North West landlord gets green light for £59m scheme in Cheshire

Eoin O’Donnell, partnerships director at Castle Green, said: “This will be another major step forward in our developing relationship with Torus, with whom this will now be our fourth project.

“We aim to deliver homes to Torus at a record pace to assist them in placing local families in well-designed, fuel-efficient homes as soon as possible.”

Torus is delivering the homes as part of the UK government’s Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) 2021-26.

Kate Collins, senior manager – provider management at Homes England, said the government was “committed to supporting ambitious house builders of all sizes to build those homes and communities”.

“Investment at Vikings Way, Congleton will transform the site and provide much-needed, good-quality, affordable new homes in Cheshire,” she added.

A consortium of social housing providers in the North West warned last week that the sector needed funding certainty over the AHP or housebuilding was at risk of slowing.

Without a government commitment to the next grant funding programme, JV North said that schemes of more than 50 homes or those that take longer than 12 months to complete “are now at risk”.

Government-funded housebuilding programmes usually overlap. The last two ran from 2018 to 2021 and 2021 to 2026, allowing housebuilding to carry on relatively seamlessly.

However, no announcement of the next AHP was made in last month’s Spring Budget.