Sponsored article: Laura Bridges celebrates finance teams for everything from their work on the post-Covid recovery to delivering affordable homes and innovating in the face of austerity.
We are thrilled to be supporting the Room 151 Place Shaping Impact Award for 2021. This sponsorship is a first for us. But every day we see how finance teams are at the heart of supporting communities to thrive through better outcomes and more resilient place settings.
We are really keen that these finance teams showcase their work and receive the recognition that comes with these awards; we can all learn and disseminate the best practice and leverage real improvements across the country.
We work with finance teams across the UK to make a difference to the communities in which they work. In particular, we have seen finance teams:
- Driving the post-COVID economic recovery in their local area through the innovative use of investment funds. Councils can seed economic growth and regeneration by establishing an investment fund to enable local businesses to access much needed flexible finance; those that might be turned down for, or need to supplement, a regular bank loan. And some councils are moving their ambitions beyond mere job creation to that of creating social value by establishing investment funds that provide a more community focussed, human approach to considering the viability of schemes and are therefore able to make an impact in their locality.
- Examining the options to deliver more affordable homes to meet local demand. Councils can use data on local house prices, market rents and household incomes to better understand housing “affordability” in their local area. This enables a council to use its financial strength to support new finance and funding streams and to directly intervene in the housing market to support the delivery of a range of tenures that meet local need.
- Generating new financial returns through better use of their assets. Councils can identify opportunities to generate new financial returns from surplus or underused assets; either through long-term, sustainable income streams or one-off receipts that can also drive regeneration and growth. Also, by actively growing their asset base, councils can support local communities and their wider service provision.
- Pushing the boundaries of the public sector by combining the effective use of their assets with the skills and funding from the private sector through joint ventures. Councils can take a more commercial approach to development that balances ambitious growth targets with an appropriate risk appetite. By bringing in outside expertise, partnership working, if procured with innovation and collaboration in mind, provides the opportunity to deliver more than just profit but also wider community benefits and knowledge sharing whilst also securing a faster pace of delivery.
- Meeting financial challenges with real innovation. Years of austerity has provided councils with the opportunity to change their relationship with residents by transforming the way they operate. Many councils have sought to become self-funding through progressive growth strategies.
- Working collectively to address homelessness provision. Councils have sought to improve their provision for those that are homeless through the use of temporary structures on surplus or meanwhile land to provide higher quality accommodation that displaces the need to use poorer quality and more expensive forms of accommodation and avoids competition with neighbouring boroughs.
We work as a critical friend or delivery partner to help finance teams work through the strategic objectives, options, business case, financing and procurement needed to make these schemes happen. We focus on the identification and management of risk as well as ensuring that governance is sufficiently robust to support these exciting schemes.
Finance are at the heart of place shaping. And we are always excited to see the fruits of this work as schemes materialise physically and their impact can be seen to be transforming areas and the lives of residents.
Laura Bridges is a director at 31tenconsulting.
To find out more about our work, see our website www.31tenconsulting.co.uk or contact Chris Shepherd (chris.shepherd@31tenconsulting.co.uk on 07968 369620) or Laura Bridges (laura.bridges@31tenconsulting.co.uk on 07432 574260).
AWARDS INFORMATION
Read about the awards here.
Read about the seven categories here.
See the nominations here.
To read case studies of finance team impact, click here.
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