Thursday, 31 October 2013

Housing: Construction – Parliamentary Written Answer

Graham Jones: To ask the Secretary of State (1) what assessment he has made of the effect on house building of his plans to transfer £400 million of New Homes Bonus funding to local enterprise partnerships;
 (2) whether the £400 million which is being transferred from local authorities' New Homes Bonus funds into local enterprise partnerships budgets will be counted as local authority budget cuts.

Kris Hopkins: The proposal for local authorities to pool a proportion of their New Homes Bonus in 2015-16 was the subject of a technical consultation carried out between July and September this year. That consultation set out our expectation that authorities would receive the New Homes Bonus they had earned, and that pooling would be local. We are currently considering the responses to the consultation and will announce a way forward in due course. Government support and investment in housing is having an effect. Housing supply is now at its highest since 2008, with 334,000 new homes built over the last three years. In the most recent quarter, housing starts are up by 33% on last year.

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