Surrey Nurse is First in Country to get Starter Homes Initiative Home - 18/10/01
Thames Valley Housing is the first housing association in the country to use money from the government Starter Homes Initiative (SHI) to assist a key worker to buy her own home through its Key Homes scheme.
A staff nurse working at St Peters Hospital, Chertsey (part of Bournewood NHS Trust) will complete the purchase of a ground floor flat in Addlestone on Friday October 19th. The flat cost her £104, 950 and was partly funded by an interest-free loan from Thames Valley Housing covering around 25% of the purchase price. She has been living in a hospital accommodation block for the past 5 years.
A double benefit for the Trust is that when she moves into her new home the hospital will be able to offer her accommodation to another staff member. The nurse works in the mental health division at Bournewood, an area where the Trust have found it particularly difficult to recruit staff, experiencing up to 30% staff vacancies. When the Trust does recruit nursing staff, they are often unable to take up the post due to the difficulty of finding affordable accommodation.
Thames Valley Housing won £17.5m of Starter Homes Initiative funding one of the largest allocations given to a single housing association, of which nearly £14m is to be spent in Surrey. It is the only county-wide SHI partnership in the country and includes 11 local authorities, the National Health Service and the Surrey Police force.
The funding will help nurses and teachers, together with a smaller number of police officers, to buy their own home near to their place of work. The county is experiencing recruitment and retention problems in these areas with local house prices at 82% above the national average - higher than all but the most expensive London boroughs - but public sector pay related to a national scale. Additionally Surrey has a shortage of lower-priced homes. Only 24% of homes are in the lowest 3 council tax bands compared with over 50% across the South East as a whole.
Councillor Easton, Chairman of the Housing and Community Services Committee at Runnymede Borough Council, said, "The cost of housing in Surrey is very high and it is therefore extremely difficult to recruit and retain staff. The Surrey Districts and Thames Valley Housing Association recognise this and have worked hard to obtain the information that was needed to support the bid for funds and to implement the new scheme. I am therefore delighted that the first unit acquired under this scheme is within Surrey".
John Yates, Housing Co-ordinator at the NHS Executive, said, "I am delighted to announce the first recipient of the Starter Home Initiative. This is a major contribution to recruitment and retention within the National Health Service."
Further Information
Miranda Oakley
Marketing & PR Manager
020 8607 0622
miranda_oakley@tvha.co.uk
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