Year zero for starter homes
Posted: November 5, 2019 Filed under: Starter homes | Tags: NAO Leave a commentOriginally posted on November 5 on my blog for Inside Housing.
The sad fate of (non) starter homes offers a lesson for politicians in the folly of making unworkable promises but it is one they seem unlikely ever to learn.
A report published on Tuesday by the National Audit Office (NAO) investigates what happened to one of the flagship promises made by the Conservatives in their 2015 election manifesto: ‘200,000 Starter Homes, which will be sold at a 20% discount and will be built exclusively for first-time buyers under the age of 40’.
Four and a half years later, the total number of completions is precisely zero and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has not even laid the regulations in parliament that would enable any starter homes to be built.
So what has happened since the heady days of 2015, when the spending review allocated £2.3 billion to build the first 60,000 starter homes?
The NAO finds that the money was gradually diverted into other schemes to buy and remediate land: a total of around £450m was spent on sites but they ended up being developed for a mix of market sale and affordable homes.
What its report does not reveal is why. This, after all, was one of the key promises made by David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2015.
The 300,000-home question
Posted: February 11, 2019 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning | Tags: Alok Sharma, NAO Leave a commentOriginally published on February 11 as a blog for Inside Housing.
Can the government meet its target of 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s?
The target was announced to some scepticism in the 2017 Budget and a report just out from the National Audit Office (NAO) says with some under-statement that it will be ‘challenging to meet’.
In detail, the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) commitment is to ‘support the delivery of a million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022 and put us on track to deliver 300,000 net additional homes a year on average’.
That means net additional homes so it includes conversions and change of use (less demolitions) as well as new building.
Statistics showing a 78% increase in homes on this measure since the low point of 2012/13 (from 125,000 to 222,000) certainly suggest that it is possible.
However, recovery from the credit crunch is one thing, an increase from more normal times quite another, and the annual increase slowed to just 2% in 2017/18.
Jules Birch 