Victoria Du Croz writes for Property Week on making affordable housing viable

In the current push by Labour to build more new homes, developers and registered providers (RPs) alike are struggling to deliver targets.
Writing for Property Week, Victoria Du Croz (Partner and Head of Planning) discusses the challenges faced in making affordable housing viable, and how funding is the key to unlocking this.
The key takeaways are:
There is a substantial need for flexible grant funding for RPs. With budgets already constrained by ageing stock and remediation challenges, having flexible grant funding to contribute towards bringing these up to standard alongside acquiring new homes would be beneficial.
On a related note, another significant issue is the increasing number of residential developments that have stalled, primarily due to RPs not taking s106 affordable housing units required as part of these schemes. These bottlenecks are causing delays and financial strain on developers, with a report finding almost 17,500 of these unsold units across 31 developments.
Whilst there have been some governmental efforts to aid this, such as developing a database of these unsold homes to find RPs, these do not address the underlying funding issues. Action is needed if the government wants to achieve their targeted 1.5 million new homes by 2029.
Read the full article in Property Week here.
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