Posted 27.10.14
Housing associations can bid for a share of around £800 million of government funding to help provide thousands more affordable homes across the country.
The announcement by Housing Minister Brandon Lewis builds on the £886 million available through the first funding round in July. That resulted in initial allocations for 2,697 firm schemes that will provide 43,821 new affordable homes.
This latest funding round takes the total figure for government investment in affordable housing to more than £1.7 billion for 2015 to 2018.
Taken together with private finance, this will result in total investment of around £23 billion and lead to the fastest rate of affordable housebuilding for 2 decades with 165,000 new affordable homes from 2015.
For an update in the Affordable Homes Programme click here.
Posted 19.10.14
Sir Michael Lyons has published the final report of his independent review of housing for the Labour Party.
The review states as fact that the nation faces the biggest housing crisis in a generation because for decades we have failed to build the homes we need. The consequences of this are widely felt, with house prices now 8 times average incomes, rental affordability stretched, increased overcrowding and the impact of house price inflation on national economic management.
The Lyons report sets out a comprehensive plan to tackle the deep and underlying causes of the housing crisis. The key barriers identified in the report are:
In addition, housing must be a priority for investment for the next government.
The review argues that tackling these problems will require strong leadership from central government alongside the delegation of powers, funding and responsibility so that every community provides the homes they need.
The review recommends measures to tighten the responsibility on councils to increase the supply of land through local plans and give them greater tools to ensure that new homes are built. It proposes changes to simplify and speed up the planning process, including "redline" applications for small sites.
It recommends a more active role for local government in the assembly and preparation of land and in risk sharing partnerships with developers, landowners to deliver more new homes through Housing Growth Areas and New Homes Corporations as local delivery agencies. There should be a new focus for the Homes and Communities Agency on delivery and attracting investment.
The review also argues for a more ambitious approach to Garden Cities and beyond that to new Garden Suburbs and re-shaping our towns and cities to deliver up to 500,000 new homes.
The review makes recommendations to reverse the shrinking capacity in the house building industry by getting smaller house builders back into the business of building homes, tapping capacity in the wider construction industry and attracting new enterprise. This could create 230,000 new jobs whilst adding 1.2% to GDP.
It proposes ways to ensure that councils play a bigger role as house builders after forty years of decline and to unlock the capacity and ambition of housing associations to play a bigger role in investment and delivery of new homes.
The recommendations in the review will help more people secure their own home through more attractive shared ownership schemes as well as more quality homes to rent.
It also argues that housing for older people and those looking to downsize should be a priority, as should investment in more social and affordable homes so that those on the lowest incomes and the most vulnerable have a secure and decent home.
The clear conclusion of the review is that building the homes we need will require a coordinated package of reforms that together will change the way we plan for and deliver new homes and that is the ambition of this report.
The full report can be downloaded via this link
Posted 01.10.14
The Prime Minister's pledge to build 100,000 new homes for young first time buyers is a welcome step to help address the housing crisis, but "who will build them?" asks the Federation of Master Builders (FMB).
Responding to the Prime Minister's speech at the Conservative Party Conference, Brian Berry Chief Executive of the FMB, said:
"The Prime Minster has quite rightly placed housing on an equal footing with health and education, but 100,000 new homes is still too few when we need to be building 240,000 new homes every year.
"Critically, it is not clear how these new homes for first time buyers will be delivered. What we need to be seeing is more of a drive to support local house building companies to build the homes in the places that local people want to live.
"Unfortunately, the number of local house builders has declined rapidly over the last twenty years, with the result that just 27% of all new homes are built by local house building companies.
"The Prime Minister's commitment to new housing needs to be supported by a range of delivery measures to help local house builders compete in the market.
"Improved access to finance and the availability of more smaller parcels of land for development would do much to help local house builders, and so help create the communities that housing alone cannot deliver."