The National Community Land Trust Network, the UK Cohousing Network and CDS Co-operatives have agreed to collaborate formally on supporting community-led housing groups across the UK. The sector is growing in prominence with an annual fund of £60 million announced in the Spring Budget, and special provision for the sector in the Mayor of London’s latest affordable housing prospectus.
The three organisations will together provide a more efficient and comprehensive offer to groups that want to deliver community-led housing, as well as local authorities and housing associations that want to support and partner with community-led groups.
Through coming together in this way we can do more to address the gaps in support for community housing groups, including facilitating the building of local and regional support infrastructure for groups and creating a national platform to provide a single point of information on community housing and for groups to learn from and connect to each other.
Anna Kear, Executive Director of the UK Cohousing Network said “I’m delighted to formalise close working relationships that have developed in recent years as part of the emerging community led housing alliance. Each of our three organisations shares a commitment to the talent and energy in the community led housing movement across the country and a vision for how the sector can deliver locally at scale”.
Catherine Harrington, Director of the National CLT Network, added “the community-led housing movement has huge potential to make a much more significant contribution to housing supply. As our recent work for the National Housing Taskforce highlighted, we can best achieve that by working more closely together rather than focusing too much on what makes us different. With this new move we can do more to build the partnerships and local enabling hubs that will help groups deliver homes for their communities that are affordable now and in the future”.
Linda Wallace, Chief Executive of CDS Co-operatives also said “we have recently refocused our business on helping co-operative and community-led housing to become a mainstream option over the next five years – across all tenures and budgets. We are excited by the opportunity of our collaboration with the National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network – both organisations which are already having a significant impact on changing the face of UK Housing. By working together we can share resources, talent and learning, speed up progress and offer more services to people who want to be directly involved in building, owning or managing their own homes”.