Loan funding of at least £624m will be made available to house builders to deliver up to 116,000 new homes.
Regular readers will know that Advantage has written about the shortage of homes available to buy on more than one occasion, and despite the government’s ambitious housebuilding targets, the under-supply of housing stock remains an ongoing issue.
In a bid to tackle the shortage of new homes, Inside Housing reported that The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has said the new funding will be available from this year up to 2024-25. This funding is anticipated to help build up to 116,000 new homes. The loans are available on a 20-year term and will be focused on transforming brownfield land and improving public transport, building schools and providing infrastructure for new homes.
Government hopes new funding will boost smaller building firms
The funding – part of the £2.2bn announced in the 2020 spending review – will be used to improve transport, build schools and unlock land for new housing, with a particular focus on brownfield sites.
The Government hopes it will create thousands of new jobs and boost smaller building firms.
Housing minister Christopher Pincher said:
“Improving transport links, building schools and health facilities are key to unlocking new homes and creating vibrant places where communities can thrive.
“This money will build on our commitment to bring derelict and abandoned sites back to life, regenerating towns and cities as we level up across the country.”
Loans will be administered by Homes England through the Home Building Fund.
Providing the wider infrastructure to create new neighbourhoods
Chief executive of Homes England, Peter Denton, said:
“This new infrastructure funding will be a powerful catalyst for creating new homes, places and communities.
“It gives us the resources we need to back more developments like Houlton in Rugby, where a £35m funding injection has helped to create new primary and secondary schools, a link road to Rugby town centre, and wider infrastructure needed to build a community of up to 6,200 homes.”
Advantage’s view: The loan funding is just one of the ways in which the government is seeking to address the UK housing shortage, with another being The Affordable Homes programme which we wrote about in September. Although this funding will be welcomed within the housebuilding sector, even allowing for the various sources of government funding and assuming favourable conditions for the construction industry as a whole, meeting the government’s housebuilding targets is still looking like a stretch. Therefore, we’d expect to see further government interventions over the coming months and years.
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