New affordable homes completed in Richmond to help meet housing needs

Nine new homes have been constructed at Edgar Road on the Hounslow Heath Estate by Richmond Housing Partnership (RHP) to help Richmond upon Thames achieve its goal of ensuring the delivery of great quality, genuinely affordable homes.

Yesterday, Councillor Jim Millard, Deputy Leader of the Council and Spokesperson for Housing, and Heathfield Ward Councillor Michael Wilson visited the Edgar Road site to tour its nine new properties. Edgar Road is the first RHP scheme that partly uses modular homes which have been manufactured in a factory off-site and then delivered to site. This process speeds up build times, reduces CO2 emissions and material waste during the construction process and provides higher quality homes as the building materials are protected from moisture and weather during the construction process.

Councillor Millard said: “The completion of nine new family homes for genuinely affordable rent is a hugely welcome and much-needed addition to the housing in the borough. We are committed to ensuring the building of homes that support residents at different stages of their lives and are tailored to residents’ needs, to ensure we have a thriving and diverse community. Providing genuinely affordable homes that consider accessibility and allow families to grow helps us to deliver on this commitment.”

The nine homes at Edgar Road will provide local people with good quality accommodation set at London Affordable Rent, which is a genuinely affordable rent set at significantly below the market rate, ensuring that residents on lower incomes are able to manage the monthly costs. These homes will form part of the portfolio of around 7,000 affordable rent and leasehold properties that RHP currently own and manage in Richmond.

Rob Cummins, RHP’s Head of New Business and Regeneration, said: “We were thrilled to welcome Councillor Millard and Councillor Wilson to Edgar Road and to show them around these much-needed new family homes. It was a celebration of our partnership working with Richmond Council and the ingenuity of building on sites like this one. We’re especially excited that this site marks our first modular build. There are many advantages to modular development techniques compared with traditional ones, most notably there’s far less disruption for the surrounding community and we look forward to many more modular builds to come in RHP’s future.”

Over the past few years, the Council, by releasing its own land for development and working with developers and housing associations on private sites, has established a development pipeline of affordable homes that is forecast to see the completion of over 500 affordable homes in the next five years, with Edgar Road being some of the first affordable homes to be completed under this programme. In the scheme, RHP and the Council have ensured a number of properties have been specifically delivered to be fully wheelchair-accessible residences to ensure that the homes meet the needs and are liveable for all residents.

The completion of these homes is part of the Council’s Housing Strategy to address housing market pressures and deliver affordable homes that meet the diverse needs of the borough’s residents. This is to ensure the Council can offer good quality homes that provide choice and quality for renters. It also aligns with the Council’s approach to partnership working that puts the focus on creating sustainable new homes that meet current and future local housing needs.