£28m added to brownfield regeneration pot
£28m has been secured by the West Midlands Combined Authority’s (WMCA) brownfield regeneration programme from the forthcoming Levelling Up White Paper.
The government is allocating £120m to the country’s seven Mayoral Combined Authorities to deliver 7,800 homes on disused brownfield land in the Midlands and the North.
The £28m will be added to the WMCA’s £500m funding pot which will deliver thousands of new homes on former industrial land and restore and convert heritage buildings into new homes, all to relieve pressure on the green belt.
Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands and chair of the WMCA, said: “Yet again the government has recognised our success in transforming former industrial sites by allocating us a lion’s share of this new money.
“We will waste no time in putting it to good use, accelerating our trailblazing brownfield regeneration programme to provide local people with affordable homes and job opportunities.
“This new money will help us fund those projects that support our local levelling up ambitions in communities right across the region.”
Cllr Mike Bird, the WMCA portfolio holder for housing and land and leader of Walsall Council, added: “This fresh injection of money is another huge vote of confidence in the capability, ambitions and strength of the WMCA’s brownfield regeneration programme.
“By using government cash to clean-up derelict industrial land we’ve helped create thousands of new homes and jobs while at the same time establishing ourselves as a trusted partner for investors and nationally leading developers looking to come on board and deliver high-quality housing.”
Also announced in the Levelling Up White PAper is a £350m housing deal for the West Midlands for WMCA’s housing delivery programme and Wolverhampton has been named as one of the first of 20 places nationwide that will be supported with a £1.5bn brownfield fund to create new urban areas.
WMCA has a target of building 215,000 homes by 2031 and at least 20% of those must be classed as affordable housing under the authority’s definition of affordability which is linked to real-world local wages.
