HOUSING charity Tai Calon intend building private houses for sale on the open market, councillors have been told.

At a meeting of Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council’s Place scrutiny committee councillors were given a brief taster of the housing association’s future plans up to 2029.

Tail Calon Community Housing was formed back in 2010 following the large scale voluntary transfer of the council’s housing stock and manages 5,821 homes in the county borough.

Tai Calon chief executive Howard Toplis said: “We’re in the process of pulling together our corporate plan for 2029 of where we want to take the organisation over the next five years.”

Mr Toplis explained that the corporate plan will be brought in front of a full council meeting for ratification when it is finalised.

Mr Toplis continued:  “Tai Calon owns quite a lot of land in the county, obviously some is where our homes sit is a big part of that, but we also own land available for development.”

He explained that some old houses had been demolished in the last three years that “free up development sites” and they have others.

Mr Topliss said: “We could be building at least 300 homes across the county.”

He said that Tai Calon want to build homes for rent and had also identified a “demand” for shared ownership.

Mr Topliss said: “People also want to buy homes outright for sale.

“That would mean setting up a subsidiary because we can’t do it as part of the main organisation as that’s a charity.

“Homes for sale is a non-charitable activity, so there’s a whole bunch of skills around that we need to bring into the organisation as we step up our development aspirations.

“There’s quite a lot of things happening in terms of changing the way we operate and the new skills we need.”

Independent group leader, Cllr Wayne Hodgins said: “It’s interesting that you’re going to make yourselves more of a commercial entity when you are going to build houses and sell them.

“We’ve got a housing strategy team set up and I certainly think that we as an authority could be a key player in that as we also have a lot of land in our ownership.”

He believed a “strong working relationship” could be forged.

Committee chairman Labour’s Cllr Malcolm Cross said that there are “about” 3,500 people looking for accommodation in the county borough on the housing list.

Cllr Cross said: “We need to make inroads into that and take people out of the uncertain position they find themselves in.”

Other things Tai Calon intend to focus on are:

Driving customer satisfaction with the use of technology on customer insight and performance of homes.

De-carbonisation of existing homes and finding the funding for this element and other projects.