There’ll Be A Boost To Housing Investment, But You’ll Have To Wait For It

‘I am doubling the housing budget’ said the Chancellor. But what he failed to add was that we’ll have to wait three years to see the extra money. In fact, more than a third of the extra won’t arrive until the next parliament. In the meantime, affordable housing investment will stay at just under £1 billion per year. As John Healey points out, in current prices this is barely 30% of what Labour was investing annually in housing. Even if it reaches £2.4 billion in 2020/21, this will only be a bit more than three-quarters of what Labour was spending before May 2010, calculated at current prices. Despite this, Osborne claims to have created ‘the biggest house building programme by any government since the 1970s’. Read more on the Red Brick blog.