You are here News From Creating Excellence: Welcome to the New Homes and Communities Agency
The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) came into being on 1 December 2008. Creating Excellence will be running a series of articles over the next few weeks to get you fully up to speed with what is known about this new Agency, where it has come from, what its mission is and what it will mean for the future of sustainable communities work in the region.
We start by looking at where the Homes and Communities Agency has come from, what its mission is and what its presence in the South West will look like.
The Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) has been fashioned through the merger of three existing government agencies and parts of central government itself. The Housing Corporation, English Partnerships and the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) have been merged with elements of Communities and Local Government1 to create a new ‘super agency' with a budget reputed to be in the region of £17bn of which around £5bn per year will be for ‘investment' in new homes.
The creation of the HCA is the direct result of Part 1 of the Housing and Regeneration Act 2008 and the aim is to bring together all the housing and regeneration delivery functions of government under one ‘roof' (sorry!). The agency has been set some very tough objectives by government, such as masterminding the aim of building 3 million new homes by 2020 and ensuring that by 2016 all new homes are ‘zero carbon'. In addition to this the HCA is responsible for the government's affordable housing targets - a tall order indeed!
A new website has been launched for the HCA (http://www.homesandcommunities.co.uk). This is the main knowledge hub for the organisation.
There is also another subsidiary site (http://www.hcaacademy.co.uk/) which incorporates the work previously undertaken by the ASC. The ASC has been renamed the ‘HCA Academy'.
The HCA has a regional structure and its new regional director for the South West, Colin Molton, starts work today. Colin arrives at the HCA after a distinguished career in regeneration most recently as deputy Chief Executive of the South West Regional Development Agency. Whilst much has still to be done to transfer employees from the contributing agencies and government departments, we understand that it has already been decided that the HCA in the South West will have two office bases in Bristol and Exeter, which mirrors the Government Office coverage of the region.
1Growth Areas, Thames Gateway delivery, Housing Market Renewal, Decent Homes, Mixed Communities, the Places of Change Programme and Gypsy and Traveller Sites Grant.
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