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Government pledges 300,000 new homes a year

Christina Hoghton
Written By:
Posted:
22/11/2017
Updated:
24/11/2017

Chancellor Phillip Hammond is ‘choosing to build’ with more money being pumped into Britain’s broken housing market

Chancellor Phillip Hammond has pledged to deliver 300,000 extra homes a year on average by the mid-2020s, which he described as ‘the biggest annual increase in housing supply since 1970’.

In his Autumn Budget Hammond said that over the next five years the Government will commit a total of at least £44bn of capital funding, loans and guarantees to support the housing market.

This includes:

  • New money for the Home Builders Fund to get SME housebuilders building again
  • A £630m small sites fund to unstick the delivery of 40,000 homes
  • A further £2.7bn to more than double the Housing Infrastructure Fund
  • £400m for estate regeneration
  • A £1.1bn fund to unlock strategic sites, including new settlements and urban regeneration schemes
  • A lifting of Housing Revenue Account (HRA) caps for councils in high demand areas to get them building again
  • £8bn of new financial guarantees to support private housebuilding and the purpose-built private rented sector
  • An additional £34m to develop construction skills across the country.

The Chancellor admitted: “This is a complex challenge. There is no single magic bullet. If we don’t increase supply of land for new homes, more money will inflate prices, and make matters worse. If we don’t do more to support the growth of the SME housebuilding sector, we will remain dependent on the major national housebuilders that dominate the industry.

“And if we don’t train the construction workers of tomorrow, we may generate planning permissions, but we will not turn them into homes. Solving this challenge will require money, planning reform and intervention. So today we set out an ambitious plan to tackle the housing challenge.”

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Jonathan Stephens, of Surrenden Invest, supported the measures. He said: “Investment and support from the government to encourage and enable (through access to cheaper finance) developers of all sizes to build can only be positive and this, coupled with the tightening of laws around planning permissions and the ability to hold land without development, will hopefully result in the levels of housebuilding required to be delivered.”