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Esh Construction strengthens Yorkshire presence with £90m affordable housing pipeline

Esh Construction is making significant progress in its efforts to provide affordable housing solutions for the communities of Yorkshire, with 468 new homes under construction and a pipeline worth £90 million.

Seven live sites, stretching from Sheffield to Driffield, will provide a mix of affordable homes, retirement living apartments and bungalows for a number of registered social housing providers including Great Places Housing Group, Barnsley Council and Akkeri Developments.

Many of these developments are heading towards completion before August 2023, including the Lytton Road development, a 44-home project being delivered on behalf of Sheffield Housing Company, the largest contract Esh has won via the YORbuild2 framework.

In Castleford, Esh Construction is close to finalising an 82-home project known as Pemberton Road, in partnership with Leeds Federated Housing Association and WDH.

Esh operations director, Simon Woodward, and business development manager, Zoe Popple, are driving development in Yorkshire, where Esh expects to deliver more than 400 homes in the next three years. Simon said: “The injection of Government investment in this sector coupled with a target to build 180,000 new homes through the Affordable Homes Programme into 2026 has opened up major opportunities across our region. Now there is huge pressure on the industry to deliver.

“Our teams and partners have worked tirelessly over the past two years, and prior to that during the pandemic, to build high quality homes for our clients through the traditional tendering process, in addition to bringing forward land for development through our land-led solution.

“Achieving this against a backdrop of material shortages and rising costs due to inflationary pressures has been no mean feat.”

As an approved contractor on the Efficiency North, Innovation Chain North and Prosper Frameworks, Esh is in a position to push the boundaries in offering its clients more certainty around costs and programme schedules when directly appointed from an early stage to assist with scheme design.

A pioneering regeneration scheme in Halifax will deliver 106 much-needed energy efficient homes for affordable rent on a site that was formerly home to three tower blocks. Delivered in partnership with Together Housing Group, the scheme was named Large Residential Development of the Year at the 2022 Insider Yorkshire Property Industry Awards and scooped the Partnership of the Year award at the Northern Housing Awards in Manchester. Judges noted the several challenges that have been overcome and recognised it as a benchmark for other Yorkshire organisations dealing with difficult sites.

Land led developments continue to compete against the process of tendering in today’s affordable housing sector, and Esh’s first jointly developed land scheme with Housing 21 and Together Housing Group in Askern, Doncaster, is heading towards completion this summer. The site features 56 houses, 12 bungalows and a three-storey retirement living building containing 58 apartments.

Chris Hale, pre-construction director, and Laura Devaney, land and partnerships director, have been pivotal in building Esh’s land led solution, which involves a developer or contractor identifying a piece of land and working in partnership with a registered provider to bring a new build scheme forward.

Laura said: “We are immensely proud to highlight the success of land led projects throughout the region in recent months with a £25 million scheme in Bridlington recently submitted for planning.

“A land-led approach alleviates a lot of work for providers, and instead allows them to focus on weighing up site viability for location, rent and sales purposes, while we focus on technical detail and design. Each party focuses on their own expertise and marrying the two together can bring greater success.

“Esh is one of just a small number of contractors in the UK who can apply for grants under the current Homes England Affordable Homes Programme 2021-26, therefore we can support registered providers with funding as part of the land led process.”

In October, Esh Construction announced a forward order book of £500m and an increase in turnover by £32 million to £255 million - one of the largest increases in the company’s history – posting an operating profit of £4 million.

Chief executive Andy Radcliffe said: “This achievement is no mean feat and is underpinned by the cumulative efforts over the last four years to reposition the group to target resilient sectors of the construction industry which demonstrate long-term stable fundamentals.”

He continued: “Our gratitude, as always, goes out to our clients, our supply chain and wider stakeholders – we are who we are due to the determination of a large group of people who believe that we only succeed, if we all succeed.”

Affordable housing is thriving in Yorkshire, and Esh Construction continues to grow its presence within the region.

For more information visit www.eshgroup.co.uk