Bridging Finance News:- Plans to build 200,000 homes for first-time buyers under 40 have been sidelined due to lack of parliamentary time to pass the necessary legislation before December’s general election.
A National Audit Office investigation discovered no such homes have been built since the Conservatives announced the initiative in their 2015 manifesto.
In the November 2015 spending review, £2.3bn was earmarked for delivery of the first 60,000 which were to be sold with a 20 per cent discount.
The report noted nearly £174m had been spent on buying and preparing brownfield sites for starter homes and that 5,998 were financed through this money. Although 29 per cent were affordable the report said they could not be called starter homes because of the missing legislation.
“It is possible that developers have built and sold homes that conform to the intended starter home specifications…However, legally these cannot be marketed as starter homes until the necessary secondary legislation is enacted,” said the report.
It highlighted that following the housing white paper in 2017 there was a shift in focus – the 200,000 starter homes target was replaced with a more general one of helping 200,000 households into homeownership.
The November 2017 budget reallocated funding for starter homes to the £9 billion shared ownership and affordable homes programme and the land assembly fund.
New home building is slower than 30 years ago
The ministry of housing, communities and local government’s target is to support the delivery of a million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022.
However, since 2015 the number of new homes built has grown year-on-year has remained lower than in 1980, noted the report.
Bridging Finance by HZA
Brokers Hank Zarihs Associates said commercial development finance lenders would like the planning system to be made more efficient so new homes could be built at a faster rate. The brokerage added lenders were keen to offer property development loans for new builds.
