Housing delivery in Bristol: A conversation with Cllr Tom Renhard, Bristol City Council

Bristol is a changing city with much needed housing growth planned alongside a significant heritage. 

This month assorted speakers from the city are spoke at The Housing Forum’s event to address the topic of the ”Bristol tapestry: The golden thread of housing delivery”.

The event was hosted by law firm Foot Anstey.

Cllr Tom Renhard, cabinet member for housing delivery & homelessness, Bristol City Council spoke to Jordan Marshall about housing priorities in the city.

To kick things off, how do you go about making key decisions around housing delivery? How do you balance the competing priorities?

Tom Renhard (TR): One of the things that is key is the question ’how do we use our land effectively?’

So when we’re weighing things up, there’s a lot of considerations that we have to make as politicians. And for me as well, it’s about social justice.

We’re always looking at things through that lens, and how we’re going to maximise affordable homes, genuinely affordable homes, from housing sites is something that will be a really key consideration from us.

Then we have to also consider all the other planning requirements that there are around net zero homes, making sure that we’re improving public realm, grants around transport, things like cycling provision and all the rest of it.

When we talk to developers, sometimes they think we want to have our cake and eat it. And maybe there’s a bit of truth in that. But what we want to do, what we have to do, is really improve things for communities and make sure we can house people appropriately and build mixed and balanced communities as well. 

The key question is, what will achieve the best outcome for people in Bristol? Because there’s no perfect decision. And I think we would be waiting a very long time, if you always wait the perfect set of circumstances, we have to deal with the reality that’s in front of us and try and make the best decisions that we can.

Are there lessons that other city council’s or stakeholders with estate and housing development opportunities can take from the what you’re doing? 

TR: I’d like to think so. One of the key lessons is just how successful and fruitful partnerships can be. And that they take hard work, they take time, and they take investment to make sure that they get right and always go well. We’re seeing the fruits of that in Bristol in just the sheer number of homes coming forward at the moment.

We’re on track for our best year of affordable housing delivery in this local plan period. So we’re really starting to see the fruits of our labour even if they still are not the numbers that we need. We’re on track for about 590 affordable homes as well as the wider market homes that will be delivered throughout the city.

So, how do you actually you go about successfully setting up partnerships?

TR: The first thing I’d say is, make sure you’re clear on what you want from those partnerships, make sure you’re clear what your priorities are from from day one.

I think the second thing is that you should be ambitious but realistic as well. I think the reason for that is you want to think one of the challenges that we and many cities face is that we’ have so much trying to get through the planning system, it really builds the pressure up. So, you’ve really got to think about what your priority is going to be if you’re going to embark on unlocking a lot of development across your local authority area.

On top of that you need to really think carefully about what you need to get to where you want to be. It’s not just as simple as coming up with a vision and waving a magic wand and you’ve got houses. And you know, there’s a lot a lot that goes in on that journey. It’s really thinking through what it is that needed. I think that’s probably been something of a painful lesson for us in places, but that’s because there’s so much going on, which is really exciting.

What are you hoping to achieve by taking part in the Housing Forum event?

TR:  We want to try and get the word out about all of the work we’re doing to get homes built across the city and the breadth of the partners that we’re working with to get those homes built. There’s no one solution to the housing crisis, we need to use all the routes that are available to help address the challenges.

The challenges that we’re facing are the other thing we want to get across. We have more than 21,000 households on our waiting list for social housing in the city, and over 1,500 households in temporary accommodation at the moment. But it also has a huge financial cost through subsidy loss for us as a council, which last financial year was in excess of £11m.

I’m hoping that people will be able to also see the breadth of our partnerships model. So Goram Homes, which is wholly owned by Bristol City Council, partner with other companies, predominantly Countryside Partnerships and Hill Group at the moment, to get homes built in the city. And they’ve started to deliver their first homes, which is quite a significant milestone for council housing in the city. The hard work of years is starting to really pay off.