This week, some of the DG Cities team is in Manchester for Housing 2025, one of the biggest events in the UK’s housing calendar. If you're attending and haven’t found us yet, come and see our data wall and asset management demo in the exhibition hall. Head of Communications, Sarah Simpkin, fresh from sticking up 1,200 post-it notes, writes about some of the highlights so far.

What happens when you get what you want?

That was the question facing a room full of council leaders, housing associations, trusts and house-builders, who had just landed a £39 billion ten-year affordable housing investment in the government’s spending review. It’s fair to say that the mood was pretty upbeat.

Let’s not be too hasty though… any optimism was tempered by caution. In the first panel I caught on new construction, a key question was whether the ambition to deliver 1.5 million new homes, accelerating to 300,000 per year, might then compromise build and design quality or environmental standards. The conversation also turned to scaling the infrastructure needed to support such rapid growth, from schools, GPs and transport to high streets - and even two new reservoirs to sustain development, in the case of Cambridgeshire.

A lot of talk was of planning, sites and building at scale, but our arrival in Manchester was overshadowed by a huge fire in the former Hotspur Press, destroying one of the city’s early mills, which had been due for redevelopment as a tower for student accommodation. With the smoke visible across the city, and surrounded by Manchester’s many former industrial to residential conversions, it sharpened the focus on the need for reuse too, as well as social housing retrofit, and the value of strategies to better prioritise repairs and improvement.

Collaboration: the week’s defining theme

One standout event was Mayoral Question Time, chaired by Guardian journalist Gaby Hinsliff, which brought together a cross-party group of new and established mayors from across the North and Midlands. The session emphasised the value of peer-led networks and the importance of collective influence to unlock devolved powers. “Is there a mayoral WhatsApp group?” someone asked. There is, it turns out. “Wait, there is?” came the surprised reply from one panellist, which got a laugh.

Their message was that mayors are uniquely positioned to cut through departmental silos to enable integrated approaches that respond to local needs. Richard Parker, Mayor of the West Midlands Combined Authority, highlighted an example from Solihull, where to expand access to jobs, they identified a need to better align the bus timetable with shift patterns.

At the same time, criticism was levelled at the government’s Green Book methodology for evaluating funding. The approach was seen as poorly suited to rural and less populous regions. As Kim McGuinness, Mayor of the North East Combined Authority, bluntly put it: “Rip the thing up.”

Other panels covered issues around safety, accessibility, the impact of regulation and tackling damp and mould. Shaun Flook, Assistant Director for Housing Needs and Tenancy at the Royal Borough of Greenwich, contributed to an important session on temporary housing and the importance of investment in homelessness prevention. In a similar model of cross-boundary collaboration, the London Councils’ Housing Directors group met to discuss some of the distinct housing pressures faced by boroughs.

Place-based solutions

A session with Eamonn Boylan, Chief Executive of Homes England, echoed the wider call for individual approaches to housing, recognising that what works in Tower Hamlets may not work in Tyneside. Several times, the panel emphasised the need for ‘place-based’ solutions, which seemed very much the mot du jour. It makes you wonder a little if anyone is advocating for the alternative - presumably inappropriate top-down housing policy with no consideration of local needs or supporting services.

It's fair to say that all deeply agree on the need for local nuance, but the challenge is delivering nuance at scale and pace. Understanding what makes an area unique, capturing residents’ views beyond tick-box questionnaires, mapping complex interconnected systems – this is where data (and potentially AI) comes in. From tree plotting surveys to customer payment platforms, data is becoming central to how councils understand local circumstances and make strategic investments.

Rasheed Sokunbi and Balazs Csuvar on the stand in Manchester

DG Cities’ presence at Housing UK is rooted in this very challenge: helping councils make sense of data and translate its insights into action. These services are designed with and for local government teams, enabling smarter prioritisation of works, planning and investment at the local level. It’s interesting to note that although the team happens to be at the Housing conference with a housing tool, it’s a flexible methodology designed to work across council sectors.

By a council-founded innovation consultancy, for local (and often central) government

The exhibition floor has been busy with product showcases, with dancing gorillas outside, various raffles and mini golf, but there have been useful discussions around resident engagement and data-driven decision-making. Perhaps the most interesting feedback from visitors has been the response to DG Cities as an innovation consultancy set up by a council - not something a lot of people realised. It was great to be able to show the value of an independent innovation lab to other councils looking to trial affordable, effective tech-enabled or behavioural solutions.

As the first day wound down, a final session on pet-friendly housing reminded us of the breadth of issues that matter to residents. It highlighted the need to challenge the expected narratives with actual data - for example, tenant pet ownership has been shown to correlate with less demand for repairs to properties, not more. I was intrigued by the range of pets (dogs, yes, but also chickens…) and in a wider sense, how it showed the broad, inclusive thinking needed to build homes that will truly work for everyone.

It’s not over yet!

There’s still much to look forward to in the programme, in particular a panel at 11 am on Thursday featuring Jamie Carswell, Director of Housing and Safer Communities at the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The panel, chaired by Pete Apps, will be bringing some of these data, social and technical themes together to look at improving housing management. Find out more, and details of where to find us, here.