Climate Change Minister Julie James has today (Friday, July 29) announced £65m to help people move on from temporary accommodation into a place they can call their home.
The money will be used to fund the Transitional Accommodation Capital Programme (TACP) which supports a wide range of projects by local authorities and registered social landlords to create much-needed extra housing capacity across Wales.
The programme will bring more than 1,000 additional homes into use over the next 18 months. Almost half will be long-term or permanent homes with the others offering good-quality homes suitable for use by individuals and families for a number of years.
The projects include use of high-quality Modern Methods of Construction homes, refurbishments and reconfiguring of existing buildings.
Local authorities and registered social landlords will use the funding in a number of ways, including:
- Bringing unused and mothballed properties that would otherwise not be re-let back into use as homes for individuals and families
- Remodelling existing accommodation
- Converting buildings into good-quality accommodation
- Using modern methods of construction as a medium-term form of housing on some sites as they are developed for permanent housing.
Climate Change Minister Julie James said: “Throughout the pandemic we worked hard to provide accommodation for everyone who needed it.
“We made sure that no one was sleeping rough or facing homeless during a public health emergency.
“We now need to build on this and continue work to tackle and prevent homelessness by ensuring that incidents are rare, brief and unrepeated.
“We have successfully helped thousands of people into temporary accommodation over the last two-and-a-half years but many more are still going to our local authorities for urgent help.
“Our ambition is for everyone to have a safe, suitable, permanent home but our housing system is under significant pressure, that’s why we are building more social homes.
“Where people are in hotel or B&B-based temporary accommodation, in particular, it can be difficult for them to move on with their lives. We need more high-quality interim accommodation options – places they can call their own – to allow people to get on with their lives, while we support them to find a permanent home.
“I am making up to £40m of capital funding available to support a range of initiatives by our local authorities and registered social landlords to help ensure even more people have a place to call home.
“These projects will provide much-needed, good-quality accommodation to help ease the pressure on housing services in the medium term.
“This work will complement what we are already doing to build 20,000 more low-carbon permanent social homes this Senedd term.”
