Due to the global financial pressures, the Government has said there is now only a small amount of money available to put towards building new homes and they can only provide very little, or no, grant funding.

At the same time, they are appealing for our help in building some of the 150,000 new affordable homes that are needed between now and April 2015 to help meet the increasing demand for housing.

To help us build new homes without the need for much, if any, grant funding, the Government has introduced the ‘Affordable Rent’ tenancy.

This new tenancy asks housing associations to charge up to 80% of the local market rent for most new homes, and on a number of our existing homes when they come up re-let – in some areas this is substantially more than the social rents we currently charge. The extra income generated by charging these higher rents can then be combined with the money we borrow from the banks to build more homes.

Affordable Rent tenancies can also be fixed term, for as little as two years, instead of our existing lifetime tenancies. By offering homes on fixed term tenancies, we can ensure that households who no longer need low-cost housing are replaced by those who need them most.

We have no plans to change any of our existing tenancies so our current tenants who are not looking to move will not be affected by these changes. Home owners are also unaffected by these changes.

This is a new way of working and the Government is still ironing out some of the finer details but it will allow us to continue building new homes to help meet the increasing
demand for affordable