A warm, if wintry, welcome to the Homes and Communities Agency. A powerful new body charged with regeneration, housing and sustainable communities couldn’t come at a better time. The HCA is offering a new big idea to make things happen: the ‘single conversation’. It’s not quite Obama’s ‘Yes we can’, but it recognises the need for what it describes as ‘a place rather than programme based approach’ to its work. What would have happened if we’d had such a system some time ago? Doubtless much frustration could have been avoided. But there would have been other, unforeseen consequences.