Following an inspiring few days at the CHC One Big Conference 2026, our team—including Tanya Simeonova and Theo Ellis—has been reflecting on this year’s core theme: “The power of partnerships – from vision to delivery.”

For Austin-Smith:Lord, the conversation focused heavily on a critical question facing our Housing Association clients: How do we move past the friction of legacy planning and procurement to deliver the scalable, high-quality social homes Wales desperately needs?

A true highlight was the address by Cabinet Minister Siân Gwenllian, who emphasized making the new national construction company, Unnos, work directly to empower local communities. Her openness to the sector’s voice signals a massive opportunity to co-design a more collaborative enabling infrastructure.

As practice and a newly certified B Corp, we believe answering this call means shifting our paradigm:

• Rooted in Community Expertise: Shifting from transactional commodities to a model that honours the distinct local needs of Welsh neighbourhoods. HAs are intrinsically linked to the people they serve, making them the ideal leaders to address localised housing gaps. We are focused on supporting that stewardship with crafted, context-specific frameworks.
• Unburdening the Pipeline: Actively finding ways to “unplug” community housing delivery from front-loaded, high-risk adversarial planning paths.

Through our ongoing work with the RIBA Expert Advisory Group and colleagues at the RSAW, we have been stress-testing the ‘Home-Creators’ planning path. Our focus is on building sector consensus around an enabling framework that stacks existing statutory tools to legally isolate early design principles from micro-details.

What does this mean for our HA partners? It means stripping away the crushing technical and design risks before you invest heavy overheads on windfall sites. By collaborating with forward-thinking local authorities and enabling agencies like Unnos, we are exploring “Plug & Play” community plots that allow HAs to step onto pre-vetted, bankable sites.

We invite our Housing Association clients, sector partners, and fellow changemakers to join the conversation. How can we better deploy existing statutory hooks to de-risk your regional pipelines and enhance life by design?

Let’s connect and build the pipeline together.