Gloucestershire builder Stonewood Partnerships benefits from government's £300 million Housing Growth Partnership
Lloyds Banking Group and Homes England has announced a new £300 million commitment to SME and regional housebuilders in the UK through their Housing Growth Partnership.
The partnership aims to bridge the homebuilder funding gap, allowing housebuilders to build more homes across the UK and grow their businesses.
The first five regional partnerships are already in place across four different regions of the UK including with Gloucestershire based Stonewood Partnerships.
The new fund will support a wider range of housing tenures to meet the UK’s diverse and evolving housing needs. Building on the success of the first HGP fund announced in 2016, the new £300 million commitment will help Housing Growth Partnership achieve its target of supporting the development of 10,000 new homes by 2025.
The new fund will be broader in scope to enable investment into larger housebuilding projects with a development value of up to £75 million. It will offer support for the delivery of a wider range of housing projects including build to rent, regeneration and retirement living. The partnership will also look to prioritise projects with a greater sustainability focus, as well as those using modern methods of construction and other evolutionary construction methods.
Since its launch, the Housing Growth Partnership has invested alongside 46 housebuilders to support the delivery of more than 4,568 new homes, with nearly half now completed and sold to families across the UK.
Housing Minister RT Hon Christopher Pincher MP said: “A thriving SME sector is crucial to our house building targets and ambitions. This significant amount of funding will help smaller and regional housebuilders by providing them with the financial support necessary to deliver much needed new homes.”
Vic Hepburn, CEO of Housing Growth Partnership, said: “The introduction of the Regional Growth Initiative will also allow the Housing Growth Partnership to support the most ambitious housebuilders in a more substantial way with additional financial and strategic support.”
The HGP fund will also partner with the most ambitious SME housebuilders in the UK to support their growth and development through its new Regional Growth Initiative. This scheme will see HGP committing a higher level of dedicated equity support to these housebuilders over a defined period to allow them to invest in their businesses and target larger and more strategic sites.
The Regional Growth Initiative is being rolled out UK wide with the aim of trying to support the next generation of large regional housebuilders.
