£2.8m funding for new affordable homes in Peterborough and Whittlesey approved

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority has approved a further £3.56 million in grants to deliver 81 affordable homes across the county.

The authority’s housing committee approved five schemes on Monday by majority.

This included a £430,000 grant for Keepmoat Homes to enable delivery of 10 shared ownership homes at the former John Mansfield School in Dogsthorpe. The homes will then transfer to Heylo Housing. Planning permission for the development was granted in November 2017 and construction started in February 2018.

A £1 million grant was also approved for Keepmoat Homes to deliver 23 shared ownership homes on the 457 home site at Roman Fields in Paston. The grant is to enable 23 properties built for the open market sale to be sold through shared ownership. Keepmoat will market the homes under the Heylo Home Reach Shared Ownership scheme. The development was granted planning permission in August 2017 and construction started in September that year.

A grant of £1.38 million was also approved to deliver 32 affordable homes in four different sites - Whittlesey Green in Whittlesey, Sandpit Road in Thorney, Harriers Rest in Wittering and Cromwell Fields in Bury, Huntingdonshire - where Heylo will work with housebuilder Larkfleet Homes.

And the housing committee approved a £477,000 grant for Heylo to enable delivery of 10 shared ownership homes in St Thomas Park, Ramsey. The properties will be built by Linden Homes, which already has planning permission on the site.

The combined authority has been given £170 million from the Government to deliver 2,500 affordable homes across the county, which includes homes for rent or sale at a lower value than is available on the market.

Labour Cambridge city councillor Mike Sargeant raised concerns over whether the affordable housing scheme is actually encouraging the building of additional affordable housing, pointing to developments receiving grants that are already close to their expected completion dates.

The committee approved a £270,000 grant for ReSI Housing to enable delivery of six shared ownership homes at Brampton Park in Brampton.

The units are part of a new 118 home development, of which 39 were already going to be shared ownership. The initial planning consent was approved in 2016 and construction is due for completion this month.

Cllr Sargeant said based on the expected completion next month he feared “we are not approving a scheme that is speculative in any way. I am concerned that we are just taking over houses that cannot be sold on the open market at the moment”.

He said he was concerned “that we just become a way of helping developers – when they can’t sell houses – rather than what I thought was our brief, which is the development of new affordable homes”.

The combined authority’s housing programme manager, Azma Ahmad-Pearce, responded saying: “I haven’t noted anyone as saying they are off-loading it for that matter because they can’t get rid of market units at this moment in time. All these were already in the pipeline – we were aware of them.”

Ms Ahmad-Pearce said all the schemes create “additionality,” meaning they are providing more affordable homes.

Cllr Ryan Fuller said in Huntingdonshire they were seeing this “more and more” and said “it is not at all being driven by the difficulty of selling these properties on the open market. We are actually seeing this is being driven by the housing associations themselves who are looking to pick up extra shared ownership units”.

He said he had “no qualms with this whatsoever” and said “it is additionality. It’s six extra units. We are looking to get people into home ownership through the shared route.”

Ben Hatton, Local Democracy Reporting Service