Our Role

Homes England appointed AspinallVerdi as sole advisor on a national commission to help assess bids to join the Garden Communities programme.

The Garden Communities programme is being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) with Homes England and contributes to the ambition of delivering 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020’s.

The Programme

The programme renews the principles originally set out by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities Movement at the turn of the 20th Century in respect of focusing on the quality as well as quantity of major new development schemes.  Twenty-three garden towns and villages form part of the current programme with the combined potential to provide almost 200,000 new homes across the country. 

 In August 2018 MHCLG invited bids for additional new garden towns and villages to join the programme.  The aim was for local authorities and their private sector partners to design and deliver high quality, ambitious, locally supported, proposals for new garden communities at scale.

 Circa 70 bids were submitted for new garden communities (including 10 x garden towns each of over 10,000 units) distributed all across England. AspinallVerdi’s role was to support Homes England in assessing the deliverability of the bids. Working to a tight timescale, AspinallVerdi scored each of the bids in terms of:

·       Scheme details – concept development; plans; unit mix etc

·       Land assembly – land ownerships; willingness; Existing Use Value (EUV); premiums etc

·       Infrastructure and abnormal costs

·       Affordable housing – target %; tenure mix etc

·       Planning policy compliance – site allocation

·       Financial viability and funding – land value capture

·       Delivery mechanism – incentive for all stakeholders to work together.