Redrow : Communities Report

Valuing Communities

Communities Report 2018

Contents

Introducing the Communities Report 2018

• 2.0 Foreword

• 3.0 Key findings and recommendations

• 4.0 Introduction

• 5.0 Measuring social value

Segment 1

The social value of key individual features and characteristics

• 6.0 Valuing health at the heart of a community

• 7.0 The value of social capital

• 8.0 Natural capital of new developments

Segment 2

The social value of a new development

• 9.0 The social value of placemaking

• 10.0 Reading list

• 11.0 Outcome evaluation table

2.0 Foreword

The design of new housing and communities can have a profound effect on the health and wellbeing of residents. We know that new homes and developments result in additional value to the people who live in or near them. However, this 'social value' is not widely understood at present. Using various established methodologies, these values can now be monetised to illustrate their long-term worth.

The housebuilding industry in England and Wales is considered to be worth around £38bn a year, including contributing £2.7bn in tax revenues, £841m towards infrastructure and supporting almost 700,000 jobs.1

Redrow's purpose is to create a better way for people to live. Instinctively we know from experience that we are achieving this through our approach to quality design and placemaking but we wanted to understand the measurable impact on the lives of the people and communities who live in and around our developments. In this, our second annual communities report, we set out to gain a greater understanding of these impacts and the social value new developments can provide.

The findings of this report not only support much of what we intuitively know about creating thriving communities, but also add to our understanding in other areas. In terms of the home itself, people gain the most social value from feeling safe and enjoying good levels of natural light. Both are a key focus in our design process.

From a placemaking perspective, being close to green spaces is most valued. This is an encouraging endorsement of our aim to create and enhance Nature for People. We have a long-standing relationship with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and recently we established a new partnership with The Wildlife Trusts to help us develop a strategy to achieve net biodiversity gains on our developments. Simply put, we aim for there to be more nature on our developments after we have finished than when we began.

Well-connected, easy to navigate and safe streets are also highly valued: findings which support the work we have undertaken to develop and refine Redrow 8, our placemaking design principles. These principles help us implement our fundamental beliefs that people value well designed, healthy and nature rich neighbourhoods.

Thriving communities are based on a sense of belonging and community. Our research shows that creating social capital by building a network of friends in a community, together with feeling safe, adds the most social value. This is also reflected in the Government's new Civil Society Strategy: Building a Future that Works for Everyone2, which has the delivery of social value as a thread running throughout the report. The strategy prescribes that social value - enriched lives and social justice - flows from thriving communities.

The publication of the findings in our latest report is an important step in helping everyone to better understand the social value to be gained from building new homes. It enables us to plan well-designed developments in the knowledge they will enrich the lives of everyone living in them.

John Tutte

Group Chief Executive, Redrow

3.0

Executive summary and key findings

"The fabric of our society is woven together by the threads of strong, cohesive, resilient communities."

Being part of a community provides people with important, meaningful human connections and a shared sense of purpose. The fabric of our society is woven together by the threads of strong, cohesive, resilient communities.

In 2017 we carried out our first research study examining the importance of community in new developments. The resulting report, Creating Britain's New Communities, described how people valued being part of a community and provided a framework to help homebuilders and government in fostering new communities. In our inaugural communities report, in 2017, we questioned c2000 people, exploring the importance they place on being part of a community. A year and half on from that first report home building numbers have grown but more still are needed to meet demand. The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has undergone a major overhaul, with an increased focus placed on, not only building more homes in places people are proud to live, but also ensuring these places are healthier, by design, and have less impact on the natural environment.

Social value

Our first community report outlined a framework for homebuilders and government to follow to help foster new communities. One of the main recommendations within the first report centred around the idea of embedding social value in homebuilding. Since then the social value movement has continued to gather pace, with the Social Value Act3 being extended to ensure that all government departments explicitly evaluate social value when commissioning services.

Building on the recommendations from the first communities report we have commissioned research which sought to attain a higher level of understanding of the social value new developments can provide. The research, which gathered views from 2,000 respondents, looked at social value from the perspectives of homes, place and community, with figures presented throughout this report over a 25 year period, around the typical term of a mortgage

Since the publication of the report, social value, as a concept, is featuring with even greater prevalence within government strategy. Social value permeates throughout the government's recently released Civil Society Strategy: Building a Future that Works for Everyone2. Whilst social value, and its achievement, is continuing to grow in prominence it remains problematic to quantify. The UKGBC in its publication Social Value in New Development4 highlights the difficulty in measuring social value due to a lack of consistency and understanding.

There are many different definitions explaining the concept of social value, but in its simplest terms social value is about quality of life or wellbeing of current and future generations.

Improving wellbeing, through developing high-quality homes and great places, requires organisations like Redrow to leverage their business expertise and financial capital. But that alone would not be enough.

Social value is co-created; communities, developers and local government must come together with a shared ambition to create better ways to live.

Social value of new developments

For this, our second report we commissioned Simetrica, a research consultancy that specialises in social impact measurement, to carry out research that could help us better understand the social value being generated by new developments. The assessment methods used by Simetrica are consistent with those advocated in the Green Book, which is guidance issued by HM Treasury on how to appraise programmes and projects to measure, amongst other things, their social impact.

The approach Simetrica have adopted, on our behalf, attributes financial values (social value) to positive outcomes and changes in experiences. The figures presented within this report are aggregated at a household level, accumulated over the course of a year. In addition, to demonstrate the social value of a development for all residents, the figures have been aggregated and discounted1 over a 25 year period, which is around the typical length of a mortgage.

The social values presented in this report are based on Redrow specific samples (constituting a sample of Redrow customers and those similar in terms of income, region and homeownership). The values are not representative of the general population and cannot be directly applied elsewhere.

The expectation is that the research findings featured in this report deliver an evidence base which could be drawn upon in the formulation of an industry wide framework to provide consistency in the measurement of social value in new developments.

The research findings have been presented in two segments, with the first segment examining the social value of key features and characteristics of new developments. For ease of understanding developments have been sub dived into homes, places and community. These are explored through the themes of:

1: Discounting is the process of determining the present value of the benefit, over a time period, taking into consideration that benefits further in the future are less valuable to us today. We use a 3.5% discount rate, in line with HM Treasury guidelines.

Social value headlines

The additional social value realised by the average Redrow household2 on an illustrative new development, present value discounted over a 25 year period.

The additional social value is the difference between the social value of living on an illustrative Redrow development and the social value of living on an assumed similar industry standard development (based on similar households and the same outcomes).

Homes

Places

Community

2: A household size is assumed to be 2.69 (the average household size in England and Wales, weighted by the proportion of Redrow customers in each region).