St Martin's Court - newly constructed over-55s housing in Lancaster
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00:30I'm Andy Sutherland and I am Head of Development for Progress Housing Group.
00:35So we are here today, it's our Lancaster Extra Care Development and this consists of 92 units that comprise of one bed and two bed apartments.
00:42My name is Les Warren, I'm Exec Director for the Progress Housing Group.
00:46So to give you an overview of the group's development strategy, Progress Housing Group is a developing housing association and we build new homes for rent and for sale.
01:04And these are all affordable homes. We're reasonably unique because in addition to generating and building general needs housing, we also develop specialist housing.
01:16And the scheme we're in today is an example of our first extra care living scheme that we're developing.
01:23Last November, the block work and brick work to the facade of the building was completed.
01:29That's quite a major milestone for the development. And as of last week, the building is now fully watertight as well.
01:35Sustainable design has been one of the main criteria for the development and this will help attain affordable running costs for the customer.
01:43This has been incorporated into the design by air source heat pumps, solar PV panels, increased wall installation and also mechanical ventilation as well.
01:52So Lancashire is seeing quite a bit of population growth as a county and that's driven by changes in household size, population growth and economic development.
02:06What we're also seeing is an increase in older people.
02:09The data we have tells us that we're going to see the number of households over 65 increase from the low 30s as it is at the moment up to about 40%.
02:22This scheme addresses that need for older persons housing where residents want to live independently but with some level of support.
02:32Maintaining the heritage value on the site has been an essential design criteria as well.
02:36It's mainly due to the two buildings with our former army barric buildings, our historic buildings within Lancaster.
02:44We've actually utilised the existing layouts of the buildings including the existing access into the building and existing window openings.
02:51And we've also carefully selected and specified each individual material for the development.
02:57We'll be working very closely with the support provider.
03:01Developments like this take a long time to bring to fruition and we're close to that point now.
03:07We exchanged contracts with the contractor on this project in January 2023 but actually work and appraisal and evaluation took place many years before that.
03:20As well as the homie and barric buildings are the former army barric buildings.
03:24There's also a former art school that was constructed at the same time as the other buildings and this has been incorporated and utilised for the extra care scheme.
03:35So some of the key factors for progress in terms of the success of this project, clearly there's a massive financial commitment required from ourselves and from Holmes England but also getting a really good quality contractor on board from the outset who has experience of delivering this type of scale of scheme.
03:54We're lucky to have a very strong development team within progress.
03:58We are committed to helping customers live independent for longer within their homes and electric care development like this helps to work towards that aim.