Manchester council has launched its own building company - called This City - to construct affordable and market homes to rent.
The council says schemes developed through This City will focus on high quality, low-carbon homes and deliver a mix of affordable rent and market properties – with the latter helping to subsidise the development of homes priced at or below the Local Housing Allowance rate. This means they will be accessible to people in receipt of housing benefit.
A site in the Ancoats suburb has been unveiled as the first project by the new company, with Wates Construction appointed as the lead contractor responsible for delivering the 128 apartments and townhouses – 30 per cent of which will be for accessible rent.
All future This City developments will include a minimum of 20 per cent accessible rented homes on completion, which will be available at or below the Local Housing Allowance level.
This City eventually wants to deliver up to 500 new homes each year – thereby increasing the number of accessible rent homes available to Manchester people.
This phase builds on recent regeneration successes to further the evolution of Ancoats into a sustainable neighbourhood that is even more attractive to people and families keen to settle and stay in the area.
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Good grief , can only imagine the incompetence that will ensue
Upside down houses , doors leading to a brick wall etc
Nothing new about this from what I remember Mr John Prescott had a Contractor doing this years ago. Then the Contractor go smart and realised what he was loosing by not doing it on open market and that was end of that. This time might be different my friend was a foreman with them 50 years ago with all their own direct labour, now I understand different kettle of fish with everything sublet out more Contract management dare I say.
Norwich City Council tried the developer game and lost £6m of council tax payers money, these people haven't got a clue in the real world that's why they are in the public sector and accountable to no one
As soon as the builders realise what they can get away with they will run rings round the Council. A lot of these Council staff will have no experience in this arena and will be manipulated and exploited. Lambs to the slaughter comes to mind!
Croydon spent £67m on mismanagement straddling tax payers with this massive Bill, a Company supposed to be owned by Council called Brick by Brick and money down the
drain, a few heads rolled and Government bail out of £120m, that’s alright then.
Joe Speye has published some interesting facts on this. Bearing in mind Mr Speye is a supported housing consultant and having read is past blogs I suspect he is probably not a natural Conservative it is interesting to see his position on this and S21 etc
See
Sham ‘council housing’ of Manchester City Council exposed
This site will not let me publish links but see speyejoe2 wordpress com
I've always enjoyed reading Joe Speye. His blog on Gove's Leveling Up nonsense provides an argument against the S21 ban that all politicians and policy makers should read.
Speaking as a builder myself, every building company knows if you get a council contract it's a licence to print money. No accountability.
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