Bath-based housing association Curo is to help speed up the delivery of vital new homes across the South of England through a new partnership funded by the government’s housing agency Homes England.
Curo, which manages more than 13,000 homes across the region and builds hundreds of new ones a year, has received £51.1m to build a further 1,067 new affordable homes across the South West and South East by March 2024 with Essex-based Swan Housing Association.
The schemes will include a mix of homes available for social rent, affordable rent and shared ownership.
Cure is working with Alliance Homes, based in Portishead, near Bristol, and Dorchester-based Magna Housing as delivery partners to ensure the much-needed affordable homes are made available as quickly as possible for people across the South West.
Curo is already working on three affordable housing developments part-funded by money from the partnership.
In Bristol, it is delivering 14 homes on a disused garage site in Redfield, while work on a further 32 affordable homes has just started in the city’s Old Market district, as reported by Bath Business News last week.
In Weston-super-Mare, 17 homes will be delivered by November next year and Curo will also start construction work on another 57-home affordable housing scheme in January in the Lawrence Weston area of Bristol.
Curo chief executive Victor da Cunha said: “This is great news for people across our region who have been priced out of the housing market and who will benefit from the delivery of more new affordable homes, more quickly.
“We’re committed to working in partnership with the government’s housing agency, local authorities and our peers to build the homes our region needs.
“Alongside homes funded through the joint Curo/Swan Strategic Partnership with Homes England, Curo’s delivery pipeline will see the addition of almost 1,700 new homes in our region over the next five years.”
Alliance Homes and Curo operate across the same areas in the West of England, including Bath & North East Somerset, North Somerset, Bristol and South Gloucestershire.
Alliance Homes chief executive Louise Swain added: “This delivery partnership with Curo ensures we can continue to create more high-quality affordable homes for people who need them. This pipeline of grant funding will support our strategy of delivering 2,000 new homes over the next 10 years.”
Magna Housing owns and manages homes across Somerset and Dorset. Chief executive Selina White said: “We’re excited to join this delivery partnership and help accelerate our affordable house-building programme. We’re looking at innovative solutions to help us build more and we’ve already ordered 45 high-quality modular homes and more will be delivered through this strategic partnership with Homes England.”
In Bath, Curo is developing the city’s 700-home Mulberry Park development on the former Foxhill MoD site.
Swan Housing operates in East London and Essex and manages more than 11,000 homes, with a secured development pipeline of 6,500 more to be delivered using both traditional and offsite construction by Swan’s in-house developer NU living. It has its own offsite modular housing factory which it is using to build high-quality homes including fully customisable ones.
Pictured, from left: Alliance Homes chief executive Louise Swain, Magna Housing chief executive Selina White and Curo chief executive Victor da Cunha at Mulberry Park
