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Council to approve £2.5bn plan to build 10,000 affordable homes
City of Edinburgh Council is set to spend £2.5bn over the next 10 years building 10,000 affordable homes and improving existing stock.
In a new 10-year strategy for its Housing Revenue Account (HRA), the council has set out plans to spend almost £2bn on new council homes, including the delivery of around 5,000 homes for social rent.
The delivery of 5,000 social rent homes would mark a 25% increase in the council’s existing stock, which currently totals just under 20,000 homes.
The council also plans to develop homes for Edinburgh Living, a limited liability partnership established by the local authority in 2018, which owns and manages homes for mid-market and market rent.
It is anticipated that the council will develop over 400 homes for Edinburgh Living over the next two years.
Edinburgh Council currently has a commitment to build 20,000 affordable new homes in the 10 years up to 2027.
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The new HRA business plan, considered earlier this week by the council’s housing, homelessness and fair work committee, assumes that council housebuilding will continue beyond the 10-year commitment, with roughly 2,000 additional homes being delivered by 2030. The plans are expected to be formally approved when the council passes its budget next month.
Kate Campbell, housing, homelessness and fair work convener at Edinburgh Council, said the investment signalled “one of the most ambitious plans for council housing of any local authority in the UK”.
The business plan also factors in the cost of delivering the council’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions to net zero by 2030, alongside the Scottish government’s target that all council homes meet its Energy Efficiency Standards for Social Housing by December 2020.
This includes the establishment of a carbon innovation fund by 2021 to trial innovative technologies, retrofit approaches and explore carbon offsetting to ensure council homes are carbon neutral by 2030.
Ms Campbell said: “We need to address the huge housing pressures facing our city and we’re doing this with one of the biggest new build programmes in Scotland.
“The substantial investment we’re proposing will create more homes, better homes and better services while helping the city to achieve our 2030 carbon target.
“This is about future-proofing homes and improving lives and it is very much in line with what tenants have told us they want to see being prioritised.”
