We talk homes with our Development Team

Since the merger of Shropshire Housing Group and Herefordshire Housing Limited in 2017 and the birth of Connexus, the development team has worked hard to amalgamate the two existing development programmes and to create an efficient team who are all working with one goal in mind - to provide quality homes for the residents of Herefordshire and Shropshire. 

The focus is on improving lives by building homes in places that people want to live, and also homes that they can afford to heat and live in.  Connexus is committed to working in rural communities – building to ensure that those communities continue to thrive, keeping schools and facilities open by providing homes for young families with a local connection, and providing homes for those whose circumstances may have changed due to age, disability or other life events. 

The programme is currently 250 new homes across the two counties each year. In 2020-21 we developed 189 homes – despite the Covid-19 epidemic, the closure of our construction sites for 2 months and then the subsequent social distancing on sites. Our development team members found new ways to work from home with the use of video meetings and electronic communication and documents. 

In 2021-22 we anticipate providing new homes across a number of sites in Hereford city, Ledbury and Orleton in Herefordshire and in Oswestry, Minsterley, Highley, Cleobury Mortimer and Broseley in Shropshire. 

In 2022-23 we will be providing further homes in Orleton, Moreton on Lugg, Canon Pyon and Ledbury in Herefordshire as well as homes in Telford, St Martins, Dorrington, Bishops Castle, Ditton Priors and Much Wenlock. 

Our list is expanding all the time as we secure new build opportunities across our counties. 

As well as supporting rural communities and ensuring quality, we are now looking towards the future and the environmental credentials of our properties. As mentioned above, we have already explored and implemented Passivhaus Accredited homes, and we will continue to commit to looking at environmental factors within our homes.

With the government’s drive to reduce carbon emissions by 68% by 2030, 78% by 2035 and to achieve net carbon zero by 2050, we are actively working towards achieving these goals. We have chosen to build on our success at Much Wenlock with a view to creating a new ‘standard’ house type which meets the Passive House standards, but which we can easily roll out to ALL our future development schemes. This would mean that we would be 2050 compliant well in advance and should not need to make any further big changes to our house types for some time unless we wish to.

As part of this project we are looking at the feedback we have received from our first Passive House scheme (good and bad), as well as feedback received from our other residents in our tenant surveys so that we can incorporate a myriad of improvements as part of this overhaul of our new build house types. 

Some of the changes we will be incorporating include wiring for photo-voltaic panels (so that we can add them later if they are not added at the point of build), room for battery storage (for the storage of electricity generated via the photo-voltaic panels or for storage of electricity taken from the grid during off-peak periods to be used at peak periods when electricity would be more expensive to buy).  electric vehicle charging points, high levels of insulation and airtightness, mechanical ventilation and heat recovery, measures to prevent over-heating in summer and alternative methods to heat properties (as gas boilers are to be phased out by 2025 on new build properties).

As an example, we were asked to re-design a scheme to incorporate a 3 bed wheelchair adapted bungalow for a family with very specific needs in Whitchurch.  We have now changed the scheme to incorporate this request and the property will be ready for its new occupants in February 2022.  We also actively support specific groups and have recently completed properties for supporting young people in Hereford city, and we also have an active foyer in Ludlow for young people – the final phase of which was completed in 2019. 

We are building an independent living scheme in Oswestry consisting of 38 apartments for older clients with support and communal facilities to enable those resident to retain independence but at the same time receive any support and company that they might also require.

In Herefordshire we are about to embark on a regeneration scheme of old prefab bungalows, replacing them with eight new bungalows (5 of which will be M4(3) wheelchair accessible bungalows) and we will be taking at least 6 households directly from Herefordshire Council’s Accessible Homes Register.  We also are mid-way through a larger regeneration scheme of 42 prefab homes in Hereford and we will be re-providing 71 new, high quality homes – with a mixture of wheelchair accessible bungalows and family homes, all within easy reach of Hereford’s amenities and city centre.

Wheelchair accessible homes are few and far between and often families with disabled children have to wait years to have accommodation that is suitable for their needs.  By incorporating these specific homes into our development programme we know that we are meeting the needs of ALL of the community. 

We are also committed to the provision of refuges and support for those escaping domestic abuse and are actively pursuing a number of avenues in that regard across Shropshire and Herefordshire, including accommodation for those with complex needs.