Development opportunities
Creating homes and communities that people want to live in is one of our key roles as a housing association.
As part of the social housing sector, the Group plays a key role in providing good quality and truly affordable homes. This underpins our strategy and is reflected in our development programme. We continue to prioritise affordable housing and currently plan for 60% of future homes to be available on affordable tenures.
Through our Development Strategy, we'll be investing £800m to build 2,500 new homes by 2020 and offer a range of housing options, from affordable rent to private sale, in London and the South East.
In 2017- 2018 the Group successfully bid to secure a grant to deliver 601 affordable homes over the next five years as part of the Mayor of London’s Homes for Londoners initiative. With the grant per home now fixed, we will receive £10.7m of new grant and use £9.55m of recycled grant. The Group is actively identifying further development opportunities to provide additional homes in the capital.
In 2016-2017, Homes England introduced another funding programme targeted at shared ownership. The Group bid for and secured £4.88m to help build 155 shared ownership homes in the South East.
In 2017-18, we completed 197 new homes; less than planned due to a number of schemes slipping behind schedule but the good news is that these will complete in 2018-19. With 800 homes currently under construction, 2018-19 will be one of the Group’s busiest years on the development front.
In 2018 the Group purchased 496 homes from Hyde Housing. These span a range of tenures from general needs and shared ownership to supported housing.
In October 2018 came the good news that we had been successful in our bid for strategic partnership funding from Homes England – securing a further 1440 new homes for people in need.
We're committed to creating sustainable communities. From large, inner-city regeneration projects to small rural housing developments, we focus on high quality design and sustainability in our building work.
