Written evidence submitted by Greater Manchester Combined Authority (ULH0017)

Greater Manchester Combined Authority

Greater Manchester is one of the most successful city-regions in the UK – representing the largest city region economy outside London, with a gross value added (GVA) of over £100 billion and is the fastest growing economy in the UK. Our vision is to make Greater Manchester a thriving city region where everyone can live a good life.

The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) is made up of the ten Greater Manchester councils and Mayor, who work with local services, businesses, communities, and other partners to ensure every part of our city region is successful. The ten local authorities that make up Greater Mancheser (Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, and Wigan) have worked together voluntarily for many years on issues that affect everyone in the region, like transport, regeneration, and attracting investment.

We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Committee’s inquiry into Unlocking Land for Housing. Our evidence reflects Greater Manchester’s strategic ambition to deliver 75,000 homes in this parliamentary term, including 10,000 energy efficient homes for social rent, in line with the Greater Manchester Strategy and national housing missions. The Greater Manchester Strategy places housing front and centre, based on the ‘Housing First’ principle that a healthy, safe place to call home is the cornerstone of a healthy, happy life. Our housing delivery ambitions are therefore a key component of our work to ensure a healthy home for all.

Our submission sets the scale of growth ambition across Greater Manchester, our knowledge of the housing pipeline across Greater Manchester, the role of public sector land and our experiences of working in partnership with Homes England.

Greater Manchester Growth Ambitions

We have been developing an integrated pipeline as a cornerstone of Greater Manchester’s growth strategy, aligned with national Government missions. This approach will secure growth for the next decade by pioneering a new way of delivering, building at a scale and pace not seen this century. Delivering our integrated pipeline requires over £10 billion in public investment over the next decade.

We are committed to leading this effort through the launch of our £2bn Greater Manchester Good Growth Fund, which will unlock priority projects, make them viable, and build investor confidence. The initial £400m capital allocation from the Fund will unlock a further £1.3bn of investment, delivering nearly 3,000 new homes and over 2 million sq ft of employment floor space.

We have a robust deliverable pipeline of housing schemes that remain unfunded and will deliver on Greater Mancheser and national housing objectives. Delivering this ambition is shared across the 10 Greater Manchester local authorities and the GMCA. Supporting the ambition requires the continued joint working which is embedded across the city region. Amongst the bodies which support this ambition is the Greater Manchester Land Commission.

The Greater Manchester Land Commission is a strategic body established in 2022 by the GMCA to oversee and coordinate the efficient use of public sector land across the city-region. It brings together various public bodies, overseen by Mayor Andy Burnham, to unlock land for housing, economic development, and community wealth building, aiming for more collaborative, sustainable development.  Key to the Land Commission is to make the most productive use of publicly owned land, aligning it with local development plans and addressing land inequalities. The Commission is working on drawing together a comprehensive list of all public sector land in the region. It also is a place to facilitate partnerships between local authorities, public bodies, and government departments to support development.

Understanding the Pipeline and Intervention Requirements

Greater Manchester has a comprehensive understanding of its housing delivery pipeline, enabled by our Integrated Pipeline—the cornerstone of Greater Manchester’s growth strategy. It brings together land supply data, local development intelligence, and site level assessments across the city region to provide a complete picture of what can be delivered, when, and what is needed to unlock it. To support the delivery of the Integrated Pipeline a combination of data intelligence and engagement with key stakeholders has been key. Examples of these are below.

• Annual land supply returns, consolidating information planning status, site boundaries, land ownership and site capacity.
• A detailed Housing Delivery Pipeline Assessment conducted in 2025, which identifies viable sites capable of contributing to Greater Manchester’s 75,000 home ambition and highlights the constraints affecting them.
• Our Social and Affordable Housing Pipeline is a key part of our Integrated Pipeline, focusing on delivering new homes across Greater Manchester. Working with Greater Mancheser Housing Providers, Homes England, and our Growth Locations, we've identified a solid pipeline to deliver over 16,000 social and affordable homes in within five years.
• An understanding of public sector land supported through the Greater Manchester Land Commission.
• Direct engagement with all ten local authorities, ensuring a shared and evidenced picture of delivery potential.
• Engagement with the developer community through the Greater Manchester Development Forum.
• A close working relationship with Homes England as a Strategic Place Partner.

This combination of intelligence and engagement with key partners, the GMCA has clear visibility of the sites which are deliverable and those which are stalled and the interventions are required to unlock them.

We have a clear understanding that the challenges in undermining delivery of homes. Site viability is a key challenge in Greater Manchester and other post-industrial cities. A key challenge is remediation of post-industrial land the challenges in ensuring viability on such sites. The Green Book’s approach to Land Value Uplift does not work well with land which has high remediation costs which is a challenge for some sites in Greater Manchester. Below sets out more details on our approach to land supply and the findings from our Housing Delivery Pipeline assessment.

Land Supply and data access

We have an excellent understanding of the volume and type of land available for housing development across the ten Local Authorities. Numeric, text and geospatial data is collected and published annually from the local authorities. The land supply data return provides information on the location, size and number of sites, the number of units in each site, land ownership status (if known), planning application status and land type. The data is drawn from the individual Greater Manchester districts’ Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessments which have been prepared in accordance with National Planning Policy Guidance. As of the 2025 position the land supply returns show land identified for 243,660 units across 3,644 sites.

The data is published on the GMCA website to be downloaded and analysed by partner organisations and those interested in the development pipeline across Greater Manchester. Alongside the online publication, the data is also visualised on the MappingGM website which provides accessible geospatial information on Greater Manchester, allowing users to interact for example with future land supply, transport information, planning designations and environmental information. Included in the suite of geospatial information is the Integrated Pipeline map which visualises the future investment opportunities across Greater Manchester.

To enhance understanding of land for housing, there is a challenge in access data on land ownership which remains costly and inaccessible, limiting local authorities’ ability to plan effectively and pursue land assembly opportunities. GMCA welcomes planned Land Registry reforms that should make ownership data more accessible.

Housing delivery Pipeline Assessment

In 2025, GMCA commissioned an assessment of Greater Manchester’s housing delivery pipeline to identify sites capable of contributing to the ambition of delivering 75,000 in the parliamentary term. Through a review of Greater Manchester five-year land supply data and detailed engagement with all ten local authorities, the work highlighted a substantial pipeline of sites across Greater Manchester but also shows that many are constrained by viability, infrastructure and planning complexity. Without targeted intervention, a significant proportion of sites risk stalling or delivering more slowly than required to meet Greater Manchester housing requirements and support our energy efficient and net zero ambitions.

The findings point to the important role of Greater Manchester wide coordination and investment to unlock land and accelerate delivery. Common challenges cut across authorities, suggesting that interventions led by GMCA, under an enhanced Strategic Place Partnership with Homes England, could be more effective than site by site approaches alone. These include more flexible and certain funding, technical capacity support, land assembly, engagement with statutory consultees and better use of public sector land.

The key issues affecting land unlocking and housing delivery in our pipeline assessment included:

• Viability constraints are a critical barrier, particularly on brownfield, town centre and regeneration sites, with abnormal costs and infrastructure requirements undermining deliverability.
• Role of the Strategic Place Partnership with Homes England, to help address key capacity and skill gaps needed to unlock development.
• Challenges for small sites delivery with more support needed for landowners and SME developers to bring sites forward.
• Biodiversity Net Gain requirements are delaying multiple schemes
• Delays from statutory consultees including the Environment Agency, National Highways and Network Rail are causing significant planning delays and uncertainty.
• Fragmented land ownership and lack of coordinated land assembly is constraining delivery on town centre and strategic sites.
• Public sector land is not being fully optimised to support housing delivery, including opportunities for council housing, energy efficiency and social rent homes.
• Construction and development capacity and skills across the sector as constrained

Homes England and the National Housing Bank (NHB)

Early discussions with the Government’s National Housing Bank indicate that any funding made available through this route will need to generate a financial return. We know from our pipeline that this approach will not close the viability gaps that are preventing schemes from coming forward. We strongly recommended that the range of products offered by the National Housing Bank is given consideration to include products that can address these viability gaps.

To deliver on the Government’s commitment in the Devolution White Paper, and consistent with established policy, access to the wider Homes England National Housing Delivery Fund (NHDF), beyond our Integrated Settlement allocation, is therefore considered essential. Without this, we will not be able to secure the scale of housing delivery required across Greater Manchester.

This will be a national as well as local challenge given the ability of other areas across the country to start on site with housing delivery in this parliamentary term. We believe it will continue to be a national objective to both unlock significant development sites that provide large housing numbers over the next decade alongside the need for actual starts on site within this parliamentary term.

Given this position we are therefore concerned that the MSAs will be excluded from accessing the NHDF programme. This approach risks Homes England and MHCLG being in a position that allocated funding at the end of the parliamentary term remains unspent. We understand the concerns expressed about MSAs effectively being able to “double dip” into the NHDF and appreciate there needs to be national equity in terms of access to national funding. However, the strategic approach needs to be developed to enable those that have the capability to deliver to continue to do so in order to drive towards the national 1.5 million housing target.

We believe that the above proposal strikes the right balance across national and regional priorities in relation to driving housing and economic growth.

Use of public sector land

Public sector land is a key part of supporting the delivery of new homes.

GMCA and the Mayor’s Office have encouraged national bodies to support sites to drive local growth and optimise land use. Doing so would require partner bodies to prioritise locations that do not deliver immediate financial return, placing pressure on limited resources and relying on uncertain grant or third-party funding support.

A broader view of value, combined with partnership based resourcing, is needed. This must be embedded into new processes, with MHCLG, DfT and Treasury alignment on budget control, parameters and MPM flexibility.

Emerging structures aligned to mayoral development areas will provide an opportunity to enable more proactive, place-based approaches. Aligning business targets and using pilot locations with partners such as Network Rail as test cases will help build momentum and establish workable models.

Summary and Recommendations

To unlock land at the scale needed to meet national housing ambitions, Government should:

• Address viability directly, including through new products from the National Housing Bank: Provide interventions and funding products that help to close viability gaps on strategic brownfield and regeneration sites and recognise additional costs for remediation of post industrial land.
• Allow MSAs to access NHDF underspend within a clear framework: Ensuring places with delivery capability can progress regionally significant projects.
• Optimise public sector land for housing delivery: Through a national strategy supporting local coordination and aligned disposal practices.
• Resource planning and land assembly capacity in local authorities: To reduce delays and improve certainty for major development.
• Improve access to land ownership data: Support the Land Registry reform process and provide timely planning information tools.

Together, these actions will enable Greater Manchester, and other regions with strong delivery capability, to bring forward the homes the country needs, aligned to national growth, net zero and devolution ambitions.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss our experiences with the Committee and are happy to provide further information on any of the information shared in the submission.

March 2026