new affordable homes and the improvement of thousands more.

In 2024/25 no new loans were funded under the Private Rented Sector Guarantee Scheme that Homes England also operates on MHCLG’s behalf. However, in March 2025 the scheme reopened to new applications, helping boost the development (or conversion) of purpose-built homes for private rent, and overall investment into this growing sector.

Leveraging government-backed financial credibility, both schemes helped lower borrowing costs for housing providers, which widened access to debt financing. This helped increase the supply of affordable and high-quality private rental homes.

Expanding Our Interventions

From our local government capacity learning programmes to stakeholder engagement events, we bring together professionals to share knowledge, forge links and catalyse opportunities to accelerate housing delivery. Our Autumn 2024 Learning Programme reached 280, or 88%, of local authorities across England. Nearly 6,900 attendee places were taken up across 16 sessions.

Despite more favourable trading conditions, the construction industry continued to face challenges regarding labour and skills shortages, including bricklayers, groundworkers and electricians. This has been exacerbated by an ageing workforce and significant numbers of skilled workers leaving the industry. Working in partnership with the National House Building Council and housebuilders, we will deliver our first construction skills hub on the Brookleigh development site over 2025/26, helping tackle the skills shortage in the sector and creating employment opportunities.

During 2024/25 we worked closely with our delivery partners to deliver capacity and capability support, and address systemic barriers in the housing development process. Planning was the single biggest challenge faced by our partners. Planning delays increase costs, reduce overall delivery and can make viability of schemes a significant challenge.

We provided planning support through our ATLAS service, run in partnership with MHCLG and part of the NHA. ATLAS is an advisory service for local planning authorities and partners across England. It aims to facilitate the delivery of large-scale regeneration and development through a range of centrally coordinated activity. This includes direct advice, funding and other enabling support. It seeks to build capacity to deliver, improve relationships, resolve critical blockages, improve quality and accelerate the planning process.

Homes England brings diverse expertise, including urban design, digital, conservation, heritage, landscape architecture, ecology, community engagement and environmental sustainability. In 2024/25, we reviewed 167 schemes, focussing on 26 sites across 22 local authorities. Together, the NHA and ATLAS are unblocking 20,000 new homes.

Delivering on Our Strategy: High-Quality Homes in Well-Designed Places

We are committed to promoting the creation of high-quality homes in well-designed places that reflect community priorities. In line with our design assessment tool ‘Building for a Healthy Life’ (BHL) and national and local design codes.

Desired longer-term outcomes

• more integrated neighbourhoods with access to nature and amenities facilitated by walking, cycling and public transport
• distinctive places that reflect local character
• streets, public space, and blue and green infrastructure that are designed for people to use, easy to navigate and have a well-considered relationship between public and private spaces

2024/25 focus

• championing a culture that ensures our people and partners have the mandate, skills and tools to achieve design outcomes
• embedding design outcomes in our processes, decision-making, and partnerships
• delivering building remediation in line with customer-first approach

Design Quality and Innovation

We continued to work with partners to embed design quality assessment across our housing interventions. Our key measure of design quality is based on the considerations of Building for a Healthy Life (BHL), a toolkit produced by Design for Homes and written in partnership with Homes England. The BHL assessment helps those involved in new developments think about the qualities of successful places and how these can be best applied to the individual characteristics of a site. We require BHL assessments for all schemes being delivered using a building lease agreement. We conduct annual BHL reviews of completed schemes to inform our understanding of how we can use BHL to best effect.

KPI 12
Share of supported schemes that meet or exceed the agreed standards for design quality (in line with BHL).

Purpose: To ensure that our sites deliver positive design outcomes for building and places, from acquisition through to delivery.

Measure: The percentage of schemes that have met or exceeded the pre-disposal assessment BHL score at ‘reserved matters’.^{[footnote 12]}

Not reported for 2024/25 as the number of projects in scope of the KPI were too few to produce a statistically meaningful average.

Working with BHL principles, significant design improvements were attained for the extra care housing at Driffield, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. We reviewed the project against BHL following concerns over the building elevations, dominant roof form, lack of internal natural light and residents’ access to outside amenity space. Our recommendations led to the appointment of specialist architects with extensive experience in designing extra care facilities. Their involvement drove the design forward, creating a building in line with the character and appearance of the area, providing naturally-lit rooms and an improved internal layout that integrates garden spaces. As a consequence, the developer submitted a reserved matters application for 313 dwellings and 69 extra care units to the Council, which was granted permission in March 2025.

Knoll House in Brighton, partially funded by an affordable housing grant and designed to BHL standards, won the Housing Design Awards in 2024. The planning application followed a rigorous process of community, stakeholder and local authority engagement to redevelop part of the Ingram Housing Estate for Brighton and Hove City Council. The redevelopment will house 28 local people with disabilities. The apartments are low-energy use, dual aspect with generous space standards and wheelchair access, with connections to outdoor space and nature.

Delivering Building Remediation

Ensuring people feel safe and secure in their homes is fundamental to health and well-being. Following the Grenfell disaster, a commitment was made that all tall residential buildings built using unsafe aluminium composite material and other forms of unsafe cladding, would be remediated and made safe. The initial, non-recoverable grant funded programmes included the Building Safety Fund (BSF) and Private Sector Cladding Remediation Fund (PSCRF). We act as MHCLG’s delivery partner on these funds, delivering funding on behalf of MHCLG to applicants outside London for buildings over 18 metres in height. The PSCRF is in its final phase with all 39 buildings having construction work on site and over 90% (36) complete at the end of 2024/25. On BSF, 92% (168) of our 182 applications had construction work on site and 67% (123) complete by the end of 2024/25.

The BSF has seen a reduction in the number of applications under management during 2024/25. This follows MHCLG’s decision to transfer 103 applications to the original developer, under the Responsible Actors Scheme. A further 110 applications were transferred to the successor Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS) which Homes England administers, and which will take forward all applications for the remediation of buildings over 11 metres in height, including any further applications for buildings over 18 metres.

Building Remediation Funds, Lifetime Targets
Metric	Achieved at 31 March 2025	Fund lifetime forecast
PSCRF applications - work on site	39	39
PSCRF applications - work complete	36	39
PSCRF grant paid	£141.4 million	£151.2 million
BSF applications - work on site	168	182
BSF applications - work complete	123	182
BSF grant paid	£947.48 million	£1.02 billion

2024/25 was the first full year of delivery for the CSS, following its formal announcement in July 2023. As of 31 March 2025, 617 buildings had been made eligible for the scheme with 612 progressed to signing a grant funding agreement, of which 113 progressed to starting works. Remediation of 31 buildings was fully completed. This is an impressive outcome for the first year given a difficult landscape of change in legislation (Building Safety Regulator requirements), and the cultural change required to drive the pace and quality of delivery. For 2025/26 our efforts will focus on finding buildings and bringing them through technical assessment, getting them on site and remediated as soon as possible.

In 2024/25 we also focused on developing an open database for all combined authorities, local authorities and fire and rescue services. This work went hand in hand with the Missing Building Strategy and CSS went through over 220,000 lines of data to make the first ever 11 to 18 metre building database available in England. A key focus for 2025/26 is to support local leaders in delivering the national and local remediation acceleration plans.

Cladding Safety Scheme, Lifetime Targets
	Business case	Achieved at 31 March 2025	Total forecast
Completions	2,222	31	2,222
Expenditure	£3.9 billion	£152 million	£3.8 billion

We ended 2024/25 safe in the knowledge that thousands of residents and leaseholders felt more secure in their homes. An exemplar is Royal View located on the seafront in Brighton, a 15 metre residential building with 33 flats. This building had unsafe cladding systems affecting both the front and rear elevations. With around £3.54 million of grant funding, works started in May 2024 and completed April 2025.

The process was virtually painless. The builders were respectful and tidy. The foreman Jake was very helpful and was always happy to answer questions. What we had assumed would be a nightmare episode was carried out so well all our fears were unfounded.

Royal View resident feedback

We are so grateful for all your help. You have no idea how worrying this situation has been for … leaseholders. We have … felt so helpless. This scheme will be a life saver for us and thank you so much for offering to take the responsibility from our shoulders for the technical and remedial works which we must carry out.

Thorndon Court, leaseholders

You were very informative and explained all steps of the process clearly. It has been a very stressful time and I appreciated the time you took to go through everything, at no point did I feel the call was rushed and can’t thank you enough for reassuring me and my husband about the application.

Arrivato Plaza, resident/leaseholder

Delivering on Our Strategy: Sustainable Homes and Places

We are committed to driving high standards of sustainability and design quality in homes and places.

Desired longer-term outcomes

• more energy efficient, carbon efficient and resource efficient homes and places, both in-use and across their whole life
• places that enhance the natural environment, including air and water quality and biodiversity

2024/25 focus

• championing a culture that ensures our people and partners have the mandate, skills and tools to achieve sustainability outcomes
• embedding design outcomes in our processes, decision-making, and partnerships

Great places are more than just good housing. Equally important is good design and a long-term approach to creating high-quality neighbourhoods. For us, this means resilient infrastructure that’s adaptable and sustainable. It means resilient homes that can respond to changing future circumstances, and resilient places that offer everyone an excellent environment for living.

Driving Sustainability

Homes England defines sustainability broadly, encompassing environmental, economic and social aspects. Over 2024/25, we built on our ‘Living Sustainably’ statement of intent by developing and trialling a sustainability passport, ahead of a phased roll out in 2025/26. Further detail is included in the Sustainability Report section within this Annual Report and Accounts.

Encouraging our partners to improve the energy efficiency of new homes contributes to ensuring higher standards of sustainability. This in turn lowers both carbon dioxide emissions and residents’ energy bills. In 2024/25, 90% of home completions supported by Homes England met Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating B or above.

KPI 13
Building performance – share of supported completions that are EPC rating B or above.

Purpose: To understand the estimated operational carbon efficiency of those home completions supported by Homes England.

90% of our supported completions* have an EPC rating of B or above.

2024/25: Target greater than market average of 84%

*Excludes affordable housing completions as the Agency does not currently capture boundary data to enable cross-reference to EPC data.

Zodiac House in Croydon exemplifies how Homes England supports sustainable delivery, with developers delivering high-quality housing by repurposing redundant commercial buildings. The 3-storey block was a 1950’s office complex which had been vacant for over 30 years. The development, by Common-Projects, provides 73 residential units all EPC rated B or above. The project balances the ambition to retain and reuse the existing structure, and all its embodied carbon, with the need to provide accommodation with sufficient daylight, space and amenity for resident wellbeing, which is difficult in deep plan^{[footnote 13]} office blocks. Repurposing the buildings has created carbon savings equivalent to planting 120,000 trees. A new multifunctional green space with a new community pavilion will be created at the entrance which will help to stitch back together a disused stretch of the high street, enhancing social and environmental well-being.

Addressing Biodiversity Decline

Biodiversity net gain (BNG) is an approach that requires developments to have a positive impact on biodiversity. The ‘net gain’ is achieved when developers create new habitats or retain and enhance existing ones on the development site. The mandatory target for BNG is 10%.

KPI 14
Average percentage biodiversity net gain planned on supported schemes.

Purpose: To measure how we enhance habitats through supporting biodiversity.

Measure: The average percentage BNG predicted to be achieved by schemes subject to planning applications submitted by Homes England, based on a measurement of the biodiversity baseline value of the site pre-development compared to the predicted biodiversity value of habitats post-development.

Not reported for 2024/25 as the number of projects in scope of the KPI were too few to produce a statistically meaningful average.

The scheme at Wymersley Green, Great Houghton is an example of how a site can deliver a measurable 10% BNG through a combination of habitat retention, enhancement and creation, together with off-site delivery. This includes the enhancement of habitats near the site within land owned by Homes England. The scheme design was developed with the existing ecological features in mind. It includes 11.36 hectares of Suitable Alternative Natural Green Space (SANG) for natural and species rich habitats. The provision of the SANG will provide an ongoing semi-natural resource to be used by the local community and delivering habitat for a range of native species.

Mitigating Climate Change

The construction, retrofit, use and demolition of buildings create carbon emissions. For the UK to reach its net zero target, both the embodied carbon from construction and operational carbon from building use, must be reduced. During 2024, we developed a methodology to enable reporting of embodied upfront carbon from the construction processes and materials used in building a home. This will provide greater understanding of how we can design and build future housing and infrastructure in a much more carbon efficient way.

Springfield Meadows in Oxfordshire is a development of 25 high-performance homes supported by finance from Homes England. The scheme uses Passivhaus principles, with the homes constructed using panel timber frames manufactured off-site. The use of MMC minimised the use of high carbon materials, including concrete and steel, and facilitated fast on-site construction.

In March 2025, we announced the commitment of £42 million from the Home Building Fund to support phase 2 of the Greener Homes Alliance. The lending alliance, in partnership with Octopus Real Estate, will commit £150 million loan finance over 5 years to small and medium housebuilders to deliver more environmentally friendly and sustainable homes across England. To qualify for funding from the alliance, developers must ensure that all homes built are fossil fuel free.

We are extremely proud of the impact our Greener Homes Alliance initiative has had when it comes to supporting developers looking to make greener decisions for their projects, and we’ve spent a lot of time working out the new criteria with Homes England to make sure the next phase is as impactful as possible.

Andy Scott
Co-Head of Debt, Octopus Real Estate

Corporate Health: Achieving Our Plan

We enable delivery of our strategic objectives by ensuring we are a high performing organisation with effective and efficient processes, robust governance and risk management, and colleagues who feel supported in their work.

Desired outcomes

• an Agency that works for its partners
• an Agency that reflects the communities it serves
• an Agency that effectively manages risk

2024/25 focus

• fulfilling statutory and regulatory obligations that give us license to operate
• managing risks and maintaining controls to ensure value for money
• supporting effective delivery
• creating a Brilliant Place to Work

Our focus is on achieving value for money for the taxpayer and ensuring we drive efficiencies and prioritise resources, whilst fulfilling statutory and regulatory obligations.

Working With Our Partners to Support Effective Delivery

Our 2024 partner perception survey shows that 66% of our partners are satisfied with the support provided by Homes England, with an additional 24% neutral. In 2024/25, new partners were included in the survey with the result reflecting the different levels of maturity of the partner relationship. While overall satisfaction remained stable, local government satisfaction ratings increased.

KPI 16
Share of partners reporting overall satisfaction with Homes England.

Purpose: To measure how satisfied our partners are with Homes England based on their understanding of our role and remit, and to provide an indication as to whether we are functioning effectively and enabling positive engagements with our partners.

A partner is any housing developer, local authority or other organisation who has transacted with us in the past 3 years.

66% of our partners are satisfied with Homes England.

2024/25 target: >65%

Building a Brilliant Place to Work

We strive to be an employer of choice, somewhere people desire to work because of our culture, behaviours, career development opportunities and mission, and we actively champion diversity and inclusion through our values. In September 2024, we published our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Report and action plan. Further information on EDI is available in the Remuneration and Staff Report within this Annual Report and Accounts.

In December 2024, we launched our annual employee engagement survey. Seven out of 10 colleagues responded positively to the question on whether they feel able to bring their whole self to work. This score is in line with our plans to improve employee engagement. We remain committed to accelerating progress through our EDI action plan for 2025/26 to drive the meaningful change our colleagues expect from us and more.

KPI 17
Average colleague rating for Homes England being a diverse and inclusive employer.

Purpose: To demonstrate whether Homes England colleagues feel we are an inclusive employer and whether we foster a positive working environment and experience.

Our colleagues rated Homes England 7.3 (out of 10).

2024/25 target: 7.3

Managing Risk

We employ a rigorous risk management framework to identify and manage risks that may impede the achievement of our strategic objectives. These principal risks are identified and managed through top-down and bottom-up processes, with a focus on proactively identifying and mitigating key vulnerabilities and operational risks that could disrupt strategic progress. At the end of 2024/25 there were 5 principal risks outside of risk appetite. These risks encompassed change and data management, culture, third party suppliers and cyber resilience. Further information is available in the Principal Risks Impacting Delivery section within this Annual Report and Accounts.

KPI 18
Number of principal risks outside risk appetite.

Purpose: To identify and monitor all principal risks outside the appetite agreed upon and set by our Board which could materially impact the successful delivery of our strategic objectives.

At the end of 2024/25, 5 principal risks were assessed as being outside appetite.

Q1: 4, Q2: 4, Q3: 5, Q4: 5

Target: 0

Principal Risks Impacting Delivery

Principal Risks Summary

‘Principal risks’ are those risks that are so significant that they could materially impact the achievement of our strategic objectives.

The Executive Leadership Team (ELT) owns and is collectively responsible for the identification and management of principal risks relevant to the organisation at any given time. Homes England’s Board continuously assesses the nature and extent of the principal risks that the organisation is exposed to and is willing to take, in order to achieve its objectives.

Our principal risks are set out in the table below:

Principal risk	Current position
Business Continuity - the capability of the Agency to continue operating and delivering services and products at acceptable predefined levels during a disruptive incident. The capability and capacity to restore operations to normalised levels within acceptable timeframes.	The Agency has taken a number of steps to strengthen its resilience and ability to maintain critical operations during incidents and this risk is now within appetite. Progress includes the closure of internal audit actions, positive assurance from an external ISO 27001 assessment, and the implementation of continuity plans across all directorates with critical functions.
Capability - the risk that capability challenges may arise as a result of not fully aligning our Target Operating Model and of failing to attract, develop or retain appropriately skilled colleagues. This challenge may be exacerbated by the systemic constraints we operate within, the markets in which we compete for staff and the funding we have available.	This risk is within appetite. Capability processes have improved, with greater alignment between performance management and the behaviours framework. The Building Brilliant Careers initiative continues to enhance the understanding of skills requirements.
Capacity - the risk that capacity challenges may arise as a result of failing to attract or retain appropriately skilled colleagues or by having systems and or processes that do not enable us to operate at optimum productivity. This challenge may be exacerbated by the systemic constraints we operate within, the markets in which we compete for staff, the funding we have available and our overall attractiveness as an employer.	This risk is now assessed to be within appetite and has not had any adverse impact on delivery, and workforce stability has been maintained. Strategic workforce planning data has improved in quality, and ongoing work through the Building Brilliant Careers initiative continues to enhance our understanding of current and future skills needs.
Change Delivery - the risk of failing to deliver the prioritised and planned portfolio of activities.	This risk remains outside of appetite. There has been significant progress in establishing the fundamental foundations needed to deliver change well. These include maturing of the Enterprise Portfolio Management Office function, including the governance, standards and frameworks. The timeline for reducing this risk is dependent on embedding actions to strengthen spend control processes and applying lessons learnt from across the change portfolio. Work is ongoing to implement the necessary control improvements required to strengthen change governance, oversight, commercial and spend controls.
Culture - the risk that the Agency’s organisational structure, processes, and ways of working may inhibit development of an agile and resilient culture, limiting the organisation’s ability to adapt effectively to change and respond to emerging priorities.	This newly identified risk is currently outside of appetite. While progress is being made, further work is needed to strengthen the Agency’s adaptability and resilience. Key initiatives underway include establishing requirements for implementation of a new Target Operating Model, investment in leadership development, enhancements to the performance management framework, and the introduction of performance-related pay. These actions are intended to support a more responsive and accountable organisational culture.
Cyber Resilience - risk of a breach of security to gain access to information for the purpose of espionage, extortion or embarrassment leading to business disruption and system failures.	This risk is outside of appetite, driven by the existence of some legacy systems which are currently being managed through interim solutions. Work is ongoing to strengthen our cyber security capability through the Cyber Security Blueprint, aligned with best practice and government IT assurance standards. Retirement of legacy systems is a key dependency in achieving a within appetite risk position.
Data - the risk of data being inaccurate, inaccessible, or unreliable due to inconsistent data management practices within the Agency.	This newly identified risk is outside of appetite due to the current reliance on manual data processes, limited data visibility, and low overall data maturity. In response, the Agency has undertaken a data maturity assessment and initiated a programme of improvements. This includes establishing a data governance framework, data ownership and stewardship, and introducing tools to support data cataloguing and quality measurement. A data literacy programme has also been developed. These initiatives aim to strengthen data management, reduce risk, and enable more effective use of data across the Agency.
Delivery Partners - risk that our delivery partners do not have the capacity, capability or willingness to work with us in delivering housing and regeneration outputs and initiatives.	The risk score is unchanged and remains within appetite. The financial pressures on many of our local authority delivery partners remain significant. The Agency has limited scope to mitigate this risk so the constraints on our delivery partners will make it more challenging for the Agency to achieve its objectives.
Funding - risk that there is a misalignment between the Agency’s capital, resource and admin budgets, and the government’s policy objectives.	During 2024/25, the Agency successfully ensured continuing budget cover for key delivery programmes and this risk is now within appetite. This was achieved through close working with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and across Agency directorates. Looking forward, the Agency will need to balance a number of factors. These include setting up large new programmes, co-ordinating with partners to deliver the government’s devolution agenda, and implementing new and enhanced operating controls and processes to fit the requirements of a public financial institution.
Macroeconomic Conditions - risk that the Agency has not monitored or is insufficiently prepared and empowered to respond to changing macroeconomic conditions, which affects our ability to achieve strategic objectives, recovery expectations and to prevent customer detriment.	This risk is within appetite; the Agency has made several adjustments in our commissioned programs, which has enhanced our ability to respond to market changes.
Sustainability - risk of the Agency failing to deliver an integrated and effective approach to sustainability, encompassing climate, environmental, social, and economic objectives. This could lead to adverse impacts on people and the natural environment, reputational damage, or failure to meet statutory responsibilities and government targets, including Net Zero by 2050.	This is a new risk and is within appetite. This risk focuses on strengthening the Agency’s corporate sustainability to support the delivery of more sustainable homes and places. While driven by compliance with Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures reporting, it also helps align with the Agency’s strategic objective for ‘Sustainable Homes and Places’, government targets, improve climate resilience, enhance the Agency’s reputation, and contribute to healthier, more biodiverse living environments.
Third Party Supplier - risk of disruption to operations as a result of reliance on third party suppliers within Help to Buy and other equity loans, leading to an inadequate service delivery and poor customer outcomes.	This is a new risk and is outside of appetite due to ongoing performance and reporting challenges, though improvements are being observed, particularly in customer- facing service delivery. While the nature of the contract with our third party supplier limits direct management of the service, steps are being taken to address these challenges. The Agency is implementing short-term improvements alongside longer-term strategic planning, to strengthen service delivery and manage the risk more effectively.
Value for Money (VfM) - risk that we are unable to demonstrate VfM on public resources invested by the Agency.	This risk is within appetite. The Agency can evidence that VfM risk is being actively mitigated through actions including assessing delivery effectiveness through programme evaluations and VfM assessments for high-value projects, utilising the robust 5-case business model framework. The Agency remains committed to its integrated change programme, which aims to deliver outcomes with clear benefits for more efficient working and risk management.

Financial Risk

Impact of Macroeconomic Uncertainty

Homes England produces quarterly economic forecasts to help manage financial risk. The economic outlook is based on scenarios provided by an independent organisation commissioned by the Agency to produce bespoke housing market forecasts.

There are 3 scenarios included within the forecasts – the baseline (central scenario), an upside and a downside scenario. Each scenario outlines the key macroeconomic risks and uncertainties applicable to the Agency.

These forecasts are based upon information available in mid-March 2025, prior to the 2025 Spring Statement and Office for Budget Responsibility revisions.

Where reference is made to annual movements, these are movements calculated on the average across the whole financial year, with the exception of house prices where the movement in forecasts are based on the final quarter of one financial year to the final quarter of the next financial year. The quarterly position is calculated using an average for that period. The forecasts detail the following:

• Central scenario
  The central scenario suggests the economy is likely to maintain a steady trajectory of growth, growing 1.2% in 2025/26. Inflation is expected to be slightly above target in 2025/26 at 2.1% before moving back to the target rate of 2.0% in 2026/27. Due to these short-term inflationary pressures, the expected path for interest rates is likely to be a more gradual easing of monetary policy as the projected bank rate falls from the current rate of 4.5% to 3.2% in 2026/27. The pace of residential transaction growth is forecast to slow from 13.4% in 2024/25 to 5.7% in 2025/26. House prices are expected to grow by 3.6% in 2025/26.

• Upside scenario
  The upside scenario assumes sustained public investment leading to stronger labour productivity growth, helping to drive economic growth from 1% in 2024/25 to 2.3% in 2025/26. Due to increased economic investment and demand, inflation is forecast to rise steadily, and although the bank rate continues to fall in this scenario, it is at a slower rate when compared to the central scenario. We forecast year on year growth in residential transactions of 8.7% in 2025/26, reaching 1.23 million transactions. In this scenario, house price growth is forecast to increase from 4.1% in 2024/25 to 4.8% in 2025/26.

• Downside scenario
  The downside scenario assumes there is greater uncertainty in global trade and the macroeconomic environment. Under this scenario, we expect this uncertainty to weaken levels of consumer spending and business investment and therefore the economy is forecast to fall into a recession, with growth falling from 1.0% in 2024/25 to minus 1.2% in 2025/26. As the economy moves into recession, inflation is forecast to slow, allowing the bank rate to fall to encourage demand and investment in the economy. The growth in house prices is projected to slow in the short-term, but is forecast to rebound to 2.8% in quarter 4 2026/27 in response to lower borrowing costs. The number of residential transactions is forecast to rise marginally.

These 3 scenarios are applied by Homes England to its portfolio of assets, to assess the financial implications on the portfolio and for the delivery of the Agency’s objectives. The valuation of the Agency’s assets may be estimated with reference to key market indicators, such as house price growth, economic growth and unemployment.

This is the case for financial assets measured at fair value and land and property assets. Similarly, expected credit loss (ECL) forward looking models for assets held at amortised cost are calculated with reference to these same economic metrics.

Impact on Help to Buy Portfolio

The Help to Buy portfolio is particularly sensitive to market risk from changing house prices. Decreases in house prices lead directly to a reduction in the market valuation of Homes England’s home equity loan portfolio. Large falls in house prices could lead to a disproportionately large reduction in the market value due to the Agency’s equity ranking behind the mortgage from the primary lender.

Regional and property type concentration exists within the home equity loan portfolio, and divergences in house price between regions are a source of additional market risk (for example, an adjustment to the prices of London flats).

A fall in house prices may also lead to a reduction in the ability of customers to remortgage or to redeem their equity loan share, either due to being constrained by loan to value requirements or the removal of products from the marketplace. This would lead to a slowing in the redemption rate on the equity loan portfolio which, in turn, would result in a higher yearly interest fee income return on the portfolio and interest fee income being generated over a longer time period.

As movements in house prices are directly related to the market value of the Agency’s home equity loans, a fall in house prices may result in an increase in customers redeeming to crystallise the lower equity value. However, refinancing options in the marketplace are likely to be limited in this scenario, reducing customers’ ability to exit.

The Agency performs a market risk analysis (note 14a) which considers how the valuation of this portfolio would change with movements in house prices and a further sensitivity analysis (note 15) which looks at the key modelling assumptions and illustrates the effect of varying them.

Impact on Recoverable Investment Portfolio

For the recoverable investment portfolio, comprising loans, debt and equity, the main type of security held is land. Falling land values would therefore result in increasing ECL estimates on loans held at amortised cost, although the effect on the ECL would not be material due to the loss floor of 35% being applied to the calculation at 31 March 2025. If land prices were to decrease by 10%, it is estimated that this would result in an increase in the ECL of £0.9 million (see note 15b). Falling house prices, particularly if combined with increasing developer costs, would result in loans becoming less viable, leading to an increased risk of default. This may in turn lead to a further increase in the ECL estimate for loans held at amortised cost.

Falling house prices would likely be combined with falling demand for housing, resulting in delays to delivery on the recoverable investment portfolio, and could impact project viability if sales cannot be recycled into the funding required to maintain project development.

Potential Impact on Asset Valuations from Alternative Economic Scenarios

To aid users of the accounts in understanding the potential risks posed by future macroeconomic uncertainty to the assets managed by the Agency, we have used the scenarios developed by Alma Economics to estimate the impact on the Agency’s key asset classes. By applying relevant metrics from these scenarios, we can model the potential impact of ongoing market uncertainty on assets disclosed in the 2024/25 Financial Statements.

Home equity loans (including Help to Buy)

For home equity loans, the principal driver influencing changes to the valuation of assets are house prices. To demonstrate the potential impact on the portfolio of house price changes, the forecast house price movements used to inform the Agency’s downside economic scenario have been applied to the valuation. These forecasts predict a reduction in house prices from quarter 4 2024/25 to quarter 4 2025/26, of 0.87%. For the portfolio that exists at 31 March 2025, the estimated effect would be to result in a reduction in the valuation of the portfolio from £15.92 billion to £15.78 billion, a reduction of £0.14 billion.

Loans

For loans measured at amortised cost, the ECL reflects a weighted average of the outcomes which might be expected under each of the 3 scenarios. To model the effect of each scenario individually, we have considered the outputs from each individual scenario ECL calculation.

In addition, we have considered whether the credit risk stages of assets, based on an assessment of Significant Increase in Credit Risk (SICR), might change under each scenario.

We have modelled the impact under each scenario if all assets were moved to stage 2 (indicating a significant increase in credit risk for all assets), with the modelling for the downside scenario producing an increased ECL of £57 million under these assumptions.

	ECL as applied in the Financial Statements (£m)	ECL if SICR stages are adjusted to stage 2 for 100% of portfolio (£m)
Upside scenario	17.3	39.7
Central scenario	20.9	42.6
Downside scenario	35.3	57.0

For loans measured at fair value through profit or loss (FVTPL), the fundamental contractual nature of these loans and primary exposure to variation in returns is comparable with loans measured at amortised cost.

As a result, the ECL percentages estimated for the loans measured at amortised cost are considered to be a suitable measure to estimate loss allowances on loans measured at FVTPL. The valuation of loans measured at FVTPL was £350.5 million at 31 March 2025.

	Estimated ECL on loans measured at FVTPL using ECL percentages applied to loans measured at amortised cost (£m)	Estimated ECL on loans measured at FVTPL using ECL percentages applied to loans measured at amortised cost, assuming all assets move to Stage 2 (£m)
Upside scenario	4.2	9.7
Central scenario	5.1	10.4
Downside scenario	8.6	13.9

Land

The carrying value of the Agency’s land and property portfolio at 31 March 2025 is £1,156 million (net realisable value £1,422 million).

Subjecting this value to metrics for upside, central and downside scenarios, shows the land and property portfolio at 31 March 2026 as below:

	Estimated value at 31 March 2026 (£m)	Base value at 31 March 2025 (£m)	Increase / (reduction) since 31 March 2025 (£m)
Upside scenario	1,192	1,156	36
Central scenario	1,183	1,156	27
Downside scenario	1,149	1,156	(7)

Over the next 12 months, the lowest point in each of the 3 scenarios occurs in quarter 4 2025/26 in the downside scenario, as shown in the table above.

Further analysis of the sensitivity of significant valuation modelling assumptions, which include more severe scenarios, has been carried out in note 14 of the Financial Statements. Given current macroeconomic uncertainties, it is possible that key contributing economic factors could have a greater impact than the scenarios presented.

Fiduciary, Economic Crime and Fraud Risk (Financial Crime)

The Agency manages Fiduciary, Economic Crime and Fraud Risk at an operational level and takes a holistic approach to prevent, report and/or mitigate events.

Such risk management, specifically for error and loss or fraud, is managed with the expectation that occurrences of fraud will take place during a fiscal year, given the scale and complexity of our activity.

The Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA) sets financial performance metrics for all government departments and arm’s-length bodies. In 2024/25 the PFSA set a joint MHCLG and Homes England target of preventing and recovering fraud loss from operational activity of £4.2 million.

Through the effective operation of internal controls, the Agency was able to prevent £2.3 million of fraud. None of the fraudulent activities were individually considered material in the context of the Agency’s activities.

The PSFA also set a performance ratio on the amount spent in achieving the prevention and recovery target. In 2024/25 the requirement was to spend no more than one third of the joint £4.2 million MHCLG and Homes England target. To achieve the prevention of fraud to the value of £2.3 million, the Agency spent £0.3 million. This figure is a combination of staff costs, data sources, and system investment.

The Agency is operating within Fiduciary Risk appetite in 2024/25 following significant improvements made in assessing and reporting potential fraud, error or loss in the Help to Buy programme during the past 12 months; mitigating historical due diligence risks in the main.

The Agency has not identified any customer as being a target match within the government’s UK financial sanctions regime guidance. The risk of exposure is deemed to be low, as customers (and related parties) are predominately UK-based.

Future Risks

Given the size of Homes England’s financial interventions, as well as the extent to which the Agency focuses on activity which is beyond the risk appetite of the private sector, we are always vulnerable to changes in our macroeconomic environment.

These potential future financial risks are monitored on an ongoing basis and regularly reported through our governance.

In addition to these, the Agency is exposed to potential future capability and capacity risks associated with effectively supporting emerging government devolution plans. As decision making authority increasingly shifts to a broader range of local authority entities, the Agency will adapt its culture, ways of working, and decision- making process to enable this changing external landscape.

Homes England will also need to take account of differences in capability and capacity across different local authorities and be able to adapt to the different requirements they each have of the Agency. While some local authorities will require quite advanced forms of support from the Agency, others will need more basic assistance to achieve their housing and regeneration targets. We need to be able to identify and service these differing requirements.

Financial Review

For the financial year 2024/25, Homes England’s performance against its budgetary control totals is summarised below:

Financial Performance					2024/25
	Outturn £m	Budget (Main) £m	Budget (Supplementary) £m	Variance (Supplementary to Outturn) £m	Variance (Supplementary to Outturn) %
Capital Financial Transactions
Expenditure	639.8	742.9	653.1	(13.3)	-2.0%
Receipts	(434.0)	(431.1)	(372.9)	(61.1)	16.4%
Net Capital Financial Transactions	205.8	311.8	280.2	(74.4)	-26.6%
Capital non-Financial Transactions
Expenditure*	3,567.6	3,450.4	3,624.6	(57.0)	-1.6%
Receipts	(67.4)	(135.2)	(123.0)	55.6	-45.2%
Net Capital non-Financial Transactions	3,500.2	3,315.2	3,501.6	(1.4)	0.0%
Resource
Expenditure: Administration**	114.0	116.1	115.6	(1.6)	-1.4%
Programme Resource***	101.1	104.0	104.2	(3.1)	-3.0%
Receipts: Administration	(274.5)	(72.0)	(72.0)	(202.5)	281.3%
Programme Resource	(67.3)	(62.9)	(63.0)	(4.3)	6.8%
Net Resource	(126.7)	85.2	84.8	(211.5)	-249.4%
Total
Expenditure	4,422.5	4,413.4	4,497.5	(75.0)	-1.7%
Receipts	(843.2)	(701.2)	(630.9)	(212.3)	33.7%
Net Total	3,579.3	3,712.2	3,866.6	(287.3)	-7.4%

*Excludes Administration Capital non-Financial Transactions.
**Administration resource expenditure excludes depreciation.
* * *Of the £101.1 million of programme resource expenditure, £15 million relates to ring-fenced programmes. The Agency cannot reallocate underspends on these programmes. Expenditure includes irregular spend of £1.4 million on the Evolve Transformation Change Programme. Further detail can be found in the Parliamentary Accountability Disclosures section within this Annual Report and Accounts.

Financial Performance in 2024/25

The Agency agrees its annual budgets with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and HM Treasury at the start of each financial year through the Main Estimates process. Budgets are illustrated gross, showing both expenditure and receipts, but are delegated and managed on a net basis. Any subsequent refinements or changes are made through the Supplementary Estimates process mid-way through the financial year.

Budgets submitted to MHCLG are accompanied by ranges to capture delivery volatility caused by project specific issues and/or by market, or wider economic conditions. Several of the Agency’s key programmes generate income as well as incur expenditure.

Programme budgets for 2024/25 were refreshed through the Supplementary Estimate process. MHCLG confirmed the revised budgets in the final quarter of the financial year and formally delegated the revised budgets in March 2025.

Although the Agency was able to update spend and income budgets at the Supplementary Estimate (based on revised forecasts) it was not possible to adjust the corresponding Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). As a result, performance against the Agency’s KPIs is reported against the unadjusted start-of-year Annual Business Plan figures.

The Agency is delegated separate budgets for programmes and administrative costs. Within both programme and administrative budgets, funding is classified as either Capital (CDEL) or Resource (RDEL). Capital budgets are split into two further categories, CDEL Financial Transactions (CDEL-FT) which covers loans and equity and CDEL non- Financial Transactions (CDEL non-FT) which provides funding for grant programmes and land transactions.

In 2024/25 there was an increase in CDEL-FT budgets delegated to Homes England of £422.8 million and an increase in CDEL non-FT budgets of £830.7 million. RDEL refers to the expenditure incurred on day-to-day business activities.

Against revised Supplementary Estimate budgets, the Agency successfully deployed 98.3% (£4.4 billion) of its total delegated expenditure budget. Alongside this the Agency generated 134% (£843.3 million) of its total income budget. A breakdown by programme is set out below:

Chart: Gross expenditure as a percentage of budget

	Percentage
Admin	98.6%
Affordable Homes	99.9%
Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land	86.1%
Building Safety Fund / Private Sector Cladding	92.4%
Cladding Safety Scheme	98.2%
Development	87.2%
Evolve Transformation Change Programme*	114.7%
Help to Buy	79.2%
Housing Infrastructure Grants	100.5%
Investments	98.7%
Market, Partners and Places	100.5%
Strategy / Single Homelessness / Other	81.1%

• Includes £1.4 million of irregular spend, described further in the Parliamentary Accountability Disclosures section. The budget shortfall caused by this spend was funded from headroom within the Agency’s non-ringfenced RDEL budget.

Overall, most Agency programmes performed well against budget. Key points to note are set out below.

Over £2.4 billion of Affordable Housing grants were awarded in 2024/25, deploying 99.9% of the delegated budget for this programme. During 2024/25 Homes England was allocated additional top-up funding of £200 million for the Affordable Homes Programme. This additional funding recognises Homes England’s ability to bring in new projects quickly and to accelerate bids for new social and affordable housing projects.

The Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS) was formally launched in July 2023 following a pilot scheme. It deployed 99% of its CDEL budget in 2024/25. The scheme has managed 581 buildings in the pipeline, making 447 eligible, achieving 111 starts on site and 31 completed works.

Development (land) programmes operate on a net basis (gross expenditure less gross income) across all individual funding types including CDEL Non-FT, CDEL FT and RDEL. The net position is managed within each of the funding types. To support managing the year end position and prevent excess RDEL income being lost from the programme, MHCLG delegated an additional £20 million CDEL Non-FT grant from departmental headroom in 2024/25 to the Land Assembly Fund.

Additionally, in 2024/25 funding flexibilities were utilised to temporarily move budgets between similar programmes to maximise the Agency’s delivery and spend within the financial year. This enabled spending on Brownfield, Infrastructure and Land (BIL) National Programme to be held back until 2025/26. Of the £27.2 million BIL National funding offered for redeployment, £22 million was allocated to Development to support the £45 million acquisition of a key strategic site in Warrington and £5.2 million was allocated to BIL London. 2025/26 budgets will be readjusted accordingly to ensure there is no change to the overall lifetime programme budgets for these programmes as a result of these movements.

Significant infrastructure grant expenditure was made during 2024/25, totalling £657.7 million. Most of those grants (£637.3 million, 97%) were made through the Housing Infrastructure Fund.

The Agency’s Investments programmes deployed 98.7% of their expenditure budget. Slippage on the Home Building Fund - Infrastructure Loans and Home Building Fund - Short Term Fund was mitigated by Levelling Up - Home Building Fund and Home Building Fund - Long Term Fund. 117.5% of the income budget was secured due to an overperformance of receipts, primarily driven by the Levelling Up - Home Building Fund, the Home Building Fund - Short Term Fund and Legacy Programmes. On the Legacy Programmes, a repayment of £38 million was received in relation to sale proceeds for the Notting Hill Housing Trust. This is a historic scheme under the Get Britain Building Fund.

The Markets, Partners and Places directorate spent £21.2 million RDEL in 2024/25 on project development activity. This work supports the development of a robust future pipeline for the Agency’s CDEL programmes. The investments have been focused on an agreed set of priority places to support government regeneration objectives.

The Evolve Transformation Change Programme spent £34.3 million in 2024/25 to support system enhancement and transformation. This includes irregular spend of £1.4 million, described further in the Parliamentary Accountability Disclosures section of this Annual Report and Accounts.

Chart: Percentage of gross income target achieved

	Percentage
Admin	381.2%
Affordable Homes	92.4%
Development	75.6%
Investments	117.5%

Administration income relates to interest accruing from Agency investments and is used to support operating costs incurred in the day-to-day running of Homes England. The Agency is only able to retain a maximum of £72 million of this income with any surplus returned to central government to support wider government expenditure. In 2024/25 the Agency generated £274.5 million in administration income, considerably more than £72 million it was allowed to retain.

Change of Assets in 2024/25

In 2024/25 the Agency’s balance sheet reduced by £1 billion (5%) to £19.6 billion, due largely to a £1.5 billion reduction in Help to Buy assets. This reduction reflects the closure of the programme and redemption of Help to Buy loans.

The reduction was partially offset by an increase across other net assets, including an increase in the fair value of residual Help to Buy loans driven by increases in house prices.

Change in net assets during 2024/25 (£m)

	£millions
Net assets at 2023/24	20,617
Help to buy	(1,524)
Other home equity	(3)
Other FVTPL	35
AC financial assets	230
Land and property	91
Other net assets	153
Net assets at 2024/25	19,599

Changes in Level of Administration Costs

The Agency was initially delegated an Administration budget of £116.1 million in 2024/25, which was revised to £115.6 million through the Supplementary Estimates process. The initial delegation of £116.1 million was £6 million less than the delegated Administration budget in 2023/24. However, an additional £7.2 million was transferred from Administration costs to RDEL Programme activity in 2024/25, so when taking this into account there is a small increase to the 2023/24 spend across payroll and non-payroll costs.

The Agency has spent 98.6% of its 2024/25 administration budget settlement compared to 99.6% in 2023/24.

Loan Portfolio Performance

Since 2012, the Agency has deployed over £5 billion of loans to support the unlocking and acceleration of housing projects across the country. The risk profile of such projects is, by definition, higher than average market risk, and HM Treasury-approved lending programmes assume average capital loss rates of 20%. The Agency-financed development projects will generate a 108% return on this strategy, being earnings of 15% balanced with cumulative capital losses on repaid loans and impairments to date on outstanding loans of 6% (less than 0.5% per annum since 2012). This compares favourably to private sector lending returns; it is materially better than the programme recovery rates and has unlocked over 202,000 homes since 2012. Indeed, the recent Public Bodies Review recommended that the Agency be authorised to take more risk in its loan deployment in order to deliver more impact.

For investment loans which were fully repaid as at 31 March 2025, of the £3.2 billion of funding provided, £3.5 billion has been recovered. Overall, there have been losses, including interest, of £26.5 million on these loans, which represents only 0.8% of the amount of funding provided.

For investment loans which are still outstanding as at 31 March 2025, of the £2.1 billion of funding provided, £0.5 billion has been recovered cumulatively to 31 March 2025. It is expected that a further £1.8 billion will be recovered on outstanding exposures at 31 March 2025 (which excludes receipts from any future interest accruals after the reporting date).

The loan portfolio performance is shown in the tables below.

Loan Portfolio Performance Charts

Performance of investment loans fully repaid at the reporting date

	£millions
Drawn	3,172.28
Excess interest accrual over drawn amounts	321.61
Write-offs	-26.46
Total recovered	3,467.43

Investment loans outstanding at the reporting date

	£millions
Drawn	2,116.95
Forecast excess interest accrual over drawn amounts(present value)	456.17
Write-offs and movements below initial cost	-311.68
Forecast total recovery	2,261.44

Combined position for all loans, repaid and outstanding

	£millions
Drawn	5,289.24
Forecast excess interest accrual over drawn amounts	777.78
Write-offs and movements below initial cost	-338.15
Forecast total recovery	5,728.87

Operating Expenditure

Operating expenditure totalled £3,556 million in 2024/25, an increase of £300 million (9%) from 2023/24. The increase is driven mainly by:

• a £692 million increase in grants payable (from £2,595 million in 2023/24 to £3,286 million) – see note 4 of the Financial Statements

• a £44 million increase in write-downs of land and property assets (from £134 million in 2023/24 to £178 million) – see note 16 of the Financial Statements

• a reduction of £329 million in movements in fair value below initial cost, for financial asset investments held at fair value through profit or loss (FVTPL) and receivables – see note 12f of the Financial Statements

• a reduction of £93 million in impairment of assets measured at amortised cost – see note 12f of the Financial Statements

Chart: Analysis of the components of operating expenditure

Components of operating expenditure (£millions)	2024 to 2025	2023 to 2024
Grants	3,286	2,595
Cost of land and property disposals	56	75
Programme costs	88	74
Staff costs	74	80
Pension costs	14	21
Administration expenses	32	28
Impairment of land and property	178	134
Movement in fair value below initial cost of FVTPL financial assets	(141 )	188
Impairment of financial assets measured at amortised charts	(30)	64
Movement in provisions	(1)	(3)
Total	3,556	3,256

Operating Income

Operating income totalled £715 million in 2024/25, an increase of £304 million (74%) since 2023/24. This is driven mainly by the impact of house price growth on home equity assets, reflected within movements in fair value above cost on financial assets held at fair value through profit or loss.

Chart: Analysis of the components of operating income

Components of operating income (£millions)	2024 to 2025	2023 to 2024
Proceeds from disposal of land and property assets	104	120
Movement in fair value above initial cost of financial assets measured at FVTPL	298	(16)
Gain/(loss) on disposal of financial assets	(6)	37
Interest income	119	118
Other operating income	200	151
Total	715	410

Help to Buy: Equity Loan Repayment Statistics^{[footnote 14]}

The table below summarises the number of Help to Buy: Equity Loans issued each financial year and the cumulative repayment of those loans at the end of 2024/25:

				2024/25			2023/24
Financial year	Number of loans issued	Number of repaid loans	Original cost of loans (£m)	Receipt from repaid loans (£m)	Number of repaid loans	Original cost of loans (£m)	Receipt from repaid loans (£m)
2024/25	0	0	0	0	N/A	N/A	N/A
2023/24	124	2	0.2	0.2	1	0.1	0.1
2022/23	26,044	679	41.7	41.3	112	6.0	6.1
2021/22	32,697	2,671	150.3	159.1	1,089	58.9	62.2
2020/21	55,617	9,867	625.9	679.8	5,386	359.9	359.1
2019/20	51,472	20,825	1,319.7	1,446.2	10,153	663.1	686.0
2018/19	52,454	25,950	1,614.7	1,753.7	21,694	1,344.6	1,436.3
2017/18	47,949	30,231	1,848.0	1,987.5	27,830	1,685.9	1,799.6
2016/17	39,964	28,054	1,570.3	1,695.1	26,649	1,484.7	1,585.0
2015/16	33,755	25,321	1,188.6	1,336.9	24,462	1,150.1	1,281.4
2014/15	27,793	22,139	964.5	1,118.7	21,553	941.9	1,081.8
2013/14	19,407	15,698	641.2	769.8	15,346	631.3	747.1
All years	387,276	181,437	9,965.1	10,988.3	154,275	8,326.5	9,044.7

The repayment statistics show that between April 2013 and March 2025 a total of 387,276 households bought homes with a Help to Buy: Equity Loan. By March 2025, a total of 181,437 households (46.8%) had repaid their loan. The repayment statistics also show that Homes England received £10,988 million from these 181,437 households, when the original cost of the loans was £9,965 million. The realised gain on disposal of £1,023 million reflects the Agency’s share of increases in the value of homes between the time the loan was issued and repaid.

Sustainability Report

Sustainable placemaking is central to Homes England’s mission to increase the supply of quality homes, improve affordability and help create stronger, more vibrant communities and places.

Our strategic plan, which was launched in 2023, set out our strategic objectives, all of which touch on the environmental, social or economic pillars of sustainability in some way. This plan includes objectives such as ‘promote the creation of high-quality homes in well-designed places that reflect community priorities by taking an inclusive and long-term approach’ and ‘enable sustainable homes and places, maximising their positive contribution to the natural environment and minimising their environmental impact’.

As we look to revise our strategic plan, the importance of delivering increased housing supply and high-quality, well-designed and sustainable homes with the infrastructure that communities need to thrive was also conveyed to us in a letter from the Minister of State for Housing and Planning in September 2024.

Over the past year we have continued to promote a series of ‘sustainability outcomes’ that aim to put sustainability and good design at the heart of everything we deliver. These outcomes enable us to work with our partners to ensure the homes and places we enable are healthy, inclusive and resilient and, through doing this, achieve social value. We take an outcomes-led approach because we believe that sustainability and good design cannot be achieved in isolation, and that well- designed places can achieve multiple outcomes.

Homes England Sustainable Placemaking Outcomes

Healthy
Nature – Nature thrives, is protected and accessible to all
Movement – Walking, wheeling, cycling and public transport are prioritised
Wellbeing – Homes and places support belonging, wellbeing and safety for all

Inclusive
Character – Homes and places are desirable, have a strong identity and sense of place
Accessibility – Homes and places are functional and accessible to all
Economy – Places support a thriving local economy with jobs and local services near where people live

Resilient
Stewardship – Homes and places are made to last and well-looked after
Resources – Homes and places are net zero carbon and resource efficient
Climate – Homes and places respond to the impacts of climate change

This Sustainability Report shows our progress in integrating sustainability and good design into Homes England’s work. It sets out how sustainability is starting to be embedded in our working culture, and how people and communities are central to everything we do. It then shows progress against our themes of ‘healthy’, ‘resilient’ and ‘inclusive’. As an arms-length public body, we also report against a series of metrics under the Greening Government Commitments (GGCs), which are summarised toward the end of this Sustainability Report.

Embedding Sustainability
This section includes our governance and business processes around sustainability as well as how we are embedding sustainability in our organisational culture.

People and Communities
This section includes how people are central to sustainable development and how Homes England supports social value.

Sustainability Outcomes
Our sustainability work is outcome focused. This section shows some of the highlights of this outcome focused work, grouped in terms of resilient, healthy and inclusive outcomes.

The Greening Government Commitments
This section includes our key sustainability metrics set by government and how we perform against them.

Much of our work on sustainability links strongly to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We show where our outcomes link to SDGs in the sustainable placemaking outcomes sections.

Embedding Sustainability

In our 2023/24 Sustainability Report we reported on how we had introduced our ‘Living Sustainably’ statement of intent and were reporting against a new suite of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that supported our strategic plan and monitored sustainability delivery. During 2024/25 we have continued to embed sustainability in our governance and business systems.

Leadership

The Corporate Governance section of this Annual Report and Accounts shows our governance structure and also describes how committees have operated over the year. It also describes our senior management structure.

The Cross Cutting Committee focuses on sustainability and design and is tasked with:

• promoting high-quality homes in well-designed places that reflect community priorities

• increasing Homes England’s focus on enabling sustainable homes and places, maximising their positive contribution to the natural environment, and minimising their environmental impact

The Cross Cutting Committee continued to review our approach to Living Sustainably, undertaking regular reviews and supporting take-up across the Agency, wherever practicable and aligned to Agency objectives.

Our Executive Leadership Team have also played an important role in advancing sustainability over the course of the year. Examples of work during 2024/25 include:

• endorsing the use of our new Sustainable Placemaking Passport

• approving Sustainability as an Agency principal risk

• embedding sustainability into our business processes

In 2024/25 we ran several pilots, across a variety of projects, to test our new Sustainable Placemaking Passport Tool. The Passport enables us and partners to consider, record and monitor a project’s response to each of the sustainability outcomes.

The Passport allows projects to define a vision for the place and community, including sustainability and design ambition. It then charts the opportunities, challenges and actions to be undertaken to achieve the vision and each of the sustainable placemaking outcomes. In summary, this tool is a check on progress towards sustainable placemaking at each project gateway stage, through to project delivery and monitoring.

The Passport will be introduced in phases over the coming year.

In support of the Sustainable Placemaking Passport, the Sustainability and Design Team has been developing technical guidance on a range of topics. This guidance is described further in the Sustainable Placemaking Outcomes section of this Sustainability Report.

We also have several established mechanisms to drive change, including:

Dedicated in-house technical experts: who provide advice on sustainability policy areas and keep our suite of policies, procedures and guidance up to date.

Our Design Surgery process: reviews and provides advice to projects to maximise design quality.

Building for a Healthy Life (BHL) reviews: our accredited BHL assessors measure a sample of projects for their performance against BHL.

Transparency

The work we do is monitored via a series of KPIs. Homes England’s Board receives and reviews monthly performance information, scored against corporate targets. Several of these KPIs relate directly to sustainability and design, including KPI 12, KPI 13, KPI 14, and KPI 15. Additionally, KPI 1, KPI 5, and KPI 10 are closely related to sustainability.

Further detail, including performance against the metrics, is included in the Detailed Performance Review section of the Annual Report and Accounts.

As well as the KPIs that monitor the delivery of our strategic plan, we also monitor a series of sustainability metrics through the GGCs. Performance information on GGCs is contained within the Greening Government Commitments part of this Sustainability Report.

Culture

Everybody within Homes England plays a role in our sustainable placemaking story. That’s why it is important that we seek to include sustainability within our organisational culture, and our way of working.

An internal sustainability communications team regularly discusses opportunities to raise the profile of sustainability in the organisation.

We regularly communicate with our staff by publishing internal information on sustainability topics. This includes via our internal intranet where we have a ‘Living Sustainably’ channel, where topics as diverse as sustainable transport, water efficiency and carbon emissions reduction, are promoted and discussed. We have also published longer blogs and presented topics at staff briefings.

As members of the Supply Chain Sustainability School, we and our suppliers have access to training and seminars on a range of topics, from social value to sustainable procurement. We also engage with a number of sector-wide forums, such as the UK Green Building Council, the Future Homes Hub and act as observers to housing sector meetings with the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE).

People and Communities

At Homes England we believe that people and communities are central to the achievement of sustainable placemaking. This includes the communities that we work with as we engage in placemaking and the social value created through this work.

For us, social value is about understanding, capturing and measuring the social, environmental and economic impact of our interventions on the wellbeing of society.

We do this by maximising the net impact on the wellbeing of the communities we serve through our interventions, partners and employees.

Our community engagement team has developed an approach to understanding, embedding and delivering locally relevant social value early on and throughout our processes. This ensures that our projects generate many more locally relevant outcomes at no additional project cost or time.

We have begun to consistently capture the delivery of locally relevant social value across all projects via our Social Impact form. These provide us with examples of how Homes England, via its partners and consultants, is directly impacting people’s lives.

This year, the community engagement team has provided direct support to projects in Sussex, West Yorkshire and Nottingham and has also completed place-based indicator exercises in Birmingham, Northstowe, Grimsby and Manchester.

We continue to embed social value in new ways and into additional programmes. Our first ever Social Value Statement to support a planning application was submitted in December 2024. This states the locally relevant social value that will be delivered should the application receive approval. Additionally, our approach to community engagement and social value has been embedded into the Bradford City Village project being taken forward through the English Cities Fund (ECF) portfolio. We aim to do more ECF projects in 2025/26.

In 2023/24, we reported on research on social value. In 2024/25, we published 2 further reports in our Measuring Social Value series. These included a report on measuring the wellbeing and fiscal impacts of housing for older people.

This focused on the measurement of the wellbeing impacts associated with the provision of homes specifically designed to meet the needs of older people. It also looked for evidence of fiscal savings that may be generated by providing these types of homes.

We also published guidance on the environmental  impact of new housing development within this series. This guidance and the associated tools allow analysts to bring a range of environmental impacts associated with changes to land use, the construction of homes and the occupation of those homes into the economic appraisal process.

At Northstowe, we have supported a series of community events and interventions to help build a sense of community. For example, we launched a £120,000 Northstowe Community Action Fund (CAF) and appointed a community development officer.

Our Sustainable Placemaking Outcomes

Resilient Outcomes

In an ever-changing world, it is important that the work we carry out is resilient to changes. Our resilient outcomes encompass climate, resources and stewardship outcomes.

Climate

Calendar year 2024 was the warmest year on record globally, and the first year that the average global temperature was more than 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial level.^{[footnote 15]} At the time of writing, 2024 was provisionally the fourth warmest year on record for the UK.^{[footnote 16]} England also had its eighth wettest year, and several storms, such as Storms Bert and Darragh brought strong winds and flooding.^{[footnote 17]}

Climate resilience has been a key focus over the last year. Following this Sustainability Report we include our Phase 2 Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) Report. This includes a series of disclosures on our governance around climate-related issues, our risk management and our metrics and targets. A key area of work within this has been the articulation of Sustainability as a new Agency principal risk. This is further described in the TCFD Report.

In addition to this, we held several workshops to raise awareness with project teams and risk colleagues to explore how climate impacts the Agency’s work. This has enabled the drafting of internal climate change guidance, that we will further develop in the coming year.

Many of our existing tools also help us to embed climate resilience in projects. For example, the Building for a Healthy Life guidance we apply to our projects checks for natural connections and green and blue infrastructure: important pillars in addressing climate effects such as urban warming and flood resilience.

A good example of SuDs (sustainable drainage) combined with leisure at Kirkleatham, Redcar.

One example of how we are addressing climate impacts is through ECF, our placemaking partnership with Legal & General and Muse Places Limited that helps deliver long-term sustainable regeneration. This mechanism has supported grant funding for sustainable and affordable apartments in Salford, as part of the first phase of Adelphi Village, part of the Crescent Salford Masterplan.

These homes will meet the Passivhaus Classic certification, are highly efficient, and provide resilience against overheating. Elsewhere, the ECF is supporting partnership working with Hull City Council by combining land holdings to enable development masterplanning, development and construction of the East Bank Urban Village.

Announced in February 2025, the long-term partnership will deliver 850 new homes alongside the delivery of critical infrastructure such as flood defences.

As part of the GGCs there are requirements to develop an organisational climate change adaptation strategy across estates and operations, including conducting climate change risk assessments to better understand any likely risks. Identified risks and mitigation should be captured in a climate change adaptation action plan.

To meet these requirements, we developed a methodology for conducting a climate change assessment at project and site level. This methodology has been trialled at 3 of our supported sites and tested through workshops. Further work in the coming year will further develop the approach.

Resources

Responsible use of resources is also an important part of our resilience story. Creating homes and places inevitably consumes resources to prepare land, build roads and other infrastructure, and construct the houses themselves. Although Homes England doesn’t directly build houses, through our land acquisitions, funding and loans we support the house building sector. All of this involves resources such as construction materials, water resources and energy, with by-products which include greenhouse gases and waste. We are exploring how to encourage less resource- intensive and lower-carbon ways of delivering the work that we undertake and enable.

Schroders Capital’s Real Estate Impact Fund

Homes England has invested £50 million in Schroders Capital’s Real Estate Impact Fund. The fund aims to ensure its investments are made in accessible and resilient locations, with access to green space, public transport, schools and GPs.

The fund is only the second real estate fund in the UK to receive approval from the Financial Conduct Authority to use the ‘Sustainability Impact’ label under Sustainability Disclosure Requirements.

Carbon Emissions

In 2024/25 we updated our carbon inventory. This shows our Scope 1, 2 and 3 greenhouse gas emissions aligned to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (see the Greening Government Commitments part of this report for an explanation of the carbon scopes). This means we monitor the direct emissions from Homes England, including our fuel use in offices, our indirect emissions, like electricity use, and wider indirect emissions such as business travel, waste and the carbon generated through our investments. We estimate that 99% of the greenhouse gas emissions come from indirect Scope 3 sources. Our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions are detailed in the Greening Government Commitments section.

To help manage down carbon emissions we have explored opportunities for carbon reduction across all 3 carbon scopes as part of our emerging carbon reduction plan. This work will continue in the coming year as we seek to minimise the carbon emissions footprint of our work.

Alongside this, we have developed a suite of internal guidance documents and case studies on carbon-related topics that will help inform projects going forward. We will roll out this guidance in the coming year.

Advances in housing construction can also deliver sustainability benefits. As part of our commitment to promoting innovation in the sector and ascertaining the impact of regulatory change, we have been trialling building houses to the Future Homes Standard, ahead of regulation. The Future Homes Standard aims to reduce the carbon in new homes by improving energy efficiency and improving heating and hot water systems. It will update future building regulations. Working closely with the Future Homes Hub, government departments, housebuilders, industry bodies and academics, a body of research findings is being built up, including post-occupancy data to further inform and enhance knowledge of these important changes.

Modern ways of manufacturing building elements can also be more efficient and save on waste. For example, we commission research on Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and are currently carrying out a monitoring and measuring research study on the impact of MMC on the delivery of homes. The overall aim of the study is to provide impartial evidence and an objective assessment of the outcomes achieved by embracing the use of more advanced MMC technologies in respect of housing delivery. The study is reviewing the overall performance of MMC housing units by closely monitoring the different construction technologies.

Environmental Management

At an organisational level, we have completed a review of our Health, Safety and Environmental Management System against best practice environmental standards, to ensure that we have appropriate processes in place to reduce the environmental impacts of our activities and continue to improve our ways of working. Following this review, we will be working to align our system against the requirements of international standard ISO 14001 in 2025/26.

Wildlife Licensing

We have updated our procedures and guidance for obtaining wildlife mitigation licences. This has included providing in-house training and awareness raising on compliance with licence requirements, and best practice in managing licensable works.

Stewardship

Stewardship is about making sure that the homes and places that we enable are made to last and well looked after. We need to think about how to create great places to live in the long-term and not just when communities first occupy homes. We recognise the role of stewardship to be integral not only to the maintenance of assets in the long-term, but as a vital placemaking tool to support and encourage activities which help create a vibrant community and leave a lasting legacy. At the same time, it is important to ensure that stewardship of assets and communities of all sizes are financially accountable and sustainable, have effective and democratic governance and support community and social value.

We are currently developing internal guidance to increase understanding of long-term stewardship and better integrate consideration of it in the project delivery lifecycle. We will continue to update this guidance in response to emerging policy.

Working towards resilient outcomes links to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals

11 – Sustainable cities and communities
12 – Responsible consumption and production
13 – Climate action
16 – Peace, justice and strong institutions

Healthy Outcomes

Our healthy outcomes encompass nature, movement and wellbeing. We know that a high-quality, safe and attractive environment that allows opportunities for active travel and recreation is a key step in ensuring our places support healthy communities.

Nature

Our defined outcome for nature is that nature thrives, is protected and accessible to all. Nature and green infrastructure are a core part of the BHL guidance that we promote and monitor our supported schemes on. We want to create places that are well integrated into the site and their wider natural and built surroundings. We want site plans to look beyond the site boundary.

Through the Biodiversity Duty (Environment Act 2021) and in line with the requirements of the GGCs, we recognise that protecting and enhancing nature is critical. In 2024/25 we worked to develop our Nature Positive Plan, which will set out our ambition to embed opportunities to reduce our impact on nature throughout our interventions and activities. Nature Positive refers to actions that halt and reverse nature loss by 2030.

In early 2025, we made a start on our first goal of ‘Understanding our nature related issues and impacts’ by conducting a nature materiality assessment. This has helped us identify the most important nature-related issues for the Agency and its supply chain to prioritise. These material issues range from reducing air, soil and water pollution to addressing invasive species. With these material impacts and issues defined, we will now work towards addressing these through our internal review processes.

Biodiversity Net Gain

Biodiversity is the variety of life. England has a variety of important habitats and supports a good range of wildlife, but this, and the wider benefits that biodiversity provides, are under threat from unsustainable development. So, it is important that, as we deliver homes and places, we look at ways we can enhance biodiversity.

Our KPI on biodiversity is KPI 14, which is the ‘rolling average percentage biodiversity net gain planned on supported schemes’. In 2024/25, this was not reported as the number of projects in scope of the KPI were too few to produce a statistically meaningful average. In 2025/26, we anticipate the progression of sufficient schemes to commence reporting against this KPI.

Biodiversity net gain (BNG) ensures that habitats for wildlife are left in a measurably better state than they were before the development. This is achieved when developers create, or retain and enhance, habitats to benefit wildlife. This can be achieved on the development site, or where that is not possible, on another site nearby. Currently, new schemes must plan for a net gain of at least 10%.

Nutrient Neutrality

We have schemes in areas affected by nutrient neutrality, which means we must bring forward development in a way that avoids net input of nutrients to sensitive habitat sites. As well as working to resolve such issues to achieve sustainable solutions, we ran nutrient neutrality sessions with key internal teams to build awareness and look at potential future improvements to ways of working.

Movement

Our movement outcome is ‘walking, wheeling, cycling and public transport are prioritised’.

In late 2024 the government updated the National Planning Policy Framework to include that transport issues should be considered from the earliest stages of plan-making and development proposals, using a vision led transport planning approach to identifying transport solutions that deliver well-designed, sustainable and popular places.

The approach to vision led transport is still developing. However, we have been investigating some key characteristics of successful approaches with our partners, such as:

• integration of, and an emphasis on, sustainable and active travel investments

• aligned spatial planning and design of sites

• digital connectivity and smart place initiatives

Taking a vison led approach can help enable local and sustainable placemaking, living and working. Over the last year we have been working to develop our internal guidance on the approach.

We are also exploring the application of the vision led transport planning approach to several of our sites, working with partners and strategic stakeholders.

For example, the planning approval for the Homes England promoted site at Pickerings Farm, Penwortham, Preston has included a vision led transport planning based transport strategy for the site.

Alongside our vision led transport planning approach work, we have been looking at some of the things that make transport work in new housing schemes. For example, we are currently updating an earlier guidance document called ‘Parking: what works where’ to bring this in line with planning practice.

Walking, cycling and public transport are key components of the integrated neighbourhood theme of BHL.

This canal side path was installed to encourage active travel at the Tower Works project, integrating well with the City of Leeds.

Wellbeing

Our wellbeing outcome means that homes and places support belonging, wellbeing and safety for all.

Analysis by the research organization TRUUD (Tackling Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development) shows that urban environments impact over 70 health outcomes, through over 200 pathways. These impacts include cardiorespiratory diseases, infectious diseases, injuries, allergies and mental health conditions. It is therefore important that as we deliver sustainable placemaking we consider health and wellbeing.^{[footnote 18]}

A huge variety of things support wellbeing, not least the sustainable interventions we mention in this Sustainability Report. We also apply BHL on our supported schemes. This includes prompts to consider sport and leisure provision, street design that allows users to use the street confidently and safely, and a series of distinctive place objectives.

Working towards healthy outcomes links to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals

3 – Good health and well-being
11 – Sustainable cities and communities
14 – Life below water
15 – Life on land

Inclusive Outcomes

Our inclusive outcomes encompass the themes of economy, character and accessibility. As we contribute to building new homes across the country, there is an enormous opportunity to improve places. This can be through supporting jobs and local services, opening up new public realm or enhancing local character and bringing a real sense of place. There are benefits for all, from homeowners to existing communities and for business.

Economy

We aim to achieve places that support a thriving local economy with jobs and local services near where people live.

Many of our schemes are bringing real economic benefits to communities. For example, some of the sites we support bring a mix of housing and commercial space to an area. Tower Works, Leeds, for example, won Residential Development of the Year at the Inside Media Yorkshire Property Awards in 2024. The build for rent development is situated within Leeds Holbeck Urban Regeneration Area and includes new commercial units around a characterful courtyard. The site sensitively regenerates a long neglected industrial site bringing high-quality public realm and new public routes through the area. One of our predecessor organisations, Yorkshire Forward, acquired the site in 2005 to ensure that this key gateway site, linking Holbeck to the centre of Leeds, was developed to a high-quality in order to set the standard for the rest of the urban village. The site was then marketed through a comprehensive tendering exercise with funding for the private rented sector from Legal & General.

While we are monitored against KPIs such as ‘employment floorspace completed’ and ‘number of jobs created’ we also work to bring about a broader range of impacts on local economies. For example, internal case studies of Homes England projects have shown that at a local level, benefits can include increased local spend in the economy.^{[footnote 19]}

Public-private partnership delivers homes and social value

Pension Insurance Corporation plc, Muse Places Limited, and Homes England have formed a £54 million joint venture, named Habiko. This partnership aims to bring forward 3,000 low-carbon, low-energy affordable homes for rent, and diversify the supply chain for future efficient housing developments. It will unlock institutional investment and become self-funding over its 12-year lifespan.

The developments aim to create social value for communities, including boosting the local economy through job creation and new skills to drive green innovation.

Character

Our aim for character is that ‘homes and places are desirable, have a strong identity and sense of place’.

We carry out regular reviews of a sample of sites against BHL, including the ‘distinctive places theme’. This review process checks how well developments have implemented the guidance. In 2024/25 we noted a number of good examples of how this theme had been implemented, across the criteria of ‘making the most of what’s there’, ‘a memorable character’, ‘well defined streets and places’ and ‘easy to find your way around’.

The Housing Design Awards (HDAs), created by government in 1948, are in their 77th year of finding and promoting the best new housing schemes. The judging process, led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) is also supported by Homes England, the Greater London Authority, the Home Builders Federation and the National House Building Council, together with the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Future Homes Hub. Homes England supports the HDAs because their focus is on sharing best practice and learning from the best schemes every year. In 2024, the awards were presented by our Chief Executive, Chief Property Officer and the Housing Minister. Of the 14 awards given, 3 were won by schemes that had received support from the Agency.

The next awards will be given in Autumn 2025 after visiting the shortlisted schemes. This includes 7 which have had support from Homes England.

Our Building for a Healthy Life reviews included assessments of memorable character, like here at Houghton Grange, St. Ives, Cambridgeshire where existing mature trees add their distinctiveness to the place.

Accessibility

Our Accessibility Outcome is defined as: Homes and places are functional and accessible to all.

This includes ensuring affordable homes are available through initiatives such as our Affordable Homes Programme and through other key initiatives, such as through increasing access to sites for affordable housing providers.

In fact, our Affordable Homes Programme has included schemes that not only increase accessibility, but contribute to broader sustainability and innovative design and construction as well. For example, one project, Sydney Grange in Failsworth, Greater Manchester, provides energy efficient over-60s retirement homes on a shared ownership basis. These have been built with MMC using a factory manufactured prefabricated panelised system which was assembled on site, enabling faster high-quality construction.

Another site, Oldland Common in South Gloucestershire created small-scale social rent supported housing for residents with learning disabilities or autism. This was supported through joint funding by Homes England, via the Affordable Homes Programme, and the NHS, through their Transforming Care Programme. The scheme incorporates energy efficient features and sustainable building materials as well as green roofs and sensory gardens.

BHL aims to ensure that our developments provide a range of homes that meet local community needs. This includes providing a mix of housing types and tenures that suit the needs of the local community.

Our guidance promotes developments that offer people access to private outdoor space, which is important for people’s mental health and wellbeing, and we encourage best practice in terms of maximising the opportunities offered by supported accommodation.

One example of how we are working towards greater accessibility is at Northstowe. Here, we are working in partnership with TOWN, a profit-with- purpose developer that focuses on quality of life and sustainability. The plan is for a development comprising co-housing alongside a mix of homes for private sale and affordable housing. It will include a low / zero-traffic play street, allowing children to play safely, and allowing the community to socialise.

Working towards inclusive outcomes links to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals

8 – Decent work and economic growth
9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure

The Greening Government Commitments

The Greening Government Commitments (GGCs) set out the actions to be taken by the UK government departments and partner organisations like Homes England to reduce their impact on the environment.

Our commentary on progress with our Nature Positive Plan and climate adaptation strategies is discussed in our sections on Nature and Climate in this Sustainability Report. Our performance against some key targets on greenhouse gas emissions, waste, water, procurement and information technology are discussed in this section of the report. Metrics that are material to our TCFD disclosure are marked with an asterisk (*).

Operational Footprint

As part of the ongoing strategy to consolidate government operations into joint hubs, we relocated staff from 2 of our offices this year into local government hubs. This included moving our London-based staff to the hub at South Colonnade in Canary Wharf and our Coventry-based staff to the Bridge Street, Birmingham hub operated by HMRC.

Consequently, the previously reported emissions for our activities in Coventry are now captured in joint reporting by HMRC for the Birmingham office, while the figures reported below include records for the new London office.

Scope of Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Greening Government Commitments

Scope 1. These emissions occur from sources owned or controlled by the organisation. They include all direct emissions from leased vehicles in the Homes England fleet and direct emissions from gas used in heating our offices.

Scope 2. These emissions result from energy consumed which is supplied by another party. They comprise indirect emissions from energy use (electricity, heating and cooling, including transmission losses) in our managed offices.

Scope 3. These relate to official business travel directly paid for by an organisation under GGC. They comprise those from business travel by public transport (domestic flights, rail, underground, taxi, bus) or in privately owned staff vehicles.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Total emissions target
47% reduction

We achieved 38% reduction*

Scope 1 emissions
Target 25% reduction

We achieved 67% reduction*

Waste management

Target overall
15% waste reduction

We recorded 6.6% increase*

Water consumption

Target 8% reduction

We achieved 38% reduction*

*As measured against a 2017/18 baseline.

The following table presents supporting financial information associated with GGC performance metrics described in this Sustainability Report:

Financial Spend	2017/18 (Baseline)	2020/21	2021/22	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25	Comparison to 2017/18 Baseline	Comparison to Prior Year
Energy consumption (£’000)	132	105	85	38	73	106	Down	Up
Official business travel (£’000)	1,772	437	1,052	1,169	2,114	1,982	Up	Down
Landfill/ Incineration (£’000)	15	42	24	0.78	0.57	0.93	Down	Up
Recycling (£’000)	9	19.8	19	5.72	3.85	21.65	Up	Up
Total ICT waste recycled, reused and recovered (externally) (£’000)				3.99	6.61	9.63	New metric	Up
Paper procurement (£’000)	19	0.96	1	3	5	4.6	Down	Down
Water supply and sewerage (£’000)	19	24	8	3.9	0.4	0.7	Down	Up

Notes on data:

• Water supply costs relate to Northstowe only. There are no available financial records for spend on hazardous waste and composted food waste disposal at our offices. Recycling and incineration costs are based on spend at our Northstowe office and spend on furniture recycling with a furniture reuse supplier. All other offices include waste services under a combined service contract.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions*

The following graphs show the greenhouse gases (GHGs) we are required to report under the GGCs.

Notes on this data:

• CO2e refers to carbon dioxide equivalent, a standardised measurement to indicate the global warming potential of different greenhouse gases, expressed in terms of the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that would cause the same climate effect.

• MWh refers to megawatt hours of district heating electricity or gas used.

Chart: Scope 1 and 2 Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Energy Consumption

Year	Total GGC Scope 1 (direct) emissions (tonnes CO2e)	Total GGC Scope 2 (indirect) GHG emissions (tonnes CO2e)	Gas use (MWh)	Electricity use	District Heating (MWh)
2017/18	387	303	550	789	0
2020/21	85	177	372	395	0
2021/22	77	62	214	218	66
2022/23	65	57	0	152	139
2023/24	155	141	248	518	139
2024/25	128	164	113	642	175

Note: MWh refers to megawatt hours of district heating, electricity-use or gas used. A megawatt hour is equal to 1000 kilowatt hours.
Chart columns which are a quantity of zero, or where no data is available, are not shown in the chart.

Homes England has made significant strides in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, achieving a 38% overall emissions reduction in 2024/25 compared to our baseline year. This marks substantial progress under the GGCs. Despite our progress, we have not met our target of a 47% reduction in total emissions.

Trends in our overall GGC defined emissions are linked strongly to business travel. As illustrated in the following chart, emissions significantly decreased between 2019 and 2022, a period when travel was restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in the last 2 years, with increases in staff numbers and business travel resumed, emissions have risen again.

Chart: Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions GGC Scope 1-3

	Tonnes CO2e
2017/18 Baseline year	1,043
2020/21	296
2021/22	250
2022/23	353
2023/24	652
2024/25	643

Emission Reduction Target: 47%

Chart: GGC Scope 1 Greenhouse Gas Emissions

	Tonnes CO2e
2017/18 Baseline year	387
2020/21	85
2021/22	77
2022/23	65
2023/24	155
2024/25	128

Emission Reduction Target: 25%

Scope 1 Total*

We have successfully achieved our sub-target for Scope 1 emissions (related to fleet vehicle emissions and gas use), reducing them by 18% this year and achieving a 67% decrease from the 2017/18 baseline. This reduction is largely due to our successful adoption of low or zero-emission vehicles in the Agency’s leased fleet.

Scope 2 Total*

In 2024/25 our Scope 2 emissions totalled 164 tCO2e, an increase on last year of 16%. However, this can largely be attributed to the recent move to a new London office where electricity use is higher, particularly in shared common areas outside our control.

Scope 3 Total*

Our 2024/25 Scope 3 emissions totalled 351 tCO2e. This is a 1% decrease from the previous year and 0.5% reduction against our baseline. These emissions were primarily related to business travel by air, train and private and hire cars. Further details on business travel are provided below.

Greenhouse Gases: All Scopes Total (Including Extended Scope 3)*

In addition to the assessment of our emissions under the GGCs, in 2023/24, we initiated work on a carbon inventory using 2022/23 data. This expanded our data collection to encompass all sources of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions within our operational control. In 2024/25 we completed further carbon inventories for the 2023/24 and 2024/25 financial years. As the GGC targets do not include these emissions, we have presented them separately in the graphs which follow.

The methodology of our carbon inventory follows the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, using the operational control approach to account for emissions from activities we directly control.

Scope 1 covers direct emissions, Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from purchased energy, and Scope 3 includes emissions influenced by our activities but not directly controlled. This method ensures consistent and transparent measurement of emissions across the organisation, helping identify opportunities for GHG reduction.

The following graphic outlines the emissions sources that have been determined as in and out of Scope for the Homes England carbon inventory across Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 categories.

*GGC metrics material to our TCFD disclosure.

Scope 1

Fuel use – offices
Fuel use – leased vehicles
Land use change – owned land

Direct emissions

Scope 2

Energy use – offices
Energy use – leased vehicles

Indirect emissions

Scope 3

Purchased goods and services
Infrastructure services
Financial services
Consultants
Advisory services
Maintenance services
Law services
Real estate management services
Employee development services

Fuel and energy related activities
Upstream emissions of purchased fuels (WTT)
Transmission and distribution of electricity

Waste generated in operations
Waste generated in operations – office waste

Business travel
Domestic flights
Rail travel
Taxi travel
Bus travel
Short haul international travel
Rental cars
Employee owned vehicles – business travel
Hotels

Employee commuting
Employee commuting

Downstream leased assets
Leased assets – assets managed by Homes England or leased to non developers (e.g. tenanted agricultural land)

Investments
Affordable Homes and Shared Ownership Programmes
Right to Buy
First Homes
Levelling-up Home Building Fund
Home Building Fund Short Term Fund
Home Building Fund Infrastructure Loan
Housing Infrastructure Fund
Local Authority Accelerated Construction

Indirect emissions

Out of Scope

Scope 3 Capital goods
Scope 3 Upstream transport and distribution
Scope 3 Upstream leased assets
Scope 3 Downstream transport and distribution
Scope 3 Processing of sold products
Scope 3 End-of-life treatment of sold products
Scope 3 Franchises

Within the previous graphic, operational boundary investment funds and acquisitions are accounted for in two different Scope 3 categories. The ‘Investments’ category within Scope 3 is limited to the Investment Programmes listed. There are other funds used to acquire land. When this land is acquired by Homes England, the activities undertaken upon it will initially be captured under ‘Purchased Goods and Services’. Once ready for development, the land parcels will be leased to developers. Therefore, from this point forward it will be captured within ‘Downstream Leased Assets’.

Certain emissions sources have been scoped out of the carbon inventory entirely, as they are either very minor or not relevant to our operations. These include capital goods, upstream and downstream transportation, and distribution and leased assets, processing, use and end of life sold products, and franchises.

As discussed in the TCFD Report, the disclosure of these Scope 3 emissions is considered to be material to our primary audience and has therefore been included in our summary of greenhouse emissions estimated to arise from the activities at Homes England. In support of Phase 2 of the TCFD implementation, this is the first Annual Report and Accounts in which we have provided this broader disclosure of our greenhouse gas emissions.

The results of the carbon inventory indicate that Scope 3 emissions make up more than 99% of our total estimated emissions in each of the last 3 years, as shown in the following chart. Our baseline year for all greenhouse gas emissions scopes in our carbon inventory and in relation to TCFD reporting is 2022/23. While reported emissions have shown a slight downward trend over the past 3 years, this is primarily due to ongoing improvements in our data collection methodology and changes in our investment portfolio.

Carbon Inventory Scope 1-3 GHG Emissions 2022-2025

	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25
Scope 1 Emissions (tCO2e)	65	153	128
Scope 2 Emissions (tCO2e)	54	132	164
Scope 3 Emissions (tCO2e)	1,159,329	1,065,883	838,960

Note: Calculation methods used in the carbon inventory for 2023/24 differs from those reported through the GGCs.

Note: Calculation methods used in the carbon inventory for 2023/24 differs from those reported through the GGCs.

A breakdown of Scope 3 emissions by GHG protocol categories is provided for all 3 years in the following chart. Within Scope 3, investment activities contribute 86% of all emissions, followed by purchased goods and services (8%) and downstream leased assets (6%).

Of the investments emissions, the largest proportion comes from our Affordable Homes Programme and the Housing Infrastructure Fund, with the Brownfield Infrastructure and Land Fund growing since its introduction in 2023/24.

The Agency’s initial carbon inventory, particularly for Scope 3 emissions, relies heavily on calculation of emissions from spending data which, while compatible with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, has limitations.^{[footnote 20]}

Most of our Scope 3 categories, including Investments and Purchased Goods and Services, are currently calculated this way. We are actively working to improve data quality and accuracy.

For example, we plan to enhance how we measure emissions from land use change in the coming year. We remain committed to identifying and acting on opportunities to reduce Scope 3 emissions, which make up a significant part of our overall impact.

Carbon Inventory Scope 3 Categories Breakdown

	2022/23 Emissions tCO2e	2023/24 Emissions tCO2e	2024/25 Emissions tCO2e
Purchased good and services	46,495	69,142	68,154
Fuel and energy related activities	32	85	92
Waste generated in operations	248	621	111
Business travel	303	431	427
Employee commuting	226	223	234
Downstream leased assets	23,558	44,636	50,390
Investments	1,088,467	950,745	719,552

Business Travel*

Business Distance Travelled

In comparison to the 2017/18 baseline year, our total distance travelled for business purposes has seen a slight increase. This is largely due to the growth in staff numbers and the Agency’s expanded efforts in supporting housing delivery at sites across England.

Despite this rise in travel, it is encouraging to note that 84% of the total distance travelled was conducted using either rail or company fleet which are predominantly electric or Ultra-Low Emission Vehicle (ULEV) vehicles, effectively reducing the overall emissions from this travel.

Additionally, at our Northstowe office, we are actively promoting sustainable travel by providing vehicle charging points and e-bikes for colleagues to borrow when inspecting the adjacent development site.

*GGC metrics material to our TCFD disclosure.

Chart: Business Distance Travelled

Year	Domestic flights distance travelled	Rail distance travelled	Private car distance travelled	Fleet car distance travelled	Car total distance travelled	Business travel distance total
2017/18	34	4,166	0	0	2,371	6,572
2020/21	0	67	0	0	247	314
2021/22	24	1,540	300	213	513	2,078
2022/23	47	4,070	469	366	835	5,000
2023/24	36	3,253	1,366	1,481	2,848	6,166
2024/25	72	4,288	1,060	1,697	2,757	7,167

Note: Chart columns which are a quantity of zero, or where no data is available, are not shown in the chart.

Flights

In 2024/25, the number of domestic flights increased to 137, covering a distance of 71,974km. This presents a 44% increase in number of flights and 110% increase in distance travelled from 2017/18.

Consequently, domestic flight related greenhouse gas emissions increased by 129% from the baseline and we have not met the GGC sub-target to reduce flight related emissions by 30%.

The increase is a reflection of many of our teams having a remit to manage sites across the country, where flights have been taken to support timely project delivery.

Chart: Domestic Flight Emissions

	Tonnes CO2e
2017/18 Baseline year	5.06
2020/21	0
2021/22	3.04
2022/23	6.07
2023/24	5.81
2024/25	11.59

Emission Reduction Target: 30%

The number of international flights in the last year has also increased, with 25 flights in 2024/25, an increase of 47% on last year. This international travel relates to colleague attendance at a key property conference in France and a trip linked to research into affordable housing delivery in Boston, USA.

We recognise the importance of reducing flights, given the higher emissions that they produce. As part of our carbon reduction plan, we will be working to reduce avoidable air travel in the coming year.

Chart: Distance Travelled by Domestic and International Flights (GGCs)

Year	Domestic flights	International short haul, economy	International long haul, economy	International long haul, premium economy
2017/18 Baseline year	34	0	0	0
2020/21	0	0	0	0
2021/22	24	0	0	0
2022/23	47	26	22	0
2023/24	36	30	0	0
2024/25	72	30	0	17

Note: The categories of international flight shown in the above graph reflect those that have been recorded. No flights were taken in other travel classes, such as long-haul first class.
Chart columns which are a quantity of zero, or where no data is available, are not shown in the chart.

Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicles (ULEV)

The Agency has made further progress this year with respect to its car lease scheme and transitioning from petrol and diesel cars to ULEV.

99% of cars under our lease scheme are ULEV cars.

We remain on track towards being 100% ULEV by 31 December 2027.

Travel is an area we will continue to focus on to encourage more sustainable behaviours.

Chart: Percentage of Fleet as Ultra Low Emission Vehicles

	Percentage
2021/22	54%
2022/23	65%
2023/24	94%
2024/25	99%

Resource Consumption: Paper and Water*

Paper

Against the 2017/18 baseline we have reduced paper consumption by 85% this year. This exceeds the target of a 50% reduction against the baseline.

This achievement can be attributed to changing behaviours by staff to reduce printing and photocopying.

Paper Consumption

	2017/18 Baseline Year	2020/21	2021/22	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25
Paper consumed (A4 reams equivalent)	5,542	234	1,384	747	865	833
50% Reduction Target	2,771	2,771	2,771	2,771	2,771	2,771
Reams per Full Time Equivalent staff	7.1	0.2	1.0	0.5	0.6	0.6

Water

We have met the commitment to reduce overall water consumption by 8% against the 2017/18 baseline and achieved a decrease of 21%. We have achieved this through measures such as reducing the frequency of window cleaning, use of more efficient dishwasher cycles and a reduction in office planting.

Beyond direct water use in our offices, we recognise that water is also embedded in the buildings we use and materials and services we procure. We completed a nature materiality assessment this year that highlighted the significant water demand in producing raw materials like rubber, plastics, concrete, and steel. These are all used in construction activities we procure to enable site development. While we currently lack tools to measure embodied water, we will explore opportunities to capture it in future updates to our commercial processes.

Chart: Office Water Use

	m3
2017/18 Baseline year	1,553
2020/21	3,131
2021/22	1,592
2022/23	205
2023/24	1,088
2024/25	1,230

Emission Reduction Target: 8%

*GGC metrics material to our TCFD disclosure.

Waste Management and Reuse Schemes*

We recorded a reduction in total waste produced in 2024/25 against 2023/24, and high rates of recycling. As such, we have met our GGC sub- targets to recycle more than 70% of office waste and have diverted all office waste from landfill. But due to higher staff numbers since 2017/18, we have not met our headline target to reduce total waste by 15% from the 2017/18 baseline.

Financial records relating to waste are provided in the table at the start of this section. There are no waste records in the category of incineration without energy recovery. The waste calculations reported in 2024/25 have been revised to remove waste reused, in line with GGC calculation methods.

This changed total waste reported in the baseline year and subsequent years, where waste was diverted from disposal for reuse, including 2017/18, 2018/19, 2022/23 and 2023/24. Through initiatives in our digital and facilities management teams, we have made positive progress with reuse schemes this year.

We diverted 21 tonnes of office furniture and 3.1 tonnes of IT equipment from disposal into reuse schemes. As part of our office moves and floor space rationalisation this year, we provided 543 items of furniture and other office assets to other government departments for reuse.

Office Waste (GGCs)

	2017/18 Baseline Year	2020/21	2021/22	2022/23	2023/24	2024/25
Total waste (tonnes)	20.37	62.60	19.96	26.21	32.83	21.71
Hazardous waste: landfill (tonnes)	0.03	-	-	-	-	-
Non-hazardous waste: landfill (tonnes)	1.11	3.70	-	-	4.66	-
Waste Composted (tonnes)	-	-	-	-	0.27	0.06
Non-hazardous waste: incineration with energy recovery (tonnes)	2.74	3.90	3.88	4.13	9.14	5.87
Non-hazardous waste: recycled (tonnes)	16.49	55.00	16.08	22.08	18.76	15.77
ICT waste reused, recycled, recovered externally (tonnes)	6.34	-	-	8.84	0.96	24.26
Recycling rate (%)	81%	88%	81%	84%	57%	73%
Landfill rate (%)	6%	6%	0%	0%	14%	0%

Note: Chart columns which are a quantity of zero, or where no data is available, are not shown in the chart.

*GGC metrics material to our TCFD disclosure.

The Environmental Impact of ICT

Information and Communication Technology (ICT), through allowing flexible working and reducing the need for paper-based reporting and data storage, can have significant environmental benefits. However, the hardware used along with the storage of data also has environmental costs. ICT, such as laptops and collaborative software applications, enable working in a dispersed way, and can save on travel miles and pollution. This is vital as we often work with partner agencies based at a distance from our offices.

To prepare for future reporting on greenhouse gases and digital services, our Digital directorate have undertaken a preliminary review of existing practices and future opportunities, including around mitigating climate change, minimising waste and sustainable procurement. Key activities include:

• sharing facilities with other government users, via Crown Hosting

• using an IT reuse supplier to manage redundant hardware

• use of refurbished headsets

• suppliers having policies in place

Sustainable Procurement

We take account of government mandatory Buying Standards when procuring goods and services and our procurement policy follows Crown Commercial Service principles. Where relevant, we are embedding procurement policy notes on social value and carbon management plans. When carrying out a procurement covered by the new Procurement Act 2023, we are aware that we must have regard to the importance of maximising public benefit in terms of social and economic value.

We are working with others in government to introduce whole life carbon reporting across our activity, and this will include working with the construction and housing sector to monitor and report embodied carbon. In 2024/25 we introduced a requirement on our capital projects to conduct whole life carbon assessments so we can further understand and identify opportunities to reduce our emissions from these projects.

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters are material considerations for our partnerships, and we seek to work with partners who set bold ambitious objectives, through both mandatory and voluntary ESG and sustainability reporting.

Sustainable Construction

Homes England does not build homes directly; rather it provides resources, either in the form of de-risked land, or funding support to others to do so. Through our relationship with housebuilders, we are encouraging them to consider ways to improve the energy performance of the homes they build and to implement sustainable construction practices.

Where we are directly involved in the de-risking of land and the provision of infrastructure, we make use of Crown Commercial Service Construction Works framework and the principles in the government’s Construction Playbook. As noted in our procurement update, we have whole life carbon assessment requirements for each of our major projects to inform future initiatives to reduce the carbon intensity of the works we contract.

Our Delivery Partner Dynamic Purchasing System Framework is a platform through which developers can bid to acquire our land and is open to new applicants on a rolling basis. The qualification process for this framework requires prospective developers to demonstrate a commitment to environmental protection through ISO 14001 accreditation or an aligned environmental management system. Furthermore, at the tender stage for sites, sustainability is a key part of the technical scoring criteria of prospective bids.

Environmental Incidents

There were no significant environmental incidents reported on Homes England operated estates during 2024/25. Seventeen environmental incidents were reported by development partners and contractors working with Homes England on our sites. These related to waste management, surface water management, protected species and minor pollution incidents.

Consumer Single-Use Plastics

Homes England is committed to reducing the use of Consumer Single-Use Plastics (CSUP) across the office estate. This year we made further progress towards plastic free office supplies, for example, working with our supplier to develop an approved list of plastic free stationery supplies, as well as having milk delivered in reusable glass bottles as opposed to CSUP.

These initiatives in 2024/25 have achieved a dramatic reduction in CSUP purchases from 3,167 items in the first quarter of the year to just 164 items in the final quarter. We will continue to work with our suppliers to further reduce CSUP purchases where alternatives are available.

Forward Look

As we move into the new financial year it is clear there is still work to do to fully embed sustainability into our corporate processes and the homes and places that we deliver.

We have further developed our Sustainable Placemaking Passport and a variety of internal guidance, so the focus will be on embedding this guidance and steering projects through their project cycle, ensuring they continue to deliver for communities, cut carbon, enhance nature and enhance wellbeing.

At the same time, we must ensure that we deliver value for money and ensure that our sustainability path is central to the government’s aim of delivering 1.5 million new homes this Parliament.

Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures Report

Compliance Statement

Homes England has reported on climate- related financial disclosures consistent with HM Treasury’s TCFD-aligned disclosure application guidance, which interprets and adapts the framework for the UK public sector.

Homes England considers Sustainability (including climate change) to be a principal risk, and has therefore complied with the TCFD recommendations and recommended disclosures around:

• Governance – recommended disclosures (a) and (b)

• Risk Management – recommended disclosures (a) to (c)

• Metrics and Targets – recommended disclosures (a) to (c) – partial compliance

This is in line with central government’s TCFD-aligned disclosure implementation timetable for Phase 2.

Homes England intends to provide recommended disclosures for Strategy and further disclosure of Metrics and Targets in future reporting periods in line with the central government implementation timetable.

Introduction

Climate change continues to be a key consideration in relation to the homes and places that people choose to live and work in. We understand that, through the many interventions we take, we cannot ignore the changes that are happening, nor can we ignore the way in which our interventions contribute to global warming.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB), founded by the G20 economies, established the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) in 2015 to bring greater transparency on the financial implications of climate change. HM Treasury has taken up their recommendations on the types of information that companies should disclose in relation to climate change.

HM Treasury guidance has directed government departments and certain arm’s-length bodies that fall within scope of TCFD to undertake a phased approach to reporting. Government arm’s-length bodies are required to follow this guidance if they have more than 500 full-time employees or a total operating income of more than £500 million. Homes England meets these criteria and therefore follows the HM Treasury guidance in this report.

TCFD reporting focuses on the 4 thematic areas:

• Governance

• Strategy

• Risk Management

• Metrics and Targets

For each thematic area there are a series of recommended disclosures.

These disclosures help stakeholders understand how climate-related issues are taken into account by an organisation.

HM Treasury has set out a phased approach to TCFD reporting across a recommended 3-year programme:

• In our 2023/24 Annual Report and Accounts we included a Phase 1 report, which focused on reporting on governance and Scope 1, 2 and part of Scope 3 carbon metrics.

• In this Phase 2 report we make disclosures against our approach to Risk Management and further Metrics and Targets disclosures, at the same time as updating our climate governance report.

• Phase 3 reporting, which is expected to come into effect in the 2025/26 financial year, will focus on updating previous reporting, plus additional disclosures under the ‘Strategy’ thematic area of TCFD.

TCFD Governance

Governance is central to effectively managing climate-related challenges and opportunities. This Annual Report and Accounts includes a Corporate Governance Report which sets out how our Board, committees and Executive Leadership Team are structured and the work they do. In this section of the TCFD Report we focus on 2 specific TCFD disclosures related to governance.

TCFD Governance Disclosure: a) Board Oversight

Homes England’s Board has the responsibility of ensuring we meet our statutory objects. These objects, set out in the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008, include ‘to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development and good design in England’. The Board receives reports from the Executive and is supported by Committees and Executive Groups.

In 2025 the Board designated Sustainability (including climate change) as a principal risk. Homes England’s Board continuously assesses the nature and extent of the principal risks that the organisation is exposed to and is willing to take, to achieve its objectives.

Climate-related issues are of most relevance to the following 3 Board Committees:

• Audit, Assurance and Enterprise Risk Committee (AAERC)

• Cross Cutting Committee

• Investment Committee

Audit, Assurance and Enterprise Risk Committee

AAERC support the Board in their responsibilities for risk control, governance, audit, financial stewardship and statutory reporting.

As part of the process of adopting our principal risk on Sustainability, AAERC have reviewed the new principal risks.

Cross Cutting Committee

The Cross Cutting Committee supports the Board in fulfilling its responsibility for a greater focus on the cross cutting quality objectives of the strategic plan. The committee regularly considers sustainability and climate matters. For example, discussions during the last year have included:

• progress on the development of our Nature Positive Plan, which will support in the management of nature-related risks and opportunities

• update on the measurement of whole life carbon and progress on the development of Key Performance Indicator (KPI) 15 and a carbon inventory

• consideration of the vision led approach to lower carbon transport planning

Investment Committee

The Investment Committee considers development and investment proposals and the business cases that support them.

Following HM Treasury’s Green Book and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) Appraisal Guide, value for money is assessed based on both monetised and non-monetised impacts. As we reported in the TCFD Report in last year’s Annual Report and Accounts, social and environmental effects are included in the appraisal.

TCFD Governance Disclosure: b) Management’s Role in Assessing and Managing Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities

The Board and its committees are supported in assessing and managing risks, including climate- related risks and opportunities by the Homes England staff, led by the Executive Leadership Team (ELT).

Executive Leadership Team

ELT is the Agency’s principal executive decision- making group. It has a responsibility for delivery and assurance to the Board of the strategic plan objectives, as well as risk, budget and performance reporting.

During 2024/25, ELT undertook an exercise to review the strategic principal risks to Homes England. This included a new risk on Sustainability. The Risk Management section of this TCFD Report sets out the work done to support the development of this principal risk.

Individual ELT members are assigned ownership of principal risks. The Sustainability (including climate change) risk is owned by the Chief Property Officer.

A summary of ELT consideration of sustainability is included in the Sustainability Report section of this Annual Report and Accounts.

Management’s role in monitoring climate- related issues

Homes England has an established and robust performance management framework that enables confident delivery of our strategic intent. The framework is vital as the Agency has a challenging and diverse brief, with accountability for performance that is complicated by a reliance on others for delivery, and exposure to complex areas of housing development and regeneration.

KPIs provide insight into the progress we make against delivery of our strategic objectives. The KPIs and corporate-level performance are reviewed monthly by the ELT and Board. These internal management reviews are supplemented by a monthly Policy Sponsor meeting, where a holistic view of performance is discussed with senior MHCLG officials.

The Agency is in the early stages of implementing and measuring climate-related KPIs. Work to provide deeper scrutiny of sustainability performance commenced in 2024/25, ahead of reporting in 2025/26. Climate-related KPIs are described more fully in the metrics and targets disclosure, later in this TCFD Report.

Homes England also has corporate targets under the Greening Government Commitments (GGCs) that seek to reduce the impact on the environment from our corporate activity. These include climate-related targets related to Scope 1, Scope 2 and part of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). They are reported to our sponsor department, MHCLG. Further detail on these metrics is contained within the metrics and targets disclosure, later in this TCFD Report, as well as in the Sustainability Report.

During 2025/26 we will refresh our 2023 to 2028 strategic plan to reflect our role in supporting the delivery of government housing and regeneration ambitions. The refresh will reflect the government’s development of a new Long-Term Housing Strategy (LTHS) and will require a review of our existing KPIs and metrics.

TCFD Risk Management

In HM Treasury’s second phase of TCFD reporting, risk management disclosures are reported for the first time. This sets out that risk management disclosures include qualitative disclosures surrounding an organisation’s processes for identifying, assessing and managing-climate- related risks, and their integration within the organisation’s risks management.

In addition to the TCFD recommended disclosures, HM Treasury has also highlighted further public sector considerations, including:

• where climate is a principal risk, the reporting entity must describe the risk in line with existing performance reporting requirements

• where climate is not designated as a principal risk (or part of a principal risk) reporting entities must articulate their rationale

As detailed in the Principal Risks Impacting Delivery section of this Annual Report and Accounts, the Agency introduced a new principal risk relating to Sustainability (which includes climate change) in quarter 4 of 2024/25.

TCFD Risk Management Disclosures: a) Process for Identifying and Assessing Climate-Related Risks, b) Process for Managing Climate-Related Risks, c) How Processes for Identifying, Assessing and Managing Climate-Related Risks are Integrated into Overall Risk Management

The Agency identifies and manages risk, including climate-related risk, in line with its Risk Management Framework, described later in the Risk Management section of this report. The framework is aligned to the 5 principals in HM Treasury’s Orange Book and sets out:

• the process for identifying and assessing risks

• the process for managing risks

• how processes for identifying, assessing and managing risks are integrated into overall risk management

It is important to note that, at this stage, our assessment of Sustainability risk, while supported by evidence observed both on our own projects and interventions, as well as external evidence of climate-related trends, is a qualitative assessment. We expect that further work in Phase 3 of TCFD disclosure will allow us to advance our understanding of longer-term risks.

In 2024/25 we began work on a methodology for the identification and management of project level climate change issues, in response to GGC reporting. This will be further developed in the coming year.

Climate change and the response to it may also create some opportunities. For example, environmental quality has been improved through nature-based solutions to flooding such as sustainable drainage. Work to support the Future Homes Standard is showing the efficacy of carbon saving and the potential for household bills to be reduced. Further detail is included in our Sustainability Report.

TCFD Metrics and Targets

HM Treasury guidance on Phase 2 TCFD reporting requires us to disclose the metrics and targets used to assess and manage relevant climate- related issues, where such information is material.

Metrics and targets allow us to track progress and help ensure transparency. In our last TCFD Report we made disclosures on Scope 1, 2 and part of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions in line with GGC Reporting requirements. In this 2024/25 report we have disclosed further metrics and targets that we identified as relevant to climate-related issues. Homes England is also subject to external legislation and policy, which includes, for example:

• Greenhouse gas targets set at a whole economy level, through Carbon Budget Orders

• Greenhouse gas or climate adaptation policies that may be set at a local level through local planning policy

Materiality in Relation to Metrics

HM Treasury guidance states that while the TCFD disclosure on metrics and targets (b) ‘climate- related metrics and related risks’ is mandatory for all reporting bodies, other disclosures, including fuller disclosure of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions are not mandatory. They are, however, subject to an assessment of materiality and, in making this assessment, the focus should be on the primary users of the Annual Report and Accounts.

Parliament is considered to be our primary user, and disclosures, where mandated or material, are set out in the following sections.

TCFD Metrics and Targets Disclosure: a) Metrics Used to Assess Climate-Related Risks and Opportunities

Our principal risk on Sustainability includes the following elements:

• Risk of Homes England failing to deliver an integrated and effective approach to sustainability, including climate, environmental, social, and economic objectives, leading to impacts on people and the natural environment, reputational damage

• ….or failure to meet statutory responsibilities and government targets, including Net Zero by 2050

These 2 aspects include climate change risk and strongly link to our suite of KPIs.

The following table shows which KPIs link most directly to our risk definition.

Homes England KPI	How the KPI relates to climate issues[footnote 21]	Data maturity (>1 years data available)	Reported in Performance Analysis section
KPI 6	Performance may be influenced by market volatility impacting sustainability / climate measures / achievement of climate targets	Yes	Yes
KPI 7	Performance may be influenced by changing environmental / climate regulation or policy	Yes	Yes
KPI 11	Performance may be influenced by credibility of reporting on sustainability / climate / achievement of climate targets	No	Yes
KPI 12	Performance may be influenced by inconsistent application of sustainability including climate issues	No	No Not reported for 2024/25 as the number of projects in scope of the KPI was too few to produce a statistically meaningful average
KPI 13	Performance may be influenced by changing environmental / climate regulation or policy or inconsistent application of sustainability and climate issues	Yes	Yes
KPI 14	Performance may be influenced by changing environmental / climate regulation or policy	No	No Not reported for 2024/25 as the number of projects in scope of the KPI was too few to produce a statistically meaningful average
KPI 15	Performance may be influenced by changing environmental / climate regulation or policy / inconsistent application of sustainability / market volatility	No	No Reporting for KPI 15 is planned for 2025/26, with a methodology agreed and implementation underway

The purpose of each KPI is shown in the Detailed Performance Review section of this report.

While many of these KPIs monitor progress against our objectives and strategy, some are also financially material. This is most clearly applicable in the case of KPI 11, total value of private sector funds leveraged. KPI 11 is sensitive to climate- related issues because:

• there is a maturing market in green finance including environmental, social and governance (ESG) funds, green bonds and sustainability- linked loans for housing

• increasing awareness of climate risk from their stakeholders is driving financial institutions’ commitment to ESG strategy, policies and practices

• institutional investors are increasingly concerned about ESG from a reputational perspective and are required to make disclosures as part of their fiduciary duty in relation to financially material factors such as climate change

Data on sustainability and social value helps institutional investors to make informed investment decisions regarding housing as an asset class.

In addition to these KPIs we report on a broad range of sustainability metrics under the GGCs. The following table shows the quantified metrics most relevant to climate risk and opportunity.

GGC Metric	How the metric relates to climate issues	Data maturity (>1 years data available)
Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3)*	Performance relates to our adherence to climate policy / government targets	Yes
Business Travel Emissions	Performance relates to the corporate approach we implement to manage greenhouse gases	Yes
Waste Generation and Recycling	Performance relates to the corporate approach we implement to manage greenhouse gases	Yes
Water Consumption	Performance relates to the corporate approach we implement to manage greenhouse gases and physical climate risk	Yes
Resource Consumption (consumables – paper consumption)	Performance relates to the corporate approach we implement to manage greenhouse gases	Yes

*Note that we have also reported an extended Scope 3, additional to GGC requirements (See TCFD Metrics and Targets Disclosure b).

In addition, the GGCs include commitments that are not quantified but do help address climate- related issues. These include:

• commitments on climate change adaption strategy

• commitments on nature recovery plans

• commitments on environmental impacts from ICT and digital

Government sets out the methodology adopted to record GGC metrics.^{[footnote 22]} Reporting against the GGC metrics and commitments is in the Sustainability Report. The GGC metrics are each reported against a 2017/18 baseline.

TCFD Guidance states that, where relevant, organisations should provide their internal carbon prices as well as climate-related opportunity metrics. Homes England includes carbon values in the Benefit Cost Ratio when evaluating projects consistent with HM Treasury’s Green Book and MHCLG’s Appraisal Guide. The latest carbon values are published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.^{[footnote 23]}

Whilst the metrics described in this section are generally sensitive to whether climate change is affecting performance, some metrics do capture climate-related opportunities. In particular KPI 13 (Building Performance – share of supported completions that are EPC rating B or above) and KPI 14 (Average percentage biodiversity net gain planned on supported schemes) where reported, are capturing positive interventions that deal with climate risk, delivering interventions that are both beneficial for climate (energy efficiency and natural resilience) and deliver wider benefits (money saving for household residents and health, wellbeing and ecosystem service benefits).

HM Treasury Phase 2 guidance encourages qualitative disclosure with existing quantitative disclosure. At this stage of reporting, we have disclosed our existing metrics because, for these metrics, data and reporting mechanisms are more developed. However, as we move to the next phase of reporting, the merit of further, more quantitative metrics will be further considered. In doing this we will continue to consider whether these metrics are material to users of the Annual Report and Accounts.

TCFD Metrics and Targets Disclosure: b) Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 GHG Emissions and Related Risks

Homes England discloses Scope 1, 2 and part of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions under the GGCs, as indicated in the previous table.

Since 2023/24 we have recorded further categories of Scope 3 additional to those required through the GGCs, using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s ‘Operational Control’ method, as part of the process of assembling a whole life carbon inventory. Under the Operational Control method, an organisation accounts for 100% of the greenhouse gas emissions over which it has control. An organisation has operational control over an operation if the organisation or one of its subsidiaries has the full authority to introduce and implement its operating policies.

Our operational control boundary for our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions is included in our Sustainability Report. The Sustainability Report also shows our total emissions and the trend since 2022/23, as well as data exclusions and reporting issues.

While the operational control approach taken through our whole life carbon inventory does not consider the whole life carbon of homes, we intend to consider the upfront carbon of home construction through our metric KPI 15.

The methodology for reporting against this metric is agreed, however we do not currently report against this KPI as work is underway to implement the necessary processes and system requirements. Further work to measure the whole life carbon of homes is currently in development, including the infrastructure that supports homes, and subject to work to refresh the Agency’s strategic plan.

TCFD Metrics and Targets Disclosure: c) Targets Used to Manage Climate- Related Risks and Performance Against Targets

Most of our KPIs relevant to climate-related issues do not state specific targets and, where they are an indirect measure of climate risk, targets would not necessarily relate to managing a climate risk. However, 2 of the KPI metrics identified as relating to climate risk do include benchmark levels of performance embedded within the metric. These are:

• KPI 13 – Share of supported completions that are EPC rating B or above

• KPI 15 – Percentage of homes within the Homes England embodied (upfront) carbon target range

KPI 13 measures the energy performance of homes, and the metric measures those supported completions that meet the higher Energy Performance Certificate ratings. More energy efficient homes are usually considered to be more carbon efficient. In 2023/24 we reported that 87% of supported completions were EPC rating B or above. In 2024/25 the rate is 90%.

KPI 15 measures the carbon prior to occupation, known as the ‘before use stage’ (A0-A5).^{[footnote 24]} While KPI 15 is not yet mature enough in its monitoring or reporting to disclose, further work to roll out the metric is anticipated in 2025/26, subject to work underway to refresh the Agency’s strategic plan.

For some metrics, the GGCs do include targeted metrics which help manage climate-related risks, and where performance data can be seen. Targets are set at a government departmental level, to which Homes England seeks to align. These targets are set out in the following table.

GGC Metric	How the metric relates to climate issues
Greenhouse Gas Emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) Business Travel Emissions	Reduce GHG emissions (from a 2017/2018 baseline) by 47% and reduce direct greenhouse gas emissions from estate and operations by 25% (from a 2017/2018 baseline)
Waste Generation and Recycling	Reduce the overall amount of waste generated by 15% from the 2017 to 2018 baseline
Resource Consumption: Water Consumption	Reduce water consumption by at least 8% from the 2017 to 2018 baseline
Resource Consumption (consumables – paper consumption)	Continue to buy more sustainable and efficient products and services with the aim of achieving the best long-term, overall value for money for society. Reduce paper consumption by 50% from the 2017 to 2018 baseline

Our Sustainability Report shows the performance against these GGC targets in detail, including where we have met or missed the targets. As the current round of GGC reporting ended in March 2025, a new round of GGC reporting is anticipated.

TCFD Next Steps

This TCFD Report sets out our current status in relation to TCFD disclosures required at Phase 2. While we have addressed each mandatory and material disclosure in turn, we recognise there is more work to be done. In particular, while we have a range of climate-related metrics and targets, these are largely existing metrics. We will further evaluate where new quantitative metrics can be added that more closely address climate risk.

The table at the end of this section sets out the climate disclosures under TCFD and the current level of compliance, as well as further work to be undertaken to achieve full compliance.

As we move into Phase 3 of TCFD reporting in 2025/26, we will consider whether further metrics and targets are material. Disclosures under Phase 3 are also all subject to a materiality test, so we will report in line with our materiality assessment in our next Annual Report and Accounts. Phase 3 focuses on the Strategy recommendations and recommended disclosures (a) to (c). These disclosures are to:

• describe the climate-related risks and opportunities the organisation has identified over the short, medium and long-term

• describe the impact of climate-related risks and opportunities on the organisation’s business, strategy and financial planning

• describe the resilience of the organisation’s strategy taking into consideration different climate-related scenarios, including a 2 degrees Celsius or lower scenario

We will further develop areas of partial disclosure and commence our Phase 3 work in 2025/26, where material. Our initial assessment is that we will make a full disclosure against all 4 thematic areas (Governance, Risk Management, Strategy and Metrics and Targets) of TCFD reporting in our 2025/26 Annual Report and Accounts.

TCFD disclosures and their status following this Report, including further steps to full compliance

TCFD Pillar	Disclosure	Status** and materiality	Next steps
Governance	a. Describe the Board’s oversights of climate-related risks and opportunities	Disclosed in our 2023/24 TCFD Report and updated in this TCFD Report	Continue to update in Phase 3
Governance	b. Describe management’s role in assessing and managing climate- related risks and opportunities	Disclosed in our 2023/24 TCFD Report and updated in this TCFD Report	Continue to update in Phase 3
Risk Management	a. Describe the organisation’s processes for identifying and addressing climate- related risks	Disclosed in this TCFD Report and in the Risk Management section of this Annual Report and Accounts	Continue to update in Phase 3
Risk Management	b. Describe the organisation’s processes for managing climate-related risks	Disclosed in this TCFD Report and in the Risk Management section of this Annual Report and Accounts	Continue to update in Phase 3
Risk Management	c. Describe how processes for identifying, assessing, and managing climate-related risks are integrated into the organisation’s overall risk management	Disclosed in this TCFD Report and in the Risk Management section of this Annual Report and Accounts	Continue to update in Phase 3
Metrics and Targets	a. Disclose the metrics used by the organisation to assess climate-related risks and opportunities in line with its strategy and risk management process*	Material metrics are partially disclosed in this TCFD Report	Further development and disclosure of any material metrics in Phase 3
Metrics and Targets	b. Disclose Scope 1, Scope 2, (and if appropriate, Scope 3 GHG emissions, and the related risks*)	Scope 1, 2 and part of Scope 3 disclosed in our Sustainability Report. A further ‘extend’ Scope 3 disclosure is also disclosed	Continue to update in Phase 3
Metrics and Targets	c. Describe the targets used by the organisation to manage climate- related risks and opportunities and performance against targets*	Material targets and performance are partially disclosed in this TCFD Report	Further development and disclosure of any material targets in Phase 3
Strategy	a. Describe the climate-related risks and opportunities the organisation has identified over the short, medium and long-term*	No requirement to disclose in Phase 2	A materiality test and material disclosures will be undertaken in Phase 3
Strategy	b. Describe the impact of climate-related risks and opportunities on the organisation’s businesses, strategy and financial planning*	No requirement to disclose in Phase 2	A materiality test and material disclosures will be undertaken in Phase 3
Strategy	c. Describe the resilience of the organisation’s strategy, taking into consideration different climate-related scenarios, including a 2 degrees Celsius or lower scenario*	No requirement to disclose in Phase 2	A materiality test and material disclosures will be undertaken in Phase 3

*Includes disclosures that are subject to materiality assessment.
**Disclosures in this TCFD Report also signpost to where information is already covered in other parts of the Annual Report and Accounts.

The Performance Report is signed on 14 July 2025

Eamonn Boylan
Chief Executive and Accounting Officer

1. Homes England is the trading name of The Homes and Communities Agency, an executive, non-departmental public body and statutory corporation created by the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 (as amended by the Localism Act 2011). Homes England is sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (formerly the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities). This Annual Report and Accounts presents the audited, consolidated results of the 2024/25 financial year for the group of entities of which Homes England is the parent. The Homes England group is consolidated into the 2024/25 Annual Report and Accounts of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. ↩

2. Further detail on our SPPs can be found later in the Performance Overview and Performance Analysis. ↩

3. The Performance Analysis provides further information on our partnership with Invest & Fund Limited. ↩

4. Range per HM Treasury guidance on what constitutes good value for money. ↩

5. Metric restated in 2024/25 to recognise housing unlocked at point of contract, compared to point of disposal of site, used in 2023/24 reporting. ↩

6. 2023/24 restated. ↩

7. Excludes affordable housing completions as the Agency does not currently capture boundary data to enable cross-reference to EPC data. ↩

8. SPP signed May 2025. ↩

9. Delivering over 2,000 homes per year. ↩

10. Compared to 12% reported in the Official Housing Statistics June 2025 which includes First Homes. ↩

11. A defined piece of land with distinct boundaries. ↩

12. Reserved matters is when details of a development are not included in an outline planning application, but need to be approved by the local planning authority before the development can proceed. ↩

13. A building with a substantial amount of floor space that is farther than 4 metres from the exterior walls due to the high internal floor-to-external wall ratio. These structures can be challenging to naturally light and ventilate. ↩

14. In order to report as up to date information as possible, and in the public interest, data within this table is based upon management and other information available within Homes England, updated as further information becomes available. ↩

15. Copernicus: 2024 is the first year to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial level. ↩

16. 2024: provisionally the fourth warmest year on record for the UK. ↩

17. 2024: provisionally the fourth warmest year on record for the UK. ↩

18. Eaton, E (2023). Economic valuation of the societal cost of non-communicable disease related to urban housing developments in the UK. Thesis (PhD). University of Bath. ↩

19. Measuring the placemaking impacts of housing-led regeneration. ↩

20. Spend-based calculation methods are considered to be ‘secondary data’ under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and have a number of disadvantages in comparison to primary data sources, such as supplier-specific data. A description of these disadvantages is contained within the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Accounting and Reporting Standard. ↩

21. KPIs may be negatively or positively affected by climate-related issues, and so act as a proxy indicator for the effect that climate- related issues may have on our business model. ↩

22. Greening government commitments: reporting requirements for 2021 to 2025. ↩

23. Update to traded carbon values: 2024. ↩

24. As defined in RICS, 2023. ↩