IN Brief:
- Lewisham has selected Hill for a development partnership covering up to £1.5bn of construction.
- The initial ten-year term can be extended by five years, with individual schemes retaining separate approval gates.
- Thomas' Lane Yard and Achilles Street are the first housing projects due to use the partnership.
The Hill Group has been selected as Lewisham Council’s strategic development partner under a long-term agreement covering up to £1.5bn of construction across the south London borough.
The arrangement runs for an initial ten years with an option for a further five, creating a standing development relationship for housing and regeneration projects rather than requiring the council to procure a separate partner for every major site. Individual developments will still require their own business cases, financial assessments, and formal council approvals.
Hill was selected following a year-long procurement process carried out under the Procurement Act 2023. The competition included initial bids, technical, quality, and financial assessment, a dialogue stage with shortlisted bidders, and final evaluation before the preferred partner was approved.
The first projects are already identified. Thomas’ Lane Yard in Catford is planned to deliver 113 affordable homes, comprising 39 for social rent and 74 for shared ownership. The Achilles Street estate regeneration in New Cross is planned to provide 278 homes, including 122 for social rent.
Those schemes are expected to use pre-construction services agreements beneath the wider strategic partnership. Design development, technical due diligence, planning, viability, programming, and procurement can therefore progress at site level while Lewisham retains formal control over whether and when each project moves into full construction.
The structure is intended to remove repeated procurement from the early stages of the council’s housing pipeline. Lewisham has more than 10,500 households on its housing waiting list and around 2,450 households in temporary accommodation, placing pressure on the authority to bring viable affordable-housing projects through design and procurement more quickly.
A single development relationship can reduce some of the time spent repeatedly selecting a partner, but it does not remove the constraints that determine whether a scheme is buildable. Land condition, planning, borrowing, grant funding, construction inflation, building-safety requirements, utilities, and abnormal costs still have to be assessed on every project.
Lewisham has kept flexibility in the commercial model for that reason. Some schemes can remain council-led, with the authority funding development and retaining affordable homes. On others, Hill can invest as developer, with the council retaining first refusal over affordable units and participating in value generated through the development.
Most opportunities are expected to involve council-owned land, although the agreement is not exclusive. Lewisham can still appoint other developers or contractors where a different route offers a better fit, preventing the £1.5bn ceiling from becoming an automatic allocation of all future construction work to one company.
The headline value also requires care. Up to £1.5bn describes the potential construction scope available through a partnership that could run for 15 years; it is not a single lump-sum contract committed on appointment. Expenditure will emerge through individual projects as approvals, land, finance, design, and procurement align.
That creates a potentially long and varied supply chain programme. Residential schemes can differ substantially in height, tenure, structural system, building services, façade requirements, ground conditions, and logistics even when they share a common development partner. Standardised governance and procurement can create continuity, but the construction packages themselves will still be shaped by each site.
Hill already has an active relationship with the borough through the Mayfield scheme at Burnt Ash Hill, where it began work in March on 64 affordable homes across three buildings. That project includes 23 social-rent homes and 41 shared-ownership properties, as well as commitments covering apprenticeships, employment, accessibility, landscaping, and environmental performance.
Existing delivery provides practical knowledge of Lewisham’s technical, planning, and social-value expectations before the strategic partnership’s first schemes reach construction. It also gives the council a live reference point against which performance on programme, quality, resident engagement, and supply chain commitments can be judged.
A Strategic Development Partnership Board will oversee governance, performance, and finances across the wider arrangement. Such oversight becomes more important as a framework extends across several political, funding, and construction cycles: the commercial assumptions supporting a scheme in 2026 may look very different when another site reaches procurement later in the decade.
The first two projects will show how much time the arrangement can genuinely remove from delivery. Thomas’ Lane Yard and Achilles Street already have defined housing outputs, so the test is whether earlier contractor and developer involvement can resolve design, viability, and procurement more efficiently without weakening project-level scrutiny.
The partnership also creates a more visible forward workload for consultants and specialist contractors. Although individual packages are not guaranteed, a standing pipeline gives the principal partner greater reason to develop repeat relationships, standardise elements where appropriate, and plan resources across several schemes rather than treating every council project as an isolated tender.
Affordable housing programmes rarely fail for lack of stated ambition; they stall when individual sites cannot clear the technical, financial, or procurement hurdles needed to reach construction. Lewisham’s new structure is designed to remove one of those hurdles by keeping a development partner continuously engaged. The next measure will be how quickly Thomas’ Lane Yard and Achilles Street turn that continuity into live building work.
