£28 million grant secures over 600 affordable homes
24th August 2009
Additional funding of £28million from the Homes
and Communities Agency (HCA), the national housing and regeneration
agency for England, has been granted to Somer Housing Group to help
provide more affordable homes under the National Affordable Housing
Programme for 2008-11.
Somer Housing Group develops affordable housing to rent and buy,
on behalf of its members Somer Community Housing Trust and Redland
Housing Association. Affordable homes are usually provided by a
combination of HCA funding; finance from a housing association;
funding from the local council; and revenue raised from the sale of
homes through shared ownership schemes.
The Somer Housing Group successfully bid for £28million extra
funding, to ensure that a number of existing and planned
developments would proceed.
Mike Grist, Group Director of Business Development, said:
‘Despite falls in house prices, we still face
an acute shortage of affordable homes in the South West. There was
a danger that some of the schemes we’d been working on might no
longer have been possible for us to develop, but the assistance of
the HCA has secured their future and will help more people into
affordable housing. It also helps us to continue working with those
private developers, that are obliged to build a proportion of
affordable homes as part of their large scale developments.’
The breakdown by local authority area is as follows:
- Bath and North East Somerset: £13.7m
- Bristol: £3.4m
- Cotswold: £218k
- Mendip: £196k
- South Gloucestershire: £7.5m
- West Wiltshire: £3.4m
The proposals accepted by the HCA include: £4.25million to
convert 115 properties planned for sale through the shared
ownership New Build HomeBuy scheme; as well as different tenures,
such as the deferred ‘Rent to HomeBuy’ scheme. This enables people
who would like to buy, but can’t get a mortgage, to rent a home for
up to three years before purchasing.
Just over £24million will help fund over 500 new homes currently
planned to be completed by 2011, including £12.7million for the
Trust’s project to redevelop all of its pre-cast reinforced
concrete (PRC) homes. Previously, a proportion of those new homes
were to be sold on the open market, to help fund the project.
Instead the area will benefit from around 100 extra, affordable
homes.
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