£100bn Pitch For National Housing Fund

The drastic shortage of housing among working people could be plugged with a government-backed National Housing Fund of £100 billion over 10 years, providing up to 75,000 extra new homes a year, a report by the independent think tank ResPublica has found. The number of new homes totalled only 143,500 last year – 56,500 less than the 200,000 needed each year over this Parliament to hit the government’s own targets. In its report, Going to scale: How a National Housing Fund can unlock Britain’s housebuilding capacity, ResPublica argues that the private sector will only build at the pace that it can sell but if the Government acted as a guaranteed buyer of new homes then confidence would grow and supply increase. Read more on 24housing.