£20m contract agreed to finish replacing 100 ‘defective’ bungalows on Wolverhampton estate

City of Wolverhampton Council has awarded its latest housing contract to Keon Homes for the work to build 63 bungalows at Lincoln Green and four two-bed maisonettes in School Lane, Bushbury, and 12 bungalows in Wood End, Wednesfield.

The estate was effectively ‘written off’ in 2023 with all of the old bungalows declared “defective” under law because of a mounting list of issues including buckling walls, leaking and poorly insulated roofs, very poor thermal efficiency, and wet rot in the floor.

City of Wolverhampton Council said the bungalows had “exceeded [their] expected lifespan… far beyond their initial 10 to 15 years.”

Once the second phase is completed, 99 two-and-three-bed bungalows will have replaced the 75-year-old aging and crumbling pre-fabricated bungalows on the Lincoln Green estate in Bushbury.

Keon Homes was handed a £11m contract early last year to build 36 new bungalows on the estate.

Councillor Steve Evans, the council’s deputy leader and cabinet member for city housing, said the bungalows were in “such poor structural condition that they could no longer be economically and satisfactorily maintained.”

The first of the new bungalows were built last year with a handful of tenants handed keys at the end of October. As many as 36 new bungalows are set to be built on the estate by the summer.

The new bungalows will be built in Alleston Road, Grosvenor Road, Lincoln Green and School Lane, and in the Wood End and Portobello areas.

The post-war pre-fabs were built as a ‘quick and temporary’ solution in the 1940s and 1950s to the country’s mounting housing crisis following the Second World War.

Social housing specialists Keon Homes is the council’s preferred contractor having won the battle to be named at the top of Wolverhampton’s huge £1bn housing framework which includes plans to replace more than 4,000 ‘outdated’ pre-fabricated homes.