South Yorkshire to consider £118m housing fund
The programme could unlock up to 7,000 new homes by unlocking schemes held back by viability issues.
The South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority has received £118.27m through its Integrated Settlement for the National Housing Delivery Fund, which will run from April 2026 to March 2030.
The funding will support housing schemes through land assembly, infrastructure provision, site remediation, and viability gap funding.
It is expected to support a mix of affordable, market sale and rented homes, with the additional development also intended to support job creation and the regeneration and densification of urban areas.
SYMCA has worked with Homes England and South Yorkshire’s four local authorities to establish a housing pipeline initially comprising 184 sites with the potential to deliver around 32,000 homes.
The pipeline includes a number of major housing-led regeneration sites, including Hoyland North and South and Royston and Carlton in Barnsley; Unity and Doncaster Waterfront and City Centre in Doncaster; Bassingthorpe Farm and Rotherham town centre sites in Rotherham; and Moorfoot and Neepsend and Furnace Hill in Sheffield.
Following further assessment of strategic fit, scale and deliverability, the pipeline has been narrowed to a prioritised programme.
The current pipeline represents an indicative funding requirement of around £158m and could deliver approximately 6,900 starts and almost 2,500 completions over the four-year programme.
This exceeds the Integrated Settlement’s initial targets of 2,600 homes enabled, 800 starts and 260 completions during the first three years.
The proposed programme will be delivered through 15 ‘mini-programmes’, covering areas including Barnsley Catalyst Sites, Doncaster City Sites and Unity Living, Rotherham Gateway and town centre sites, and Sheffield’s Moorfoot, Gleadless Valley and New Neighbourhoods.
Four further programmes will focus on affordable housing, with one covering each of South Yorkshire’s four districts.
The mini-programme model is intended to give local authorities greater flexibility to move funding between projects to accelerate delivery, while providing longer-term funding commitments for major regeneration schemes.
Each programme will have agreed milestones, outputs and grant allocations, allowing SYMCA to redirect funding to other projects if schemes are at risk of falling behind.
A total of £1.5m is also proposed to support technical due diligence and business case development across the 15 programmes.
There has already been significant private sector interest in the funding, with SYMCA receiving numerous expressions of interest.
However, because the current pipeline is already overprogrammed, the authority does not currently intend to launch a full open call for private sector-led schemes. It said this approach would be reviewed regularly to reduce the risk of under-delivery.
The NHDF replaces the former Brownfield Housing Fund and is primarily aimed at addressing challenges associated with brownfield development, although funding can also be used on greenfield sites where significant infrastructure investment is required.
The programme is being delivered alongside £85m of City Densification Fund funding, which can support schemes in the Don Valley, Sheffield city centre and Rotherham Gateway, as well as other financial tools available to SYMCA to support housing growth.
SYMCA is meeting on Monday, 14 September to discuss the funding.
