We are delighted to announce that despite facing a challenging year we completed and handed over 836 new affordable homes during 2020. This equates to helping more than three families into a new affordable home every working day.
With our development programme focused on the delivery of new affordable homes for rent, we recognise we have a clear role to play in the delivery of new affordable housing across the South West.
The new homes were delivered at 75 sites in the region, providing 554 rented and 282 shared ownership homes. 196 were completed in Cornwall, 336 in Devon, 116 in Somerset and 189 in the West of England.
Russell Baldwinson, our Executive Director of Development, said: “It goes without saying that the reduced development activity in the south west of England has had an impact on the number of homes LiveWest developed this year.
"Considering this as a mere challenge and not a boundary, however, the organisation has made it clear that future months and years will involve a scaling-up of development activity to ensure that original targets are being met.
"This will effectively mean continued growth for LiveWest in the coming years as it rapidly builds up the development of new affordable housing.
“We have a huge supply chain and we invest heavily into delivering new homes across our geography. In 2019/20 we spent circa £167m on new homes and over a 10-year business plan cycle we’ll invest £2bn in our supply chain on delivering new homes, the majority of which will be affordable homes.
"One of the obvious impacts is this period of slowed activity which reduced the number of homes last year, but we’re mindful of that and we’ll be increasing the number of homes we develop in later years.
“We have been recognised as one of the top 10 housebuilders in the UK in 2020 and were ranked fifth by having one of the largest programmes of homes developed for affordable rent, 494 of the homes we built last year were of this tenure.
"We were also ranked seventh for the 289 homes we built for social rent, underlining our commitment to providing new rented affordable homes for people across the region.
“We are very much focused on the delivery of new affordable housing for rent so to achieve top 10 status for both affordable and social rent is fantastic given the level of demand for affordable housing in the South West where house prices in relation to incomes is one of the great disparities nationally.
“Like our peers in the sector, we face considerable challenges in the coming months and years and must continue to innovate, develop with new funding models and work with stakeholders to keep delivering affordable homes and investing in communities.”
In addition, we won two regional LABC awards in the category of 'Best Social or Affordable Development' for their development of homes in rural Goldsithney in Cornwall and homes in Pucklechurch, South Glos last year.