Homes England has published a pipeline of major works worth over £200m.
The pipeline, which is the first published under the new Labour government, and the first since February, details all projects planned for the next 18 months.
It covers £210.2m worth of work, some starting as soon as November 2024. It covers 14 projects in total.
Government bodies including Homes England and the Department for Transport have published project pipelines since 2022 to alert the industry to upcoming contracts and allow them to plan their work and procurement teams accordingly.
The biggest job advertised in the new pipeline is a £52m project to build phases 3a and 3b of a new town called Northstowe in South Cambridgeshire. Between them, the two phases include 5,000 new homes and three primary schools.
Homes England initially submitted plans for the 30-year project in 2020 to the local council. The agency has also delivered new roads, public transport routes and cycleways for the town.
A tender for the scheme is expected in December, while the contract award is expected in June 2025. The build project is earmarked to take 44 months in total.
Homes England also expects to release a £27.6m tender for a highways and infrastructure contract at Northstowe in January, which it says will be awarded next August. That contract will last for 27 months. There is further a £5m project coming next year for other road development works at Northstowe.
The second-largest contract in the pipeline is a £30m framework for development monitoring and management services of Homes England properties, which will be released for tender in October and contracted out next May.
Homes England also put out information about a £27m project to work on Burtree Garden Village, near Darlington. The 18-month project – which is phase one of the development job – will include constructing an access roundabout, spine road and secondary roads for the new town.
It already went out to tender last month, and Homes England expects to award a contract in December.
In January 2023, Homes England announced that it had invested £43m into the new town, which will include 2,000 new homes and 200,000 square metres of employment space across 307 acres.
Alongside developer Hellens Group, Homes England submitted a planning application for the town to Darlington Borough Council in January 2023.
The pipeline also includes a £15m plan for a new primary school in Brookleigh, a town being developed in Sussex, plus a job for early planting works and an offsite mobility corridor at the same town, worth a combined £5m.
The new Labour government announced major changes to housebuilding soon after prime minister Sir Keir Starmer entered 10 Downing Street, leaving housebuilders “buoyed”. Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced plans to reinstate local housing targets, in line with Labour’s manifesto pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the next five years.
The government is currently consulting on planning law changes to free up so-called “greybelt” land – previously developed land in the greenbelt – for homebuilding.
