ROOF Blog

Housing minister John Healey has announced a boost to house building in England, by confirming nearly £500million funding to build around 8,000 affordable homes across the country. This takes total government funding for house building to £3.5 billion since June. Over 3,000 of these new homes are expected to be available through the government’s HomeBuy schemes, offering first time buyers a helping hand onto the property ladder. And nearly 5,000 homes will be available for affordable rent through housing associations.

The National Audit Office (NAO) has expressed concerns over the strength of the information collected on Decent Homes progress. It is estimated that over a million social homes have been improved by CLG’s Decent Homes Programme. The original target was that all social sector homes would be decent by 2010, but by November 2009, CLG was estimating that approximately 92 per cent of social housing would meet the standard by 2010, leaving 305,000 properties ‘non-decent’. 100 per cent decency would not be achieved until 2018-19.

Demand to build council homes is far exceeding government expectations, putting pressure on the Treasury to release extra cash as part of the spending review next month.

The pressure amounts to an end to the 20-year effective moratorium on council house building, amid a new cross-party consensus to build council homes.

Nearly 90 local authorities, including large Conservative ones such as Birmingham, have bid to build a further 3,500 council homes as soon as possible.

The Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) had planned and budgeted for a demand to build 1,200 homes.

The bids come on top of 49 councils that were given the go-ahead by CLG in the summer to build 2,200 homes on the condition that they were on site by March next year.

The unexpectedly large number of local authorities bidding in the second round represents the largest potential council house building programme in more than two decades.