Budget Highlights

Key Budget measures for housing:

• £500m in housing infrastructure fund to unlock a further 650,000 homes
• The next wave of strategic partnerships with nine housing associations which will deliver 13,000 homes
• British business bank guarantees for SME house builders
• ’Simplification’ of process to convert commercial properties to new homes
• Providing funding to empower 500 neighbourhoods to allocate homes to local people in perpetuity
• Help to Buy Equity Loan scheme extended two years to 2023 and limited to first time buyers
• Retrospective inclusion of first time buyers of shared ownership in the stamp duty relief

 Housing associations will increase their development of social rented homes and build out ‘difficult’ sites they wouldn’t have previously tackled, after receiving a share of the new ‘strategic partnership funding’ announced in last week’s budget.

On Monday, Chancellor Phillip Hammond announced £653 of grant would be used to support seven partnerships with housing providers to build 13,475 new homes by 2022.

These providers were later unveiled to be Platform Housing Group, Optivo, Southern Housing Group. Orbit, Thirteen, Vivid and a partnership of Guinness Partnership and Stonewater.

It marks the second allocation of strategic partner funding – the governments new preferred model of grant giving.

The National Housing Federation (NHF) said the Autumn Budget ‘missed a real opportunity’ to deliver more social homes, with other housing bodies also expressing disappointment.

Kate Henderson, chief executive of the NHF said, “The chancellor’s announcements on housing are not the wholesale changes needed to fix our broken housing market.

We desperately need tens of thousands more social homes to be built every year which is why we are disappointed that the government has missed a real opportunity to overhaul how land is sold.

The current set-up means last year landowners pocketed more than the global profits of Amazon, McDonalds and Coca-Cola combined, raising the cost of land and making it almost impossible for organisations who want to buy land for social housing to afford it.”