November 2025
Finance is the most significant barrier for communities looking to develop new homes. The most significant gap is early-stage finance – the £15k per home on average it costs to secure a site and a planning consent. Our movement has worked on this problem for many years, and now we’re taking an exciting step forward on one potential solution for part of our movement.
The Community Land Trust Network is partnering with Middlemarch Community Led Housing CIC to develop our financing solution for community land trusts developing homes with housing associations. We are putting in some of our own money, and are seeking partners to co-fund and develop this work with us.
CLTs and housing association partnerships: a proven approach
Middlemarch has been a pioneer of this partnership model. They support communities to bring forward proposals for affordable homes, including sourcing land, engaging their neighbours, navigating the planning process, and setting up a new CLT if none exists in the area. At an early stage, they help CLTs find a partner housing association that is then able to finance, build and manage the homes with, and on behalf of, the CLT, with the CLT retaining the freehold of the land.
The CLT housing association partnership model has accounted for roughly half of the affordable homes completed by CLTs, and is now providing more than half of new rural affordable homes in Devon.
It is helping to meet a dire need for social housing in areas that in some ways suffer from worse homelessness than towns and cities. It is also rewiring the rural housing system to put community power at the heart of the solution to this pressing issue. Many CLTs use these projects as a launchpad to develop other community assets like village halls, orchards and enterprise centres.
Succeeding despite the current system
But the model has been dependent on grants for this enabling work, including all the professional fees, such as architects and surveyors. Enablers like Middlemarch can recover their costs by charging a fee to housing associations, but they otherwise work at risk. Worse, CLTs have no source of funds for the £10-15,000 per home it costs to bring forward a planning application.
In 2016 our network secured the Community Housing Fund, which put £240m on the table for communities in England between 2016-2022. It plugged these financing gaps, and was a massive success, enabling communities to bring forward thousands of affordable homes at minimal additional cost to the government. But despite this, and concerted campaigning by our network, and support from ministers, the government has not been willing to reinstate the fund.
We’ve continued to look at every option to expand this model, so more CLTs can use it.
We supported Middlemarch to look at ways to grow the partnership model through the first CLH Growth Lab, established by the CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network and funded by the Laudes Foundation. They identified huge potential for communities to use this model across the country, but finance remained a key barrier.
We then used a small top-up grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to commission a social finance expert to develop a revolving loan financing model, to test if this could replace grants. It showed real promise, and we had positive discussions with a number of fund managers and Homes England about loan and equity investment approaches.
Unlocking rural social housing
We are now partnering with Middlemarch to develop a business plan for this national financing vehicle. Our board is investing some of the charity’s designated fund for ecosystem growth to finance this work. Our aim is to develop a viable product, and to line up potential first investors, so we can then establish and pilot the financing vehicle. This will be a rapid piece of work, and we will publish an update when it is completed. But we would welcome offers of co-funding and support as we develop this new financial solution.
If we can crack this, we will open a pathway to communities developing thousands of affordable homes on community-owned land. We’re excited about the work to bring our vision one step closer – that every community can play an active role in making itself more sustainable and socially just through community ownership and community-led development.
We will also be shortly announcing further related work on other models, including embedding community power in the development of urban public land.