£3bn Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme Announced by the Government

Posted by Ideal Modular Homes on 29th October 2020 -

Last week, Housing Minister RT Hon Christopher Pincher MP announced that ARA Venn will be managing and delivering the government’s new £3 billion Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme.  This will provide cost-effective long-term loans to registered providers of affordable housing.

The new scheme will help finance affordable housing across England, including social housing, affordable rent and shared ownership. This follows last month’s launch of the new £11.5 billion Affordable Homes Programme, which will be delivered over the next five years until 2026, providing around 180,000 new homes across the country. 

These are welcome announcements as one of the challenges housing providers need to overcome when it comes to meeting housing demand is cost. We’ve sat on numerous virtual sessions, discussions and webinars during the pandemic, and cost is the main barrier when it comes to building more homes. Both the scheme and the programme will provide housing providers with the opportunity to invest in new ways of building too. 

More councils, local authorities and housing associations want to invest in things like modern methods of construction and offsite construction to help meet the shortfall from the pandemic and help meet the rising housing demand, but they tend to struggle for funding to provide the upfront costs. Over a modular home’s lifetime, they are more cost effective but they need to be purchased upfront, they are designed with the future in mind so don’t need rework later on and are more sustainable. 

Schemes such as this will allow more flexibility for housing providers to look at new ways of building and be more innovative when it comes to housebuilding. The Government wants to build 75,000 modular homes per year by 2030 and with the Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme and Affordable Homes Programme, I’m sure this target can be reached. 

Everyone has the right to a secure, affordable, good quality home, and that is central to the Government’s mission with both this scheme and programme. We also have a similar mission, we want to deliver sustainable, high-quality, beautiful homes in a cost-efficient way and believe that, with enough Government backing and funding, housing providers will be able to move to modular and deliver the much-needed new affordable homes to families across the country.