During the Autumn Statement and Spending Review today, Chancellor George Osborne is pledging a huge new fund for housing.
The Autumn Statement details Government spending plans for up to 2020, including billions of pounds in cuts.
Alongside £20 billion in cuts to Whitehall budgets and £12 billion in welfare cuts, Osborne is promising around £7 billion for house building, in a bid to build over 400,000 affordable homes in England.
The combined Autumn Statement and Spending Review has been under way since 12:30pm today. It sets out departmental spending limits for the next five years and gives details of the Government’s taxation and deficit reduction plans.
Osborne is addresses the “crisis of homeownership in our country”, pledging a “bold plan to back families who aspire to buy their own home”1.
The Treasury announced that Osborne would reveal “the biggest affordable house building programme since the 1970s”1.
This will include:
- £2.3 billion for developers to build starter homes for first time buyers, who will receive a 20% discount on properties worth up to £450,000 in London and £250,000 elsewhere.
- £4 billion to build 135,000 Help to Buy: Shared Ownership homes for households earning under £80,000, or £90,000 in the capital.
- £200m for 10,000 new homes for tenants to live in for five years at reduced rents while they save for a deposit. They will then be given the first right to buy the home.
- £400m for 8,000 specialist homes for the elderly or those with disabilities.
The Executive Chairman of the Home Builders Federation (HBF), Stewart Baseley, reports that recent attempts to fuel housing supply are beginning to take effect and the latest house building statistics for England are “very encouraging”1.
However, Labour claims that the Conservatives’ house building record since 2010 has been a “failure on every front”1, with homeownership at the lowest level in a generation and a halving in the amount of affordable homes to buy.
The Shadow Housing Minister, John Healey, says: “If hot air built homes, then Conservative ministers would have our housing crisis sorted.
“A matter of weeks ago, the Housing Minister promised a million more homes, now George Osborne is saying they’ll build 400,000 more. Rather than rate them on what they say they will do, people will judge them on what they’ve actually done.”1
1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34915218