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Osborne to announce billions for homeownership
The government is set for an historic shift in affordable housing funding, using the cash to largely build low-cost homeownership homes.
In the Spending Review today, chancellor George Osborne will announce a £4bn fund for social landlords and private house builders to build 135,000 ‘Help to Buy: shared ownership’ homes by 2020/21.
The Treasury will also announce a £2.3bn programme to directly fund developers to build Starter Homes and regenerate brownfield land.
A total of £200m will be available for an additional 10,000 homes at 80% market rent, which will be sold after five years, with the tenant getting the first right to purchase the property.
Mr Osborne will also announce £400m funding to help providers build 8,000 specialist homes for older people or those with disabilities.
He is expected to say: “In the end, Spending Reviews like this come down to choices about what your priorities are. And I am clear: in this Spending Review, we choose housing. Above all, we choose homes that people can buy.”
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) currently administers the £4.8bn Affordable Homes Programme, which provides grant funding to housing providers to build homes for affordable rent through to 2018.
Funds have only been allocated for 2015/18, despite a two-year extension being announced in the Autumn Statement last year.
The radical shift in affordable housing funding was trailed in July, when the government said it would alter the DCLG budgets to focus on “supporting low-cost homeownership for first-time buyers”.
Under Mr Osborne’s plans, current restrictions on shared ownership homes will be overturned, with the government offering Help to Buy: shared ownership properties to all households earning less than £80,000 outside London or £90,000 inside the capital.
Shared ownership buyers will not need to be nominated by a local authority.
Briefings ahead of the Spending Review offered little detail on the mechanisms of Help to Buy: shared ownership homes. Currently, Help to Buy – which allows people to buy properties with a 5% deposit – cannot be used alongside shared ownership.
Starter Homes will also be able to be used with Help to Buy.
The government previously announced a £26m fund for developers to purchase brownfield sites for Starter Homes.
Spending Review seminar
Inside Housing and Social Housing have teamed up to unpick the implications and identify the opportunities presented by chancellor George Osborne in his Spending Review today.
The FREE event for housing associations, local authorities and arm’s-length management organisations (ALMOs) will be on 2 December 2015 between 4pm and 6.30pm in Central London.
Speakers include York University professor Steve Wilcox, chief executive of Wandsworth Council Paul Martin and Institute for Fiscal Studies senior research economist Robert Joyce.
To find out more visit www.insidehousing.co.uk/spending-review or email rachel.murphy@oceanmedia.co.uk to express your interest in attending. We will contact you to let you know if your application for a place has been successful.
