Small builders will be able to access a £3bn Home Building Fund to help them break into the English housing market where 60% of new homes are currently built by just 10 major builders, under a major intervention in a Housing White Paper issued by the Dept for Communities that aims to ‘fix the broken housing market’.

By providing loans to help small and medium sized builders, off site construction, essential infrastructure, custom builders and self builders, the fund is intended to diversify the market and help build 25,000 new homes this parliament and up to 225,000 in the longer term.

Other headline issues in a wide-ranging White Paper include –

1)  Planning for the right homes in the right places – a consultation on the principle of a new, standardised way of calculating housing demand to reflect current and future housing pressures.

2)  Giving local authorities the tools to speed up house-building and the powers to make sure developers build on time.

3)  A Lifetime ISA will be introduced in April 2017 to help younger adults save flexibly for the purchase of their first home.

4)  Commitment to build more affordable homes via, for example, the £1.4bn programme announced at Autumn Statement. Originally aimed at shared ownership, this has been opened up to include ‘affordable rent’ homes.

5)  Amending planning rules so councils can proactively plan for more long-term ‘build to rent’ homes.

6)  Ensuring more longer-term tenancies are available in private rented schemes.

7)  The government’s commitment to the Green Belt is re-affirmed with – among other things – a de facto presumption in favour of housing on suitable brownfield sites and other action to radically increase brownfield development.

8)  Continued encouragement for local authorities to use the stock of existing empty homes efficiently.

9)  Action to promote fairness and transparency for leaseholders.

‘Fixing our broken housing market’ links to two versions of the White Paper and a range of supporting documentation.

10/2/2017