The UK's most up-to-date social housing and public sector news website
HCA unveils details of £635 million package to Kickstart Housing Delivery
Other Housing stories
- Pickles blasts prayers ban ruling - 'worship is hard-fought British liberty'
- Fact or Fiction? Tower blocks
- Council wrapped over revealing tenants' 'social housing status'
- Crowded Oxford shelter lets rough sleepers use floor
- Private landlord fined for allowing tenants to live in 'hell-hole' home
Advertisement
With the latest projections showing only 90,000 private sector homes will be completed in 2009, Homes and Communities Agency chief Sir Bob Kerslake told housing delegates yesterday that new models of funding and construction were needed in order to revive the government’s house building plans.
Speaking at the Chartered Institute of Housing’s (CIH) annual conference and exhibition in Harrogate, Sir Bob Kerslake announced he was setting up a new Housing Finance Group to help find new sources of private sector funding and said that "more needs to be done on private housebuilding".
Sir Bob said that new money in the Budget was already having an impact on kick starting affordable housing programmes and said that he was "confident that there would be an appetite amongst local authorities" to deliver homes.
Elaine Elkington, Strategic Director of Housing and Constituencies at Birmingham City Council, told delegates that the authority wants to kick start building using its own land and prudential borrowing through its new Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust, and deliver 50,000 new homes by 2026.
Ms Elkington said: "Our ambition is to be one of the first local authorities in the country to sign a three-year local investment plan with the HCA…to put delivery at the heart of things."
David Montague, Group Chief Executive of L&Q called for more intermediate rental and shared equity products and for government investment to take the lead but urged banks to start lending again for shared ownership in order to stimulate the market otherwise it would become a "happy memory". He said we needed to grow "pathways to ownership" so that people could own a home when they are ready.
Sarah Webb, CIH Chief Executive, said: "We are currently only
building one new home for every two new households in England, and
that needs to change. We must work together as a sector to help
private sector house builders, housing associations and local
authorities to access funding and kick start delivery."
