The first The Northern Way, Community-led housing Summit was held September 2025 in Leeds
The Conference brought together communities and professionals to explore the future of Community Led Housing
Key themes of the event:
- How community-led housing can become a key component for local and regional authorities in delivering growth and housing outcomes across the North
- Workshopping proposals and models of how the sector can streamline, scale up and deliver more homes for communities more quickly
- Community Led Housing for All- how can the sector ensure it empowers minority and disadvantaged communities to have opportunity to create their own homes
the full two day agenda below
Reflecting on the Northern Way Summit- what we can take away and build on!
Time flies! I can’t believe that it’s been 5 weeks since our inaugural “Northern Way” summit in Leeds where we gathered so many friends and colleagues from the CLH sector and also many fellow travellers – local & regional authorities, social enterprises, designers, funders/investors and developers.
I think this broad mix of sector and outside-sector attendees added a lot to our discussions and I hope that we can really expand on that.
We said at the time we wanted to try to capture some of the sense of what we discussed over the two days- both in our full sessions, our small group workshops and even our social gathering!
Some broad themes
Simplifying the System
Community led housing is hard. When it works its results are amazing, but even our successes have historically taken a long time to come to fruition. How do we, as a sector, find ways to make the path easier?
Growth and Replication
Hand in hand with the above was the resounding desire for us to be a bigger part of the new housing picture. How do we achieve a step-change in what we do so that instead of a handful of community led schemes a year we are looking at building out dozens of them?
Social Value
We know that CLH schemes can provide social value and impact by the bucketful but how do we demonstrate this in a format that makes sense to communities, landowners, public sector and funders? What are the key elements of CLH that enable the social value release?
Combined Authorities
The current process of devolution to mayoral regions provides a great opportunity for community led housing to find support and funding on a regional basis. How do we develop these relationships and build these potential partnerships say between our enabling hubs and regional mayoral authorities? Do we need to adapt our processes, models and language to build these alliances?
Access to grants: working with RPs- or setting up sector RPs?
It’s very clear that the only reliable access to social housing grant is going to be through the framework of Homes England and Registered Providers and this is not going to be open to change.
Recognising the difficulties of registration for individual community groups, this leaves the option to find better, repeatable partnerships with existing RPs or looking at the creation of community based RPs who are fundamentally rooted in the sector and share its values. In all likelihood both of these options will be needed. How do we learn from the success stories (and failed examples) where the sector has worked with RPs to develop clear replicable models for working with RPs?
UKREiiF
Every year sees the UK’s real estate industry descend en masse to Leeds Dock. Every local authority and region is lobbying to attract investment and billions in net worth is lobbied for. “Community” is a word which is bandied around, a label adopted by many of the players.
It is our objective, spearheaded by our friends Resonance, to achieve a presence at UKREiiF and be front and centre, retaking the label of Community and trying to catch just a small percentage of the bandwidth and hopefully, some of the investment!
Carrying the torch onwards
We’d like to look at taking forward some of these theme discussions into the coming months and see what we can do with them. We can then revisit them in 2026 – hopefully at the next Northern Way summit!
Many thanks go to our sponsors for the event:-
Wrigleys Solicitors
Resonance
Ecology Building Society
Charity Bank
The CLT Network (particular thanks to Tom for stepping in more than once to speak to cover others!)
Thanks also go to all the contributors, speakers and those who put time and effort into planning and supporting the event.
Finally, all the attendees- over 100 delegates!
If you are interested in being involved in next years summit please contact info@leedscommunityhomes.org.uk
