...So Hugh, how’s your small boats charity coming along?...

— 28 Jun 2024, 11:16 by Hugh Dennis

Grreat ... this from an old friend who knows just where to stick the knife. I do it back to him so all's fair, but it does throw up some questions that need answering.

Firstly, we're not a charity. We're a community interest company who's surplus goes back into our mission statement. Other than that, we're a totally normal company, paying normal market rates for anything and everything that we do.

Neither is it "small boats". That phrase now refers to illegal immigration across the channel and whilst confusing for the short attention spans of modern media and social media, not difficult to differentiate.

So why is it all taking so long? Let's start at the beginning.

Our idea is all about making better use of underused publicly owned land (what we call “greyfield”) by building affordable homes on it.

Little Ships formed in 2018 and launched late 2019, but COVID intervened and we didn’t get enough crowdfunding or investment to undertake the audits and studies around the UK. Government and charities didn’t give any grants and most investors and ESG funds just looked bewildered when asked to lend money to a non-profit that has no land ownership aspirations.

I started off in finance and so was able to call on lots of talented and experienced city execs for advice on how to attract investment into affordable housing in the UK. A promising financial model emerged but then sank under Truss’s mini budget which torpedoed that business model ('scuse the nautical puns, there's loads more). I’ll write about that "for profit" journey in another blog.

We got over £20K in from social investors and donations though, which helped the idea develop but it was nowhere near what was needed to promote and bring forward all these homes that could and still can be built.

Why didn’t it work back in 2019/2020?
Whilst COVID didn’t help, in hindsight the main problem was that we didn’t set out clearly how it would happen, from getting control of the greyfield land through to managing the homes (and the myriad of legal, practical, architectural and technical issues in between). It was also because no one had done what we’re proposing at scale. There is no track record for the idea.

Despite the scepticism and opposition from what we like to call “The Housing Crisis Industry”, this doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. So, the first thing to address was track record to give people confidence that we’re not talking nonsense.

My architecture business decided to take on some larger greyfield type projects where we developed a series of solutions and a product which allows sustainable sociable and safe prefabricated homes to be built in a variety of different greyfield locations. The architecture business as of June 2024 has over 300 of these homes in planning for private sector developers and we are excited to see that the idea works better than originally hoped. Obviously the idea of living over a car park sounds a bit unlikely but good design will out… and this is just the beginning. When the market place and other architects and designers focus on this new genre, the technology will come on in leaps and bounds.

So, although more complicated than building brick houses on a field, or a freshly demolished Brownfield plot, Greyfield land isn’t a complicated idea, and there's now clear evidence that it is realistic.

Next problem is legitimacy, why should public bodies give us their land?

We’re now connecting with properly constituted asset-lock community groups (and creating our own where needed) around the UK, and these will act as the owner and client group to whom Little Ships will provide expertise on getting hold of the underused land and getting homes built. This is called development management, and when we're not required to risk private money, will be a nominal % of the cost of construction, comparable to the other professional consultants such as architects and engineers. This is just starting now and may take time to get momentum, so it is essential that we get as many supporters as possible to give us legitimacy.

If a council won't release underused land which it has no plans to use to it's own residents (or a hospital trust to it's own staff), then it's engaged in land speculation (..."perhaps we can sell it for a fortune!"...) which is of course the root cause of the housing crisis. I'll write about that another time too.

We’re sorry it’s taken so long, and have no idea how the journey will pan out, but we will keep flexibility in achieving the defined end goal of building as many affordable greyfield homes that we can.

 

ps. We're not firebrands or communists hell-bent on the destruction of capitalism. We're not allowed to be political, we're just going to build some homes on land that we all own.