Supporting the UK housing market

Citra Living marks our entry to the private rental market as part of our commitment to exploring opportunities to increase our support for the rental sector.

The launch of Citra Living marks our entry to the private rental market.

To complement existing activities in support of UK housing we will bring new, incremental, high quality rental properties to the market under Citra Living. The intent is to partner with housebuilders, landowners, modern methods of construction providers and others to bring quality rental property to the market more quickly, as well as to help improve the market in terms of sustainability.

As part of our commitment to helping Britain recover, we aspire to a UK in which all people have access to stable, affordable and safe homes in places they want to live. We support every part of the housing market.

Read the press release 

As the UK’s largest mortgage lender, we’re supporting more and more of our customers to buy their first home.  We currently support one in four first time buyers onto the housing ladder.

We provided more than £40 billion in lending to first-time buyers in the three years to 2021 – significantly above our £30 billion commitment. In 2021 provided £16 billion in lending to first time buyers and exceeded our commitment of £10 billion before the end of the year.

Through our family of brands we offer savings tools and provide a range of deposit saving options. We also provide range of first time buyer and home mover mortgages as well as options for later life lending. For those aspiring to own their own home but struggling to find a deposit, intergenerational options such as our Lend a Hand mortgage from Lloyds Bank allows a family member to put down 10% of the purchase price of a home into a three year, fixed term savings account.

We also support a range of government-sponsored affordable housing initiatives, including Right to Buy, Shared Ownership and the Help to Buy: equity loan. Most recently, we have signed up to support the government-led First Homes initiative, which aims to help young people and key workers on to the housing ladder.

Lloyds Banking Group is one of the largest funders to housebuilders in the UK.

In the three years to 2021, we provided £9 billion funding to the social housing sector, outstripping our original £2.25bn funding commitment by £6.75 billion. In 2021 we delivered £3.4 billion in funding  to the social housing sector, exceeding our full-year target of £1.5 billion, including £500 million in ESG-linked funding.

The funding will aid the creation of more, high quality affordable homes and support the sector to accelerate its investment in creating greener homes through the construction of sustainable new builds and the retrofit of existing properties.

Housing and social housing is also a key investment focus for the Group’s pensions and investments division, Scottish Widows, which has invested £3.5 billion in social housing.

Whether our customers own or rent their homes, we want to provide peace of mind.

We provide a range of options for building and contents insurance, ensuring protection and peace of mind for those in owned and rented properties alike.

We also offer a range of support for those who find themselves in need of support to stay on top of their mortgage payments.

As part of our broader commitment to sustainability, we must make sure that homes – new and old – support the UK’s sustainability targets and build towards a greener future.

We’re supporting the creation of national sustainability standards for house-building finance and will assess the energy retrofit requirements of over 200,000 homes in the social housing sector. Our ESG-linked funding for social housing will support the sector to accelerate its investment in creating greener homes through the construction of sustainable new builds and the retrofit of existing properties.

Through Lloyds Bank and Scottish Widows we have become early adopters of the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing.  We’ve also joined the Executive Committee of NextGeneration, to further develop the national sustainability standards for new-build housing finance to help ensure that new homes being built today are  sustainable and support our path to net zero carbon.  We’ll also be working alongside other key industry stakeholders to create a framework that works for builders across the industry, including SMEs and housing associations.

To help support this move towards sustainable building, our business customers including housing associations have access to our Green Building Tool – a digital insights calculator that helps customers to identify, evaluate and understand the estimated outcomes of potential investments to make properties more sustainable and energy efficient. This activity benefits tenants by creating greener homes with typically lower running costs while also helping to tackle the climate emergency. The development of new homes and retrofitting of existing ones also supports jobs in the small and large companies undertaking the work.

Similarly for personal customers, we have teamed up with the Energy Saving Trust to create a similar Eco Home Tool. It supports home owners and landlords to find out just how green their homes are and shows how a few simple changes could make homes more friendly to the environment.

Our ambition is underpinned by a wealth of housing data and expertise across our business, covering every area of the housing industry.

We’re exploring ways to innovate the housing market in order to enable access to homes, such as the potential introduction of new options in rent to buy.

We’re also working closely with other organisations across the industry as well as with influential voices and policy makers to improve the housing market for all.

During The Big Conversation: Helping Britain Recover we heard from a range of housing practitioners and experts in three events focused on Yorkshire and the Humber, the South East of England and London. What emerged was a common view of specific problems and potential solutions, in particular the central importance of long-term policy certainty from government.
 

• Conversations centred on the shortage of affordable housing in the UK, which is making home ownership an unrealistic prospect for many individuals and families.
• A scarcity of specialist skills was also highlighted as an issue holding the industry back.