Over £50m funding boost set to deliver more than 3,000 new homes in Manchester

Major funding bids will help build 3,380 new homes in Manchester, including 1,761 ‘genuinely affordable’ homes, following successful submissions to GMCA’s Brownfield Housing Fund.

Manchester City Council has been awarded £51.6m that will allow the development of 31 long-term underused sites over the next two years, and 52 per cent of the homes built will be affordable to Manchester people.

The funding is part of the trailblazer agreement between the Government and Greater Manchester over three years to unlock brownfield land to be used to build new housing. The total fund allocated to the region amounts to £128m in this phase of bidding (£150m overall). Some of the housing developments that will receive funding include:

• Victoria North- Manchester City Council & FEC (£6.9m)
• Former Boddingtons Brewery- Latimer & Clarion (£3.1m)
• Jacksons Brickworks- Your Housing Group (£5.3m)
• One Cathedral Gardens- Property Alliance Group (£6.3m)
• 4x This City Sites (£10m)
• 5x Project 500 Phase 1 Sites (£1.8m)
• 6x Project 500 Phase 2 Sites (£1m).

Manchester City Council has previously successfully bid for £3m the national Brownfield Land Release Fund (administered by One Public Estate), which was used to kickstart development at the Council’s inaugural This City site in Ancoats and a range of Project 500 housing sites. Find out more.

These new homes are part of the ‘ambitious’ target set in Council’s Housing Strategy up to 2032, which includes the target to help build 36,000 new homes across the city. 10,000 of these new homes will be affordable and 3,000 of those will be located in the city centre.

Cllr Gavin White, Manchester City Council’s executive member for housing and development, commented: “We have been necessarily ambitious through our housing strategy, committing to helping to build 36,000 new homes up to 2032, of which at least 10,000 will be genuinely affordable to Manchester people.

“This is a challenge both in terms of available land and the funding necessary to build new housing at scale, but we are on course to meet these targets. However, we must be innovative and use the resources available to use.

“As a post-industrial city, we have lots of brownfield sites that are sometimes difficult to develop, but this land represents a massive opportunity to deliver the homes, particularly the affordable housing our residents need. This funding is hugely welcome and we will help bring these unused areas of Manchester back into use.”

By Matthew Neville – Senior Correspondent, Bdaily

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