New affordable homes drive

FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon visited tenants of Glasgow’s latest affordable homes development this week as Scotland’s largest housing, care and property-management group announced yesterday it had secured a further £65 million of private investment.

The new funding is a fiveyear revolving credit facility with two banks, and takes the amount raised by the company in the past three years to fund the country’s largest building programme of affordable homes to more than £500m. The 105 flats and terraced houses visited by the First Minister are being developed by Wheatley’s largest partner organisation, GHA, and its commercial subsidiary, Lowther Homes, on the site of the former Govan Tram Depot in the First Minister’s Glasgow Southside constituency.

The development is part of Wheatley’s rolling programme of 3,500 new affordable homes, and the latest funding is from Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland.

Wheatley also got £100m of private finance from Blackrock, the world’s biggest fund manager, last May; £50m in 2015 to develop Lowther Homes’ portfolio, also from RBS and Bank of Scotland; and £300m of bond finance from the London capital markets in 2014. Wheatley chairman Alastair Macnish said: “The Glasgow development visited by the First Minister represents another notable milestone in Scotland’s largest affordable homes building programme.

“It is our intention to return to the capital markets in the next couple of years and to develop other means of securing private finance to continue funding our house-building programme across Scotland.”