Delivering affordable housing

The lack of affordable housing is a major national issue and a top priority for City Mayor Paul Dennett.

Salford City Council and partners are working hard to deliver more affordable homes for both renting and buying in the city.

Meeting the demand

In April 2021 around 5,158 households were on Salford City Council’s housing register, a list of people who have been assessed as having a housing need.

Salford City Council calculates that the city needs an extra 809 affordable homes every year just to meet current need. These could come from new build, bringing empty properties back into use or converting commercial premises into residential.

At present around 280 new affordable homes are provided in Salford each year. We are continuing to increase this supply through working with our partners. 

How is Salford providing affordable homes?

The council provides affordable homes in a number of ways:

Development

Around six per cent of affordable homes in Salford are provided through the planning system – the council requiring developers to provide affordable homes as part of the scheme. These homes are then owned and managed by housing associations (registered providers). This is comparable to or better than many other local authorities in the north west.

In future, we expect more affordable homes will be provided in this way.

Housing associations and partners

Affordable housing in Salford is also funded through government grants to housing associations (registered providers). The funding is administered through Homes England. This is the main way in which new, affordable housing is provided in Salford.

Salford City Council also works with a range of organisations and partnerships to deliver more affordable housing.

Together we:

  • identify suitable land, buildings and commercial space for housing provision
  • bring empty homes back into use
  • support bids to Homes England for funding
  • support schemes through planning permission to completion
  • build new affordable housing schemes; and
  • On completion, let the homes to new tenants

Below is a list of partners currently delivering affordable homes in Salford:

Delivering affordable housing directly

It is clear that by working with our partners to increase much needed affordable housing supply is not sufficient to deliver the step change required. To augment and complement this, following government policy changes Salford City Council is directly delivering affordable homes.

Dérive

One route is through Dérive (Salford) Ltd, a wholly owned city council company. 

Set up in 2017 Dérive started trading as a wholly owned council company in June 2018. Its aim is to deliver 'truly affordable homes'. It has costed and funded £15.8 million business plan to deliver 127 affordable homes by 2024. It completed its first units at Charlestown in 2019, and now has a portfolio of more than 50 homes currently being built. 

Council house building

In October 2019 the council also secured funding from government to directly deliver 129 council homes. This followed lobbying by City Mayor and other leaders to remove council restrictions and regulations that prevented them delivering much needed council homes.

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