There was certainly a positive atmosphere throughout the venue. Perhaps the feel of the event was helped by the glorious Liverpool sunshine, allowing some of us a touch of ‘schadenfreude’ for those colleagues who'd been at MIPIM in the pouring rain the previous week.

And yet it was surprising that we all managed to feel so upbeat, given much of the subject matter under discussion. The conference began with the excellent Trevor Williams, who set the macroeconomic and geopolitical scene, doing his best it seemed to hide the sun behind a lot of dark clouds. Not that he was unreasonably gloomy - he was quite right to talk about the sector working through a “compressed period of seismic change, and the upending of the established, rules-based order”. We're seeing that in spades this month, with what's happening to global free trade.

Amidst all the gloom, it was positive to hear him portray housing, and specifically the inadequacy of the UK's housing stock in terms of quality, type and often location, as being both one of the problems at the heart of our poor national productivity (even perhaps one of the causes of it), but also part of the solution. If government and the entire housing industry can embrace the need to build more homes, better homes, and in the right place, as a way of driving economic growth, then he argued we can start to fix the productivity problem - albeit housing on its own can’t drive GDP growth to anything like the extent we need, or aspire to.

He shared my and JLL's view (since re-affirmed by the OBR) that, regrettably, we have no chance of delivering 1.5 million homes in this Parliament or getting to 300,000 new homes a year. But we clearly need to do as much as possible and, from RPs, the will is clearly there throughout the sector, including its funders and investors, to find new and creative ways of delivering, as well as continuing to make the old ways work effectively in an environment of higher finance costs.

There is clearly a lot of real financial strain around at the moment, and the funding model is fragile. But it does still work. We have seen plenty of evidence of this ourselves in the last four weeks since getting back from Liverpool, with the amount of borrowing activity and security revaluations we have been undertaking, including Notting Hill Genesis’ (NHG) new sustainability bond issued last week.

As Priya Nair, Chief Executive Officer at The Housing Finance Corporation , pointed out in her session, the sector has never been short of capital at any time since 1988 - it's just that the sources of that capital and the terms on which it's lent or invested have changed as a result of various influences, and the rate of change has accelerated in the last 15 years or so.

That certainly remains true – as the Regulator of Social Housing’s Chief Executive Officer, Fiona McGregor, highlighted in her presentation, the sector arranged £2.6 billion of new money in Q4 2024, even with significantly diminished financial headroom and low interest cover.

In my session with Catherine Wilson of Savills, we looked at the positive trends in the housing market, and how these are helping to buoy-up valuations, especially on market value subject to tenancies (MV-T) basis. The sector should have nothing to fear on that score, although there are clearly headwinds in other respects.

The overarching point that was hammered home by many speakers, including Kate Henderson, the NHF’s Chief Executive, is that investing in social housing makes real economic sense. Putting money into grant funding will bring government a good return, both economically and socially, with a wide range of economic benefits flowing from that investment in our national infrastructure. That circles right back to Trevor Williams’ point about one of the drivers of economic growth, which should remain in our domestic control in the face of renewed international turbulence.