Legal & General wins social value award

Legal & General Capital is committed to using its patient capital to unlock and create economic, social and environmentally useful investments across the UK.

Legal & General Homes has been awarded Best Business Contribution to Social Value in the Social Value Awards 2018 for its commitment to creating economic, social and environmental benefits for the area surrounding Buckler’s Park. 

Legal & General Homes was the first housebuilder in the UK to formally incorporate social value into its developments, helping ensure that the places it creates are inclusive and benefit the existing community.

In 2017, Legal & General Homes worked with Social Value Portal, an independent body that measures societal impact, to develop and sign the first Social Value Charter in the UK.  It consulted with local businesses, faith groups, traders and parish councils and surveyed over 430 private residents to identify the priorities, needs, challenges and opportunities for the local area.

Legal & General in Housing

Legal & General has been involved in supply side housing activities for nearly 20 years. These include:

• Bringing housing back to the centre of the UK’s cities through large scale regeneration, such as Salford, Plymouth, Liverpool, Bracknell, Newcastle and Canning Town
• Ownership of house builder CALA Homes, which is on track to deliver an annual capacity of 2,500 units and revenue of around £1bn in 2020, and believes it has the capability to build in excess of 3,000 units per annum thereafter. CALA has seen revenues grow from £241m in 2013 to £748m in 2017
• Legal & General’s total investment capability for the Build to Rent (BTR) sector currently stands at circa £1.5bn. It has secured around 2,000 homes under construction or in planning, with sites in Bristol, Edinburgh, Salford, Bath, Brighton, Leeds and Walthamstow, with the aim to have 6,000 in planning, development or operation by the end of 2019
• Delivering its first three new housing communities, Legal & General’s housebuilding arm, Legal & General Homes, is bringing forward a rapidly expanding housing pipeline. These include a 78-acre site in Shrivenham, Oxfordshire with outline planning for 515 new homes, building 1,000 new homes on its 250 acre site in Crowthorne, Berkshire, called Buckler’s Park, and 1,500 new homes at its 272 acre site in Finchampstead, also in Berkshire
• Revolutionising the construction industry through its modular housing factory in Leeds, it will deliver highly-sustainable precision-engineered homes. Legal & General is the first provider of modular homes to be constructed in a factory on a moving assembly line. This means that the modular product is delivered to site as a complete unit, with the electrical, plumbing, wiring, kitchens and bathrooms all in place. With groundworks completed in advance, at site level it requires only cladding and roofing
• Providing later living accommodation through Inspired Villages Group, a best in class operator and developer of later living accommodation, established by Legal and General in 2017. Inspired Villages Group’s development portfolio currently has around 1,000 homes
• Launching Legal & General Affordable Homes, a new wholly-owned affordable housing provider which it is establishing through a leading development and management platform
• We are also a significant investor in student accommodation, having invested £1.5bn to date in this sector.