Housing reform is often discussed as if the barrier is a single gate. Change the planning rules, increase targets, release land, and the homes will follow.
Then you visit a large site that has been “approved” for years and still has no roads in, no utilities scaled, no coherent phasing plan that a range of builders can plug into without starting over. The gap between permission and delivery is where the housing crisis quietly lives.
Nick Millican’s vantage point sits inside that gap. He is the CEO of Greycoat Real Estate, with overall responsibility for investment, strategic asset management, and capital partner relationships, and he has led the firm as CEO since 2012. Greycoat is best known for central London commercial work, yet its platform also includes residential and strategic land. If you want to understand what “better policy” could mean, it helps to look at the delivery machinery, not the speeches.
What follows is Millican’s take on housing reform, drawn from the kind of work his role requires and from the policy-adjacent partnerships Greycoat is now part of. Where I infer a point of view from actions, I say so.
The real bottleneck is the middle
Reform conversations focus on two ends of the pipeline: permissions granted and homes completed. The most stubborn problems often sit in the middle.
That middle includes infrastructure delivery, site complexity, coordination among landowners and stakeholders, and the practical realities that make a site “viable” for builders and funders. In December 2024, Homes England announced a £250 million master developer joint venture with Oaktree Capital Management and Greycoat Real Estate aimed at unlocking large-scale development sites across England, targeting large or complex sites with capacity for more than 1,000 homes each. The model described is straightforward: acquire sites, masterplan them, complete necessary infrastructure works, and then offer ready-to-develop parcels to a range of housebuilders.
As explored in this piece on London Loves Business, that is a policy stance expressed through structure: stop assuming every housebuilder should shoulder the earliest, riskiest work.
Master developers as a form of policy implementation
The phrase “housing reform” can sound legislative. The master developer approach is closer to implementation science.
Homes England’s announcement frames the partnership as long-term, with stewardship and placemaking central to development, and with a multi-tenure approach intended to increase delivery pace while embedding social and community values. That framing matters because it describes a method, not a slogan.
In March 2025, following that December 2024 announcement, Greycoat, Oaktree and Homes England purchased Bourn Airfield in Cambridgeshire. Greycoat’s own project page describes a plan for 3,500 new homes, community infrastructure including schools and local centres, high-quality green space, and 40% affordable housing. The page also states that the partnership will act as master developer, delivering key infrastructure to accelerate housing delivery, with local community involvement and stakeholder consultation.
This is housing policy expressed as sequencing: build the enabling conditions first, then invite multiple builders into a site that is actually buildable.
A reform principle that respects capital
Nick Millican’s day job is not policy writing. It is aligning capital with projects that can deliver superior risk-adjusted returns, while managing assets through complex market cycles. That lens tends to produce a specific kind of reform argument: if you want private capital to support housing delivery at pace, the pathway has to be legible.
That does not mean reducing standards. It means reducing uncertainty that has nothing to do with quality. It means clearer sequencing of obligations, transparent infrastructure plans, and timelines that match how developments genuinely unfold.
The Homes England partnership announcement explicitly positions the model as a way to remove barriers that slow housebuilders down by doing early-stage infrastructure and masterplanning, then handing over build-ready parcels. Read as policy, it suggests an approach that makes risk more measurable, which is one way to attract long-term investment without compromising the end product.
Field notes on what “better policy” looks like in practice
From this vantage point, better housing policy is less about a single reform lever and more about making delivery repeatable.
Make the middle investable
If sites stall at the infrastructure stage, policy can support vehicles that fund roads, utilities, schools, and enabling works upfront, then recover value as parcels are built out. The master developer model is one such vehicle.
Increase delivery capacity, not only permissions
A plan to build more homes strains the system that approves and delivers them. Policy that invests in delivery capability, including the expertise to manage complex sites, tends to convert ambition into completions.
Protect place quality through governance
Placemaking and stewardship are often treated as branding. The Homes England announcement frames stewardship and placemaking as core to the partnership’s model. In practice, that is governance: rules about phasing, public realm, design consistency, and how mixed tenures coexist.
Enable diversity of builders
Large sites can become dependent on a single delivery channel. The partnership model explicitly aims to offer ready-to-develop sites to a diverse range of housebuilders. That is a delivery strategy with social effects: more entrants, more resilience, fewer single-point failures.
The takeaway: policy should be designed for delivery
If you want a concise summary of Millican’s take, it is this: housing reform should be judged by whether it makes delivery easier to execute without lowering the bar on quality.
His role at Greycoat is rooted in strategic asset management and long-term performance. The partnerships Greycoat is part of, especially the Homes England master developer joint venture and the Bourn Airfield project, offer a practical template for what “better policy” can look like when it is built into the structure of delivery itself.
In housing, the decisive work is often unglamorous: infrastructure first, sequencing clear, handoffs clean, stewardship continuous. Reform that respects that reality is the kind that has a chance to stick.
Continue here: https://euroweeklynews.com/2025/03/05/nick-millican-sees-tenant-demand-driving-sustainable-real-estate-forward/