Panellists

Helen Collins (Chair)

Principal, Avison Young (Chair)

Helens’ career spans 30 years working senior advisory and delivery roles, Helen specialises in public/ private sector initiatives for growth, partnerships, and in asset optimisation. Recent projects include Homes England’s Strategic Partnership initiative, and delivery of a number of landmark affordable housing portfolio transactions. Helen is a Fellow and Former President of the Chartered Institute of Housing and a Professional member of the RICS and a regular speaker on the industry conference circuit.

Jack Burnham

Head of Affordable Housing, Octopus Real Estate

Steve Partridge

Director - Housing Consultancy, Savills

Steve is a senior leader and highly regarded national expert in UK housing finance with nearly 30 years’ experience in the public and private housing sectors in business planning, investment appraisal, financing and the development of new homes.

Steve leads Savills’ work on building funding and delivery capacity with UK-based local authorities and housing associations, to help deliver new homes at scale, and also specialises in working to bring new sources of private investment and housing providers together to introduce new and innovative ways to bring private finance into the development of affordable housing. He leads work on setting up new housing providers, raising capital for investment into non-profit and for-profit housing providers, and helped traditional housing providers access these new sources of capital.

Simon Century

Managing Director - Housing, Legal & General

Simon Century joined L&G in 2016 and is a Managing Director for Housing. Simon is responsible for leading L&G’s investment strategy across the residential housing sectors. In 2018, Simon founded L&G’s wholly owned affordable housing business, Legal & General Affordable Homes and in 2020 Legal & General's Suburban Build to Rent business. Simon is responsible for L&G growing investment portfolio across other residential platforms including leading L&G’s participation into the later living joint venture with Natwest Group Pension Fund, the joint venture into the urban build to rent with PGGM as well as sitting on the board of L&G Modular Homes.

Simon’s career has spanned residential real estate, corporate finance and corporate strategy. He joined from the affordable housing provider, bpha where he was an executive committee member responsible for strategy and corporate finance. Prior to bpha, Simon worked at the advisory and investment firm, TradeRisks, advising clients in the infrastructure and quasi-government sectors.

Simon is a full Member of the Association of Corporate Treasurers and holds the Certificate in Investment Management from the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment.

Mary Parsons

Regeneration and Partnerships Director, Lovell

Mary has over 25 years’ experience in the development, construction and regeneration industry; working across the private, Housing Association and consultancy sectors. She has been involved in some of the largest housing-led regeneration programmes in the UK. She was with Places for People Group for 15 years and was a Group Main Board Director for a decade, responsible for their large scale developments and new places. She joined Lovell in 2020, a major national housebuilder and part of the Morgan Sindall Group as national Regeneration & Partnerships Director and Divisional Board member. Her current responsibilities include a number of strategic joint ventures with public sector partners including Suffolk, Hertfordshire and West Sussex County Councils.
Mary is past Chair of the Town & Country Planning Association, was a Commissioner for the National Housing Federation’s national Great Places Commission, for the Government’s Building Better Building Beautiful Commission and the ‘No Place Left Behind’ Commission into levelling up and community-led regeneration. She is a member of the University of Cambridge’s Property Board including their award winning new neighbourhood at Eddington and is Trustee and Chair of MOBIE, an education and skills charity founded by TV Presenter and Architect, George Clarke, to attract the next generation into housing and construction.

Grainne Gilmore

Director of Research & Insights, Cluttons

Gráinne is director of research & insight. Before joining Cluttons she held positions at Zoopla, as head of research, and at Knight Frank where she was head of UK residential research, leading the teams producing insights on all aspects of UK sales, lettings, residential development and the specialist BTR, student and later living housing sectors. Gráinne started her career at The Times, where she was an award-winning finance and economics journalist.