One of the country’s largest Build To Rent players, Legal & General, says it’s started work on 6,000 residential units in the past year – most of them in the BTR category.

Since March, it has secured planning permission for around 6,000 homes through its later living, BTR, modular housing and ‘build to sell’ businesses. 

Nigel Wilson, the company’s chief executive, says: “With UK unemployment likely to rise significantly over the next 12 months, it’s essential that financial institutions continue to invest in the real economy, recycling pensions funds and savings into projects that help to create jobs, housing and vital infrastructure. 

“We are looking at how investment capital can not only create stable, long-term returns for our customers, but also to help to re-build regional economies in the wake of Covid-19 and limit the impacts of climate change. Our triangle of strategic challenges – climate, ageing and infrastructure – have all taken on a new urgency. We need to build back better, decarbonising our economies, creating a new intergenerational contract and sharing the benefits of a sustainable economy more fairly.”

L&G says it’s invested around £1.5 billion in what it calls “levelling up the UK’s towns and cities” since the March 2020 lockdown, in turn creating over 30,000 jobs over the long-term and “supporting a regional economic bounce back.”