By Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid has announced over £600 million of new investment to support the building of 50,000 new homes in areas of high demand in England.
The funding is to be made available via the Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF), a government capital grant programme worth up to £5.5 billion, which is intended to ensure necessary infrastructure is in place to deliver further housing development.
Specifically, the £600 million will help deliver five new projects in London, central Bedfordshire and Essex and builds on the £1.3 billion already allocated to deliver up to 76,500 new homes.
The dream of home ownership
Mr Javid remarked: “I want to see more homes built in the places people want to live, so more people realise the dream of homeownership. But we need the roads, rail links, and schools to support the families living in those homes, which is why I set up a fund to put in place the infrastructure to unlock new homes in these areas.”
Mr Javid added: “Today, I’m announcing hundreds of millions in new investment, helping more people get on the property ladder and allowing more communities to flourish.”
Robert Jenrick, Housing Secretary, echoed this, saying that he was determined to “help people make the dream of home ownership a reality.”
He added: “This investment of over half a billion will unlock thousands of new homes by providing essential infrastructure. To build more, we need to provide the infrastructure and public services to match. This package will support existing communities and ensure they receive the roads and schools to sustain the homes being built.
“Last year, we built more new homes than any other year, bar one, in the last 30 years. There’s more to do and I will be focusing relentlessly on getting Britain building.”
Supporting the housing supply
Funding allocation through the HIF is designed to support local authorities that want to step up their plans to increase the overall housing supply, make more land available for housing, and deliver new physical infrastructure that supports new and existing communities, according to the government.
The government’s recent press release highlighted that, while there are many sites all over the country that could be used for new housing projects, many lack the infrastructure needed to make building homes on them viable. This could be because they lack the roads, rail links, or schools required to unlock new development.
The government claims it is committed to increasing the UK’s housing supply and helping more young people realise their dreams of home ownership.
Lovely to see politicians making pious pledges about house construction.
None of it is possible.
Why not? I hear you ask.
House builders are an oligopoly, a small group that control a market, in this case house construction.
Their absolute capacity is around 180,000 houses a year.
Has no-one noticed that every new housing developments are offering “A beautiful development of 3, 4 and 5 bedroom houses?”
Where are the two bedroomed houses? Why no one bedroomed flats?
A famous bank robber was once asked why he robbed banks?
His answer was simple.
“That’s where the money is”.
That is the nub of the problem.
Faced with limited capacity, house builders build only the most profitable properties, 3, 4 and 5 bedroomed houses.
Until we increase and train the number of construction workers by 50%, all these promises of 300,000 new homes a year, will remain “Pie in the sky.”
Why should the house builders spoil, as Arthur Daley would say, “A nice little earner?”
Some are making a net profit of 30% after tax.
Sadly, the Housing Minister has a life expectancy of 8 months. Either onwards and upwards, or to the back benches.
This has been the case since 1997, regardless of the political party in power.
Nothing will happen, and in two years we will look back on having built 180,000 expensive houses, and not tackled the problem of constructing more homes.