Affordable Housing – Parliamentary Written Answer

Robert Halfon:  To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what steps he is taking to encourage the building of affordable housing.

Brandon Lewis: The Government’s National Infrastructure Plan announced an extension of affordable housing capital investment to 2018-19 and 2019-20, of £1.9 billion to ensure that an average 55,000 new affordable homes a year continue to be delivered. This will bring the delivery total to 275,000 across 2015-20. [Edit]

Government Acts On House Builders’ Call to Speed Up Planning Process

House builders have welcomed commitments in the National Infrastructure Plan to speed up the planning system and accelerate housing delivery.  The time taken – and associated costs – to get applications to the stage where work can start on site has increasingly acted as a constraint on housing delivery and worked against smaller house builders in particular. The measures should  reduce the time taken to get applications approved, cut down on risk and get more sites active more quickly. The measure should particularly assist and encourage smaller builders, who, lacking the financial capacity and resources of larger companies, have been disproportionality penalised by the delays and costs of the current system.The affordable homes programme will be extended to 2020, with £957m of funding to help build 275,000 affordable homes over the life of the next Parliament. Read more on the HBF website.