Growth Services Consultancy

BANES has an ambitious corporate strategy, an economic strategy highlighting the priority given to affordable housing growth and a new Housing Plan that sets out the Council's actions to deliver against that. The new Local Plan doubles housing numbers and the associated economic (employment space) across the district to 28k from 14k. This level of change is unprecedented and will put significant pressure on existing service delivery models. We are ambitious to deliver sustainable growth building strong communities through high quality development that is well planned, provides the affordable homes we need, essential infrastructure and promotes healthy and active lifestyles. Historically left to the market and volume housebuilders, we have typically received fragmented, poor-quality development, limited infrastructure investment and failed to deliver the affordable homes needed. B&NES has a significant existing capital programme to deliver over the next 5-10 years and has established two centralised services, Corporate Landlord (developer) and capital delivery service to achieve this. Some of the housing planned will need to be delivered by the Council through these service models, but much will need to be delivered by the market, developers and/or partnerships. There is a desire to retain as much influence as possible over the development that happens in the district to achieve good outcomes for communities. We need to plan our service model to meet the expected growth and demand to deliver more homes faster but with more certainty and control over the outcomes. Through examples and evidence assess and present options to establish a Growth Service model that can scale to address the expected increase in activity. The estimated value of the contract is £25,000 (excl. VAT)