But budget falls short of the £580m to £740m that Audit Wales identified as necessary to meet 20,000-home housebuilding target
The Welsh government has allocated an extra £81m of capital funding for social housing development in its 2025-26 draft budget.
The additional monies take the total social housing grant to just over £437m from £370m the previous year, while an extra £13.75m investment will support the transitional accommodation capital programme (TACP) which provides funds for social landlords to bring forward longer term homes.
An additional £26.25m of financial transactions (FT) capital has also been made available to support loans to registered social landlords (RSL), while a further £5.5m will be ringfenced for the independent living programme which supports housing adaptations.
While housing and local government investment will focus on achieving the Senedd’s target of building 20,000 low-carbon social homes for rent by March 2026, an additional £57m of capital cash will be provided for the help to buy scheme.
However, despite increased investment, the current budget still falls short of the £580m to £740m that Audit Wales identified as necessary to meet housebuilding targets.
As well as the funding deficit, Matt Dicks, national director of CIH Cymru pointed out there “there is no significant increase in the amount allocated to improving and decarbonising our existing social homes.”
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The Welsh government increased funding for decarbonising existing homes by 3% year-on-year from £92m to £95m.
Dicks said: “Social landlords in Wales share the ambitions of Welsh Government around building new affordable homes and making existing ones more sustainable, but those twin ambitions have already placed great pressure on existing business models of housing organisations, and while there is a significant increase in capital investment in this draft budget, it is unlikely to shift the dial enough to deliver on those ambitions at the pace and scale needed to end our housing emergency.
“Our own research has shown that providing everyone in Wales with a safe, sustainable and affordable place to call home will save the public purse £11.5 billion with an upfront investment of £5 billion. The starting point of that journey is the full incorporation of the Right to Adequate Housing into Welsh law, to ensure that future budgets reflect the scale of the housing emergency we face.”
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