The National Housing Trust initiative (NHT) is an additional tool to help make more new affordable homes available for below intermediate rent in areas where there is not enough affordable housing to meet current demand. In these times of budget reductions across the UK it provides an innovative way to maximise the number of new affordable homes available for rent through kickstarting construction on housing sites across the country.
The Scottish Government and Scottish Futures Trust (SFT) are currently working with a number of Councils and developers to deliver Phase 1 of the NHT initiative. This phase is delivering hundreds of new affordable homes for rent across the country and supporting hundreds of jobs in the construction industry and wider economy.
Building on the success of phase 1, and in response to the significant demand from the public and private sectors to expand NHT further, a second phase of procurement of the existing model with Councils and developers has been launched across 15 Council areas. Developers are therefore now invited to submit Pre Qualification Questionnaires to participate in this second wave of procurement and further details are included in the procurement notice.
For more information on these phases, see How does the NHT work? Additional information is also available on the SFT website.
As a further part of our work to expand NHT we put out a summer discussion paper to get feedback on the variant models which we had co-developed with a number of interested RSLs. The responses we received demonstrate appetite and capacity for this kind of approach amongst both RSLs and Councils and we are in discussions with a number of respondents about how we can best support development of credible proposals. We will provide an update on this work later in early 2012.