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City council allocates £3m to deliver 210 homes on ‘challenging’ brownfield site
Manchester City Council will receive over £3m to support housing developments across the city that will bring long-term brownfield land back into use.
The funding will help build 210 homes in total – 119 of which will be affordable housing – at sites across north and east Manchester and one site in the city centre.
A total 81 of the affordable homes are part of the council’s Project 500 initiative, which works in partnership with the city’s housing associations to make available smaller, harder to develop pockets of land to increase the number of affordable homes available in the city.
Initially Project 500 looks to build 500 affordable homes in partnership with housing providers in the city, with a wider ambition to exceed that number in the coming years.
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All of the homes under this scheme will be capped at the Manchester Living Rent. This is a level of rent capped at the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rate and ensures that these homes will be affordable to as many people as possible, including those in receipt of housing benefit.
These new homes are part of what the council described as an ambitious target to deliver 36,000 new homes across the city by 2032. Of which, 10,000 of these new homes will be affordable.
Gavin White, executive member for housing and development at Manchester Council, said: “Post-industrial Manchester left a lot of unused, brownfield land across the city – with the largest swathes across north and east Manchester.
“Developing this land and bringing it back into use is an important part of our plans to deliver 36,000 new homes in the next 10 years, and we have an ambitious target to make sure 10,000 of these are genuinely affordable to Manchester people.
“However, brownfield land is often more challenging to develop, and we also have lots of smaller plots that are financially difficult to build on. This funding will support our partnership with the city’s registered providers to build on these smaller plots of land as part of our Project 500 initiative – delivering the affordable homes our residents need.”
Nationally, £180m has been made available to councils up to 2025 to develop under-used council-owned land for housing and part of round two of the Brownfield Land Release Fund, which is administered by the government’s One Public Estate programme.
In January, the government released a further £60 from this fund. As with previous rounds, the funding will go towards regeneration schemes that bring derelict urban sites back into use.
This portion is targeting the delivery of 5,800 new homes by 2027. It follows the allocation of a previous £35m share that was distributed to 41 councils from Exeter to Sunderland at the end of last year.
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