Community-led housing in the UK needs a cultural change in terms of how it is financed and greater political support if it is to grow as a viable and popular way to create homes. But key projects in the capital are showing the value they bring to residents, and local authorities like Tower Hamlets are fighting competing needs to make small sites available and meet growing demand.

Those were some of the key points to emerge from NLA's breakfast talk ‘Community-led Housing: taking action’.

The talk was kicked off by Levent Kerimol, formerly of GLA and now Project Director at Community Led Housing London. Kerimol suggested that ownership and long-term management is a key part of community-led housing, almost more than who is doing the development. But he added in a question-and-answer session following the presentations that there was more of a tradition of self-build and history of cooperative housing elsewhere in Europe, compared to the UK’s more ‘top-down’ model. ‘There’s definitely a mindset shift that is sometimes needed’, he said, pointing to benefits including often smoother consultation and greater densities than otherwise might be achieved.

Robin Sager, Strategy, Regeneration Schemes Coordinator, LB Tower Hamlets, said community-led housing is backed by a local authority duty and in its case a mayoral commitment, but that there was also demand to create affordable housing of different tenures for a more sustainable community. Tower Hamlets has established a register with around 120 independents and small groups on it, for whom it holds forums and has released a number of small sites, made available through a GLA portal. But there is a shortage of land, competing priorities where there is land, and a ‘chronic housing shortage’, he said.

Chair of RUSS, Anurag Verma took the audience through its work (with Architype and Jon Broome Architects) in Lewisham, building on the legacy of self-build in the area from Walter Segal (RUSS was founded by Kareem Dayes, one of the former residents from Walters Way). ‘We think housing is a resource, not a commodity’. RUSS’ scheme in Church Grove on a former primary school site and using GLA grant money is of 33 affordable units 10% larger than London Plan standards with amenity space and the two blocks linked by walkways.

During the panel discussion, Kym Shaen-Carter, Development Manager and Head at Igloo Community Builders, said that often the benefits of self-build include working with the community to deliver on a site no-one else could develop. ‘Every council has very ambitious levels of delivering council housing’, she said. ‘Community-led housing is just an additional way of doing that. This is just extra’. Successful community-led projects also make it easier for the next project, she added. ‘It’s about us as a sector proving that we can do it’.

Other points raised included the need for the work of associated architects to be recognised; the problem of the sector’s ‘severely undercapitalised’ nature and how mainstream funders could be attracted; the possibility of shifting up in scale and the supposition that self-builders are a high-risk group. ‘That’s completely erroneous’, said Verma. ‘We need a lot more political support…there needs to be a real cultural change in terms of how we finance things’.