Homes England has just released a summary of the government’s Affordable Homes Programme 2016-21, which records the numbers of homes supported up to September 2019. Of 57,543 homes funded by grant from Homes England only 1.5%, that is 913 were ‘social rent’. Of more than £2 billion grant handed out a puny £54 million was devoted to ‘social rent’.

£971 million grant went to “affordable home ownership” for 29,604 homes. Just over £1 billion was funding for 27,026 ‘affordable rent’ homes. The average rent in these was 76% of market rent.

22,691 “affordable rent” homes were built with nil grant. Usually these will be part funded by Right to Buy receipts and/or Section 106 monies. These are the ones which would be affected by the government policy for First Homes which would use Section 106 monies for them rather than for social housing.

To see the tables for these statistics download a PDF here he funding

Notes
If the average grant per social rent property is £59,394 the 913 homes would add up to £54,226,722. So only 2.6% of funding has supported ‘social rent’ homes.

£1,048,797,982 has funded 27,026 ‘affordable rent’ homes, comprising 50.5% of funding.

£971,248,032‬ has funded “affordable ownership” comprising 46.8% of funding.