Welsh Budget: government to spend more than £1bn on new social homes over next three years
The Social Housing Grant will increase by 24% in Wales next year, as the government announced plans to spend more than £1bn on building new social homes over the next three years.
In its draft Budget published today, the Welsh government as said it will spend £310m in Social Housing Grant in 2022-23, up from £250m this year.
The Budget also confirmed plans to spend £330m on Social Housing Grant in 2023-24 and £325m in 2024-25.
A further £35m will be spent over the next three years on the Welsh government’s Land for Housing scheme, which helps housing associations buy land.
Together, this makes up a capital investment of more than £1bn over the next three years to support the government’s target of building 20,000 low-carbon social homes by the end of this parliament.
In addition to the Social Housing Grant, the Budget allocated £580m for the decarbonisation of social housing Wales up to 2024-25.
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Stuart Ropke, chief executive of Community Housing Cymru, called the Social Housing Grant funding “record breaking”.
“The longer-term certainty and substantial additional funding in today’s announcement will support housing associations in their work to build thousands of homes over this Senedd period,” he added.
Matt Dicks, national director at Chartered Institute of Housing Cymru, said the Budget “places us in no doubt over the priority this government gives to the support of high quality social and affordable housing”.
A total of £375m in capital and £6.5m in revenue has been allocated to building safety. This will pay for a second phase of the Welsh Building Safety Fund, alongside supporting delivery of the Building Safety Passport Scheme.
The latter is part of a Welsh government initiative to fund fire safety surveys on all buildings taller than 11 metres in order to produce ‘passports’ that will set out any remediation work required.
Last week, Welsh minister for climate change Julie James announced that the government plans to launch a scheme in the new year that will see it buy some flats that are caught up in the building safety scandal.
Today’s draft Budget also allocated £27.5m over the next three years on homelessness prevention and housing support.
Meanwhile, £1m has been allocated to help establish a national construction company that will support councils and social landlords to improve the supply of social and affordable housing.
The Welsh Labour-led government committed to setting up a construction company recently as part of a co-operation agreement it signed with Plaid Cymru.
Other spending commitments over the next three years include £60m on market housing, £8.5m on shared equity homeownership scheme Homebuy, and £3.5m for local authorities to lease properties from the private rented sector to discharge their homelessness duties.
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