Reduce text sizeIncrease text sizeDefault coloursImproved contrastHigh contrastSharing our expertise and experience through best practice and guidance is a key part of our enabling role, and we have published or worked with our partners on a number of documents to helping local authorities and other partners to maximise delivery in their areas. Please note that some of these documents may be a couple of years old and so data (such as costs) should be used with care.
We also have a library of external guidance and research that may be of use, available through downloads and synopses. To search through this library click on 'advanced search' in the top right and include 'Report', 'Learning Material' and 'Toolkit/Guide' in the search criteria.
Case studies are also available by using the search function or searching by topic and keyword.
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Affordable home ownership mortgage toolkit (2011) Produced jointly by the HCA and CML brief guidance on the merits of keeping it simple when providing affordable home ownership and links to other useful documents which may assist organisations providing affordable home ownership, such as Mortgage access for affordable housing, advice on how to maximise the mortgageability of all types of affordable home. |
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Shared Ownership Joint Guidance (2012) Providing information for staff and professionals working in shared ownership on a range of issues. Shared Ownership: Joint Guidance - PDF (300 KB) - updated November 2012 |
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Investment and planning obligations: responding to the downturn (2009) This document sets out the approach the HCA will take to help local authorities meet immediate housing need and ensure that when the upturn begins, a recovering market is not hampered by a proliferation of lapsed consents, or delays due to a glut of re-applications. |
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S106 planning agreements and LCHO lending (2009) Outlining the issues that arise for lenders when section 106 (s106) agreements or other planning controls are used that contain restrictive or variation clauses. Section 106 Planning Agreements and LCHO lending - PDF (110 KB) |
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Empty Homes Toolkit This toolkit pulls together the skills and experience of a large range of people and organisations experienced in bringing empty homes back into use |
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HCA Design and sustainability standards Setting out our expectations of housing quality for the projects we support. Design and sustainability standards (2007 - Affordable Housing) |
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Urban Design Compendium (2008) Guidance on good urban design – summarising the principles of urban design, how they can be applied and the processes which lead to successful places. |
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Design and quality (2010) Quality Reviewer is a guide to help non-experts, particularly those in local authorities, to appraise the design quality of planning applications. This guide will help you to get a better understanding of the planning application process and empower you to comprehensively appraise them to determine their quality. |
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Historic English Partnerships standards (2007) Quality Reviewer is a guide to help non-experts, particularly those in local authorities, to appraise the design quality of planning applications. This guide will help you to get a better understanding of the planning application process and empower you to comprehensively appraise them to determine their quality. |
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Heritage Works: The use of historic buildings in regeneration (2013) A detailed guide to using heritage assets in regeneration projects. http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/heritage-works/ |
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Heritage and Historic Characterisation (2009) 'How to' Guide outlining a new development-led approach to masterplanning which advocates assessing the historic character of a site. |
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Heritage Assets Biennial Report (2009-2011) This report outlines the diversity and scale of the HCA’s contribution to bringing heritage assets forward for redevelopment while also preserving their historic character. Includes 51 listed buildings and 14 Scheduled Ancient Monuments. |
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Car Parking: What works where (2006) This toolkit highlights the most appropriate car parking approach according to density of development and housing typology. It takes stock of common car parking treatments and reviews how successful they are in providing adequate levels of safe parking with a high quality environment. |
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Manual for Streets 1&2 (2007 & 2010) Aims to reduce the impact of vehicles on residential streets by asking practitioners to plan street design intelligently and proactively, and gives a high priority to the needs of pedestrians, cyclists and users of public transport |
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Rural Housing and Masterplanning (2011) This document identifies key lessons from those projects along with 12 case studies that provide a brief snapshot of the types of work undertaken by local authorities through the Fund. |
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HAPPI report (2010) The Housing our Ageing Population Panel for Innovation (HAPPI) has gathered good practice from across Europe and put together new and creative proposals to help put us at the forefront of housing for older people. |
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Community Engagement and Stewardship To ensure that future communities are successful, practitioners need to find the right recipe for local collaboration across sectors; involving residents in decision-making and long-term stewardship of new settlements. |
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HCA/LGA report - Meeting Local Housing Demand (2012) This document is an enabling tool outlining what local authorities can do to help realise the housing aspirations of their communities, and what support we, along with the LGA, can offer. |
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Dealing Green: Options for Registered Providers (2012) The Green Deal aims to make 14m homes more energy efficient by 2020, driving down energy bills, reducing CO2 and creating as many as 250,000 jobs. As part of our enabling role this guide, produced with Sustainable Homes is designed to help Registered Providers ask the right questions and make the right decisions about getting involved in the Green Deal. |
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Monitoring guide for carbon emissions, energy and water use (2011) The Carbon Challenge programme will contribute to zero carbon by 2016. This report explains the monitoring framework and demonstrates the toolkit for carrying out monitoring and evaluation of occupant behaviour as opposed to relying solely on predictions from design models. |
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Design for Manufacture & Lessons Learnt (2006 & 2010) Design for Manufacture and the Lessons Learnt documents show how affordable, sustainable and high quality housing can best be achieved throughout England. More information here and here. |
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Feed in Tariff (2011) Explaining how the Feed In Tariff relates to schemes that have received HCA funding and clarifying issues about State Aid rules on double public subsidy. |
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Low Carbon Infrastructure Fund (2011) Programme to support the development of district heating (DH) infrastructure as part of the delivery of new homes. |
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Sustainable Homes Index For Tomorrow (SHIFT) (2009) HCA commissioned Sustainable Homes to carry out analysis of the data resulting from the operation of SHIFT, with case studies. |
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Fit for the Future: the Green Homes Retrofit Manual (2008) This guidance pulls together in one place the key information that social landlords need in order to improve the environmental performance of their existing housing stock. |
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Total Capital (2010) The HCA has been working with local authorities and other public agencies to develop the concept and test the potential benefit of a Total Capital approach to investment in places through five case studies. This report summarises the benefits and barriers identified, and suggests solutions and possible changes that may be necessary to make a Total Capital approach effective. |
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Employment densities guide (2010) This updated guide provides advice to practitioners involved in regeneration and economic development projects on employment densities associated with different types of property use. The guide is the recognised industry-wide point of reference for projected job creation and is used by local authorities, developers and surveyors, to name a few. The updated guide includes more up to date information about how many jobs you can expect to accommodate in modern properties of different types, from industrial units to commercial offices. |
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Employment and skills guidance (2009) The aim of our guidance document is to adopt a unified strategy across all of our investment programmes, whilst recognising individual approaches can be negotiated locally; determined by the priorities identified within Local Investment plans or by Local Enterprise Partnerships where these are in place. Toolkit for registered providers & Toolkit for developers and contractors |
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Viability tools Our practical, experience-based tools help our partners with a variety of technical areas relating to housing, regeneration and economic growth
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Economic Analysis (2006-present) The HCA follows HM Treasury Green Book to assess the Economic Case of an intervention - the process of defining objectives, examining options and weighing up the costs, benefits, risks and uncertainties of those options. Support is available on request for: Additionality; Value for Money; Contaminated Land Remediation Benchmarks; Cost Benefit Analysis; Valuing Regeneration; Assessing Optimism Bias; Housing Subsidy in Regeneration Benchmarks; Brownfield guidance; Endowments |
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National Land Use Database Contains information on previously developed land and buildings in England that may be available for development, whether vacant, derelict, or still in productive use. Guidance notes for Local Authorities providing NLUD returns via Microsoft Excel or in a GIS format are available to download. HCA NLUD guidance notes 2010 – PDF (90 KB) Guidance notes for Local Authorities providing NLUD returns via the Data Entry Management Tool (DEMT) can be downloaded from the key documents page of the archived NLUD website. More information here. |
