Harnessing Brownfield Land: Productive Discussions with MHCLG

This week, Cornerstone Place co-founders David Ball and Richard Kennedy met with Thomas Dannatt and Philip Bell at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to share progress on our projects supported by the Brownfield Land Release Fund (BLRF).

Our starting point was the work we’ve been doing alongside Rochdale Borough Council, with outstanding contributions from officers including Hannah Courtney-Adamson, Albert Margai, Stuart Morris, and Lynn Phillips. This collaboration has shown how even modest capital interventions can unlock land for meaningful social impact.

We were pleased to demonstrate how each £1 of BLRF funding deployed through our projects is set to generate 1.9 ‘impact bed nights’—a clear illustration of how targeted public investment can deliver measurable social returns.

In the discussion, we reflected on how the BLRF programme could evolve to enable even greater impact and smoother delivery. One opportunity we explored was the untapped potential of small, local authority-owned sites. These often-overlooked parcels of land, when supported by targeted BLRF capital, could play a pivotal role in delivering much-needed homes—what we described as a potential ‘small sites accelerator’.

By scaling the successful model developed with Rochdale, we see a pathway to replicate this approach in other local areas, turning underused land into housing solutions for those in need.

We’re grateful to the MHCLG team for the constructive engagement and look forward to continuing to work with them—and with councils across the country—to bring forward more of these high-impact, community-rooted developments.