As the largest housing association in the South West, we are pleased to be featured as one of the country's biggest developers of social housing in a nationwide survey
The 911 homes we built last year ranks as the 15th highest number of homes built by a housing association, according to Inside Housing Top Biggest Builders 2022 list which focuses on the top 50 biggest builders in the UK. To put this into context, there are around 1,300 housing associations across the UK.
We were named 10th for the number of homes we have started building, with 1,207 homes planned to be complete by the end of March 2023. This represents an increase of almost one third of new homes being built compared to last year.
We were also ranked ninth for our development pipeline which will see 7,000 homes developed over the next five years - 6,000 of which will be affordable - demonstrating our ongoing commitment to building new affordable homes across the South West.
We were ranked eighth by having one of the largest programmes for social rent compared to all homes completed. The 272 social rented homes represented almost 30% of the total number of homes completed during the last year, underlining our commitment to providing new social rented homes for people across the region.
LiveWest, which owns more than 39,000 homes across the region, also delivered 258 shared ownership homes, 250 for affordable rent and 20 for rent to buy as well as 111 for outright sale.
Russell Baldwinson, our Executive Director of Development, said: “These figures clearly show our development programme is very much focused on the delivery of affordable homes.
“Given our scale, we have a clear role to play in the delivery of new affordable housing across the South West.
“We are an ambitious organisation and to be recognised as one of the biggest builders of social housing in the country very much supports this ambition.
“We are very much focused on the delivery of new affordable housing for rent so to achieve top 10 status for social rent is fantastic given the level of demand for affordable housing in the South West, where house prices in relation to incomes is one of the great disparities nationally.”
The survey revealed that the 50 largest housing associations across the United Kingdom completed just over 40,000 homes, which is a 16% increase on the previous year and an investment of £7.4bn.
The figures represent a boost for the social housing sector considering the challenges of building homes in the last year; including rising costs, supply chain difficulties, labour shortages and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Russell Baldwinson added: “We recognise that the current external economic environment is impacting the affordability of housing across the South West; we have experienced a sustained period of high house price inflation, house prices are now at record levels meaning that more families require access to good quality affordable housing.
“The greatest need in the South West is for low cost rented housing which underpins our commitment to increase the supply of new housing with a focus on delivering new affordable homes for rent.
“We have ambitious plans to significantly increase our delivery over the coming years, ensuring we play a key role in helping address the shortage of affordable homes in the South West.”