The first mixed community social housing scheme in Northern Ireland in a generation was launched in County Fermanagh. The 20 families on Carran Crescent, outside Enniskillen, signed up to a charter for their community.
In the Good Friday Agreement, it was envisaged that people should be able to choose where they wanted to live without intimidation. However, nearly 95% of Northern Irish estates are segregated on religious grounds. Shared Future Housing is the Housing Executive's response. In Carran Crescent, no more than 70% of any one religion will be allowed, and all the residents have signed up to a charter.
Paddy McIntyre, Chief Executive of the Housing Executive, confirmed that other similar projects are planned. He said: "All research that has been carried out has shown that there is a demand from people to live in mixed community housing.
"The difficulty up to now has been safety and security concerns, which has been the predominant feature in the choice that people make.
"We are not social engineering. This scheme has been allocated on the basis of the normal housing selection."
Housing Minister Yvette Cooper confirmed 45 towns and cities as New Growth Points, with the potential to deliver up to 100,000 extra new homes and many more new jobs than previously planned over the next ten years.
The proposals will deliver a substantial number of new homes to help first-time buyers onto the property ladder and enable towns and cities to grow their economies by creating new jobs and encouraging business development.
The successful bids, put forward by over 70 local authorities with high housing demand, contain a wide regional spread. They include major cities like Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Birmingham, and Bristol, as well as large and small towns like Swindon, Reading and Ipswich, Grantham, Thetford, and Maidstone.
These areas will share in £40 million start-up funding to support infrastructure, unlock sites for new housing, and assess and mitigate environmental impacts. It is expected that this will make them more attractive for business investment and help young people to find a home.
The initiative is a crucial part of delivering an increase in house building in England, in response to economist Kate Barker's review of housing supply. That found that over the last 30 years house building rates have halved, whereas over the same period demand for new homes has increased by a third.
The local authorities will now work closely with DCLG and other Government organisations, such as the Environment Agency, Highways Agency, Natural England, and CABE, the Government's design adviser, to ensure that the growth is sustainable, acceptable environmentally, and realistic in terms of infrastructure.
Negotiations to build affordable housing under section 106 planning rules are set to speed up, with the launch of a new toolkit developed by the Housing Corporation.
Local authorities, private developers, housing associations, and the Housing Corporation all stand to gain from the new assessment tool, which aims to help boost the supply of affordable housing passing through the planning system.
Economic Appraisal Tool is designed to help all parties to reach agreement on levels of finance offered by developers, and the amount of social housing grant required to make new housing developments viable and sustainable.
The toolkit, designed by property consultants GVA Grimley & Bespoke Property Group, has also been commissioned in response to Kate Barker's forthcoming review of land use planning, and to the broader agenda of reforming the planning system.
Alongside the new package, the Housing Corporation has also recently established a specialist Planning Unit to look at how the planning system can deliver affordable homes faster and more effectively.
Housing Corporation Deputy Chief Executive Steve Douglas said:
"Section 106 Agreements are becoming increasingly critical to the delivery of affordable housing. This Economic Appraisal Tool will not only help the Housing Corporation better measure the value of its investments on S106 sites, but will also help developers and local planning authorities negotiate and agree the viability of affordable housing proposals. Our Future Approaches to Investment paper sets out how we plan to move forward on our investment programme: getting better at looking at added value on Section 106 sites is an important part of this process. "