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Welsh government confirms £1bn social housing spend over next three years
The Welsh government has confirmed that it will spend more than £1bn on building new social housing over the next three years.
In its full Budget published today, the Welsh government confirmed 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.
The spending was first announced in the draft Budget in December, but has now been confirmed after consultation.
In addition to the Social Housing Grant, the Budget also confirmed £580m for the decarbonisation of social housing in Wales up to 2024-25.
A total of £72m in general capital will also be used to help accelerate the scale and pace of the decarbonisation of Welsh homes. Of this, £35m will be used to test the use of new funding models.
The government also revealed yesterday that £8m is being allocated over the next three years to the Welsh government’s Land for Housing scheme, which helps housing associations buy land. This was on top of the £35m initially announced in the draft Budget.
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.
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Stuart Ropke, chief executive of Community Housing Cymru, said: “The final Welsh budget is right to focus on further addressing the cost of living crisis and climate change. We also warmly welcome the extra funding for the Land for Housing scheme, in addition to the already record breaking investment in social housing.
“This sends a strong and clear message of commitment from the Welsh government, to support the sector in building safe, warm and affordable homes across the country over this Senedd period. It is the vote of confidence we were seeking.”
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.
Nearly 250 people have expressed interest in the scheme so far.
The Welsh government also announced in December that it was going to launch another scheme, which will see it buy some of the flats that are embroiled in the cladding crisis from leaseholders.
Today’s full 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.
The full Budget included an additional £10m to Tai Ffres, a partnership between the Welsh government, Llamau and United Welsh.
The funding will support an alternative housing pathway for young people aged 16 to 25 who do not meet the threshold for homelessness services, or where the traditional route of supported accommodation services would not be suitable for them.
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