You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Wheatley to invest £1.2bn in new and existing homes
Scotland’s largest housing association, Wheatley Group, is set to spend £1.2bn on new and existing homes over the next five years, it has said.
In an interview with Inside Housing, Martin Armstrong, chief executive of Wheatley Group, revealed that the figure would be included in the group’s new strategy, which it plans to launch early next year.
In 2014 the 80,000-home social landlord completed a stock modernisation programme, spending £1.2bn on bringing its homes up to the appropriate standards.
It will spend the same amount in the five years from 2020 to carry out more improvements to existing homes and also building new ones, Mr Armstrong said.
READ MORE
He told Inside Housing: “It’s always been important for us to get the balance right. New build is extremely important but existing tenants and priorities are also extremely important.”
Wheatley Group is already the UK’s biggest builder of social rented housing, completing 554 homes of that tenure in 2017/18, according to Inside Housing’s Biggest Builders survey.
This figure was significantly higher than UK organisations of a similar size, thanks to the Scottish government’s greater level of support for social rented housing, compared with the UK government.
In the interview, Mr Armstrong also attacked the UK government over Universal Credit, calling it “the most odious piece of public policy ever invented by a government”.
He added: “It will strike at the heart of our communities. We’re seeing it now being rolled out across all our [subsidiaries] and it’s even worse than we anticipated.”
In particular, Mr Armstrong criticised the fact that Universal Credit claimants have to wait at least five weeks before receiving their first payments.
He told Inside Housing: “It’s built on some fundamental flaws. It’s built on the principle of work. It’s to get people used to the principle of work, which I understand. I get that. But when you work a month, you get paid from the day you start. When you apply for Universal Credit, you only get it from the date the process is complete.
“So it’s almost like expecting people who work to work for free for a month and feed themselves, and then only start getting paid on the second month.”
