Salford City Council’s own housing company, Dérive Group Limited, has had its Registered Provider (RP) subsidiary approved by the regulator.
The regulator announced the news as Dérive collected the keys to its 100th affordable home.
Dérive RP is wholly owned by Dérive Group Limited. The company was set up in 2017 to increase the supply of well-designed, truly affordable homes to meet local housing need.
Salford City Mayor Paul Dennett said: “This is a significant moment in the further development of Dérive and helps pave the way for the further delivery of the city council's truly affordable housing ambitions.
“The market is not adequately tackling the housing and homelessness crisis by providing affordable homes. Many residents are pushed into the private rented sector – and increasingly trapped there - as they have no alternative option. So we started Dérive to combat the problem, which is a national problem.
“By achieving RP status it allows us to access to the government’s / Homes England's Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) so we can build more zero carbon homes available for social rent.”
Councillor Tracy Kelly, a director at Dérive and Statutory Deputy City Mayor and Lead Member for Housing, Property and Regeneration, continued: “In Salford we have 4,000 households on our housing waiting lists and people are desperate for affordable homes to live in.
“We started our own company from scratch to provide larger numbers of homes to try and meet this demand. In just five years we now have 105 affordable homes and we are now working extremely hard to get hundreds more built to increase the supply.”
Works are nearly complete to provide a further 131 affordable homes at Clifton Green in Pendlebury, Kara Street in Langworthy and Ryall Avenue in Ordsall.
And construction of 275 homes in Weaste, Charlestown and Little Hulton is also underway.
Councillor John Merry, a director at Dérive and Deputy City Mayor said: “One of the important parts of our model is that we provide a good mix of housing to meet local need. Work is taking place on a range of properties from one and two bedroomed apartments, to two to five bedroomed houses. They also include wheelchair accessible homes.”
Robin Lawler, Independent Chair of Dérive RP, added: “We also have a development pipeline of 589 affordable homes. It is very exciting that our initial plans are now coming to life as we create high quality affordable homes in Salford and support new communities.”
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- Date published
- Wednesday 15 March 2023