A new report by Inside Housing has named Bromford as the eighth biggest builder of social rent homes in the UK over the past decade.

The report was published in the 40th anniversary special of the leading housing industry magazine and revealed we had completed 2,620 social rent homes over since 2014. The table was topped by Scottish housing association Wheatley Group, with L&Q, Peabody and Sanctuary, who  all own more than double the number of homes we do, following in the table.

Development director Amanda Swann spoke to Inside Housing as part of their report and explained there has been a real commitment to building more social rent homes over the past six years since the mergers with Merlin and Severn Vale.

“As a result of the organisations coming together, and the strategies that have come off the back of that, we've more than doubled the output of social rent homes we’re building,” she said. “If you look at the of direction of travel, when the organisations came together in 2018, we delivered something like 19% of our programme as social rent. Last year, they were 44% of all the homes we built.

“Building social rent homes was always something we were doing and something that we want to do for so many reasons, for example we see it as being key to helping tackle homelessness. We work with lots of local authority partners who also prioritise social rent so we are committed to supporting this through our own development as well as S106 and partner delivered schemes.

“Providing homes for social rent is so important because it gives customers the opportunity to live in a safe, secure home that is truly affordable and ultimately what we're here for and is our core purpose.”

Over the past three years we have noticeably increased the number of social rent homes we have built, with the 1,375 homes built during this period accounting for 51% of our ten-year total. It means we’ve been the biggest builder of social rent homes in England over this period. And social rent properties will continue to form a significant part of the homes we build in the years ahead.

“Social rent homes will absolutely continue to be front and centre in our development programme,” Amanda continued. “Although there will be challenges in the years ahead we are really committed to our development programme and have aspirations to deliver more than 12,000 homes by 2031. And we’re looking to build more ourselves as it will mean we’re more in control of our own destiny and are better able to control the cost, quality and time it takes to complete a development.

“We know we are facing into a General Election this year and the uncertainty this can bring, we would urge all parties to retain their commitment to affordable housing and in particular social rent.

“We can be rightfully proud of the homes and developments we’ve completed over the past decade but there’s even more to come as we move to investing in scale to create places where our customers and the wider community are thriving.”