Council to explore affordable housing options

Consultants working on behalf of Herefordshire Council are expected to explore the possibility of building 115 affordable homes on the Blackfriars Street side of Hereford FC’s stadium.

The local authority wants to deliver 1,000 new council houses over the next four years and 2,500 within the next decade.

To achieve this, they are expected to ask Engine Regeneration to investigate the feasibility of building affordable homes on council owned sites across the county.

The part of football ground next to Blackfriars Street is among the potential sites which are immediately available for development.

The site had been earmarked for a £14.375m refurbishment which focused on providing student and/or key worker accommodation, a community room and new stands.

But county council leaders have not made a decision on those plans which were expected to be approved last March.

Engie is also expected to explore the viability of building 2,610 homes on the Grafton Ashley Farm smallholdings estate, 259 houses at Hereford County Bus Station, 71 on Burghill Hospital farm small holding, 35 on The Pastures open space and 25 at the closed Holme Lacy primary school.

Housing, regulatory services, and community safety cabinet member Ange Tyler said: “The report coming forward to cabinet on Thursday evening looks at the pipeline of sites which are being brough forward for a feasibility study to see what the viability of the sites are for affordable homes building.

“These are council owned sites. And they’ve identified the potential delivery of 115 units on Blackfriars Street.

“These are the sites that Engie are going to look at and give us a feasibility study to see whether they are viable to bring forward as council owned sites for potential affordable homes.

“Engie will do their appraisal and bring a report back to us to see which sites we can bring forward quickly.

“They’ve done background information it’s just homing in on is it worthwhile, is it viable and what could we actually achieve here on all these sites which are already owned by us as a council.

“Even though they’ve identified the sites, we are looking at it as a blank canvass at the moment.

“We want to have a pipeline of sites over the next five to ten years and hopefully identify the sites now so that we can go out to key potential stakeholders and look at how we can deliver our own council sites.”