Housing and Communities
We explore the policies, challenges, and opportunities shaping housing and communities across the Midlands. Our research focuses on building thriving, inclusive neighbourhoods where people have access to safe, affordable homes and resources they need to flourish.
Our Approach
As one of the key work-streams at the CNM, our Housing and Communities research programme seeks:
• To address critical issues around Housing and Communities in the Midlands, supporting independent debate on strategy, policy and practice.
• To collaborate with key stakeholders to undertake impactful research, which includes reviewing existing evidence, identifying evidence gaps and addressing these gaps with new rigorous research in the field of Housing and Communities in the Midlands, focusing on common areas of interest, which will benefit our region and its communities.
• To engage with academia, industry, local, regional and national government, highlighting evidence of best practice in the region, working with our partners to both evaluate and positively influence regional and national policy around Housing and Communities.
• To create long-term and sustainable impact as a think-tank by uniquely contributing towards new longitudinal evidence bases and frameworks particularly around core themes including housing quality, health and wellbeing, net zero transitions and tenant engagement, housing need and affordability.
Our Recent Reports
In May 2026, the Centre for the New Midlands published ‘Homes that Work: The St Basils Ten Year Live and Work Evaluation‘.
Ten years ago, Live and Work opened its doors at Apprentice House in Sandwell based on the fundamental premise that housing and employment are not separate issues to be managed in separate systems, but a single, interconnected challenge that demands a joined-up response.
This evaluation, drawing on a decade of service user data, a Social Return on Investment analysis, and the direct testimony of young people, frontline staff, and professional stakeholders, confirms that this premise was correct, and that the Live and Work model has had a profound and far-reaching impact on the lives of the young people it has served.
This report marks an important step forward in the development of a Decent Neighbourhood Standard.
Building on the first WLCA Demonstrator Report, which established the case for a neighbourhood standard and sets out its core dimensions, this report moves the agenda from concept to implementation.
Using Erdington High Street as a practical test case, it shows how the Standard can be translated into evidence, action and indicators. The findings highlight significant strengths, including strong community spirit, an active high street and valued local institutions, but also an area facing serious and persistent pressures – concerns about safety and crime, health and economic inequalities, gaps in social infrastructure and weak accountability.
At the start of March 2026, we hosted a roundtable with our partners, Entec Si and Pearl Comms. We brought 20 of the region’s leaders from across housing, policy, communications, the legal sector and technology together to explore the shared challenge: the sector holds huge amounts of data, but often struggles to turn it into meaningful insight.
The event brought together key partners who reiterated that the housing sector’s data dilemma is not primarily a technology problem. Instead, it reflects deeper issues around governance, culture and organisational capacity.
While tools such as AI and predictive analytics offer significant potential, participants agreed that the sector must first focus on the fundamentals: data quality, clear ownership and strong governance.
By treating data as a strategic asset and embedding responsibility across organisations, housing providers can begin to unlock the insights needed to improve services, strengthen tenant relationships and plan effectively for the future.
The Decent Neighbourhood Standard conceptualised in this research project applies the underlying principles and core themes of the Decent Homes Standard to a neighbourhood scale, expanding its scope from the closed system of individual homes to the broader open system of neighbourhoods.
Our ambition is to create a universal but adaptable standard that can be applied to new and existing neighbourhoods and communities, helping to identify local priorities, guide policy and strategic investment, and support community empowerment. This demonstrator project marks the first step in developing a Decent Neighbourhood Standard, a practical framework for evaluating and enhancing the quality of neighbourhoods.
This report is a detailed evaluation of the Social Housing Quality Fund (SHQF), a £15 million grant programme aimed at tackling severe damp and mould in social housing across the West Midlands.
Key findings from this report are as follows:
1. Living with damp and mould is devastating to tenants’ lives, health and well-being.
2. The reported causes of damp and mould are seen to be poor ventilation and inadequate heating.
3. Proactive and reactive strategies were adopted in deploying the SHQF funding.
4. Satisfaction with repairs quality but dissatisfaction around tenant engagement and communication.
5. The SHQF Programme demonstrated added value and additionality but is a ‘drop in the ocean’ of repairs funding needed.
6. It’s too early to make a judgement on the impacts of the SHQF
On 16 March 2023, the Centre for the New Midlands held an Affordable Housing roundtable at Eighteen, 103 Colmore Row in Birmingham. This was attended by 18 senior leaders representing the public, private and not-for-profit sectors all working to deliver affordable housing in the West Midlands region.
The aim of this roundtable was not simply to agree on the extensive barriers preventing our region from delivering the affordable homes we so urgently need.
Rather the discussion focused on reframing what affordable housing means for different stakeholders in the region, how we might work collaboratively to overcome barriers and enhance affordable housing supply and drawing together a set of key policy priorities to support the delivery of more affordable homes.
Our Leadership Board
Our work is guided by a team of experts who voluntarily share their time and expertise to support our research agenda. Our experts are drawn from across the region, across both the private and public sector but have the common goal of helping us to help shape an even ‘better’ West Midlands region.
Our Recent Articles
