​Yorkshire Housing’s development falls as it looks to ‘scale back’ new build

Yorkshire Housing’s annual build rate has fallen as it looks to scale back development over the next few years due to “economic pressures.”

The 18,000-home housing association completed 502 homes in 2022/23, according to its annual financial statement. This is down on the 700 completions recorded for the previous year. The association said it was slightly behind its development targets due to “slippage in the development programme, particularly where labour shortages have delayed completions”.

Yorkshire Housing said: “The economic pressures being felt across the sector means that we will have to scale back our future development ambitions over the next few years to create the right balance in our plans between investment in existing homes and development of new ones”.

However, it said that it will still hit its target of building 8,000 homes between 2020 and 2030 as it has already completed more than half of these.

Yorkshire Housing increased its capital investment in existing homes from £7.5m to £15.9m in the year and said it is planning further increases in 2023/24.

The association posted a surplus of £11m in 2022/23, after recording a loss of £30.6m the previous year due largely to one-off financing costs totalling £35m. Excluding one-off items, the group’s pre-tax surplus increased from £5.3m to £12.4m.

The group’s turnover decreased slightly from £148m to £145m. Yorkshire Housing said this was due to several factors including a near-halving of homes sold in the year from 86 to 42, which was “well below” its initial plans. Its shared ownership sales remained flat at 233 units, compared to 235 last year.

It said: “This would have been higher had it not been for delays in the delivery of some of our developments. Sector and UK wide challenges for skilled labour, and wider economic challenges, meant our completions were below what we originally planned. “

Rental income grew year-on-year by £7.6m to £98.9m.

Nick Atkin, chief executive of Yorkshire Housing, said: ”We continue to make good progress towards achieving the target we set ourselves in 2019 of building 8,000 new homes, delivering over 500 new homes last year across a range of tenures and now more than halfway to reaching the target.”