Recently, HM Treasury released the updated version of the Green Book following the 2025 Green Book review. Alongside the release of the Green Book, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has also released the MHCLG Appraisal Guidance. Whilst the majority of those with experience in the public sector are well-versed in the Green Book, the MHCLG Appraisal Guide is the slightly less well-known sibling of the Green Book. Think of the Green Book as Owen Wilson and the MHCLG Appraisal guide as Luke Wilson, slightly less well known but equally as talented.
The MHCLG Appraisal guide provides the technical tools to assess and value the impacts of MHCLG and partner organisation interventions (there isn’t room to cover these in the cross-cutting Green Book). It is particularly important for informing spending decisions regarding housing, commercial property, and urban design. Other departments have similarly produced appraisal guidance that can largely be accessed through the Green Book supplementary guidance by subject.
What’s new?
The main addition to the new MHCLG Appraisal Guide is that it enables practitioners to understand the health impacts associated with urban design, so that these impacts can be understood and incorporated into investment decisions. Research carried out by academics at the Tackling the Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development (TRUUD) consortium shows that the urban environment can be a major determinant of health. Non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease or asthma account for 89 per cent of deaths in England and ill-health among working-age people is estimated to cost £150 billion a year. Good urban design can improve well-being and health, generate positive impacts for the wider economy and reduce pressure on the NHS and social services.
The TRUUD consortium has identified almost 200 pathways through which urban design impacts health. These include housing quality, accessibility of green space, air and noise pollution, local facilities and transport health pathways. To assess these impacts, a new tool has been released alongside the Appraisal Guide, the Health Appraisal of Urban Systems tool (HAUS). This tool has been developed by TRUUD for the purpose of assessing and valuing the social and economic impacts of alternative urban designs. This should help in supporting the development of value for money assessments within business cases. The release of the tool is accompanied by two case study examples showing how the tool can be applied.
Stephen Aldridge CB, Chief Analyst / Chief Economist and Director of Analysis and Data at MHCLG and member of the LPIP Advisory board, has said about the updated MHCLG Appraisal Guide:
“I am very pleased to recommend the use of this Guide as a means of helping to deliver better evidence-based policymaking across the range of housing, community and local government interventions. The work done with TRUUD on the health impacts of urban interventions is pathbreaking and I am particularly pleased that the World Health Organization has used it as a case study for its “Taking a Strategic Approach to Urban Health” publication.”
In addition, MHCLG has also developed a separate Technical Annex. This provides practitioners with greater detail on how to appraise several key non-health-related impacts of projects and programmes, related to regeneration and the urban environment. The technical guidance includes additional detail on recommended assumptions that need to be considered when appraising projects, appraisal summary examples, land value uplift guidance, additionality guidance and distributional impacts, alongside other technical considerations that need to be made in the appraisal of an intervention.
Conclusion
Overall, the updates made to the MHCLG Appraisal Guidance are much appreciated and will help to improve the quality of business case appraisal, enabling a greater range of benefits to be assessed in relation to regeneration and urban environment interventions. The updated technical guidance provides greater clarity on the assumptions that need to be made when developing a business case. This should support better evidence-based policy making.
The guidance is not a static document; it is a living document. As new research is conducted around appraisal topics such as land value uplift, additionality, health, environment and distributional impacts, the guidance will be updated and enhanced to provide more help to the user.
This blog was written by Alice Pugh, Senior Economic Analyst – City REDI, University of Birmingham.
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Disclaimer:
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and not necessarily those of City-REDI or the University of Birmingham.