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British housebuilding company Persimmon have announced that they have amassed enough land to build more than 100,000 homes over the coming years; now all they need is policy certainty!

In their latest full year report, Persimmon said that their land holdings now total 17,000 acres, on which it can build over 100,000 homes.

Their output increased last year, with legal completions up from 11,528 in 2013 to 13,509 in 2014 (a 17% increase.) They intend to keep the growth going into this year, with plans to begin construction on 400 active sites throughout 2015.

The Scottish Government’s new £30 million ‘Small Developers Scheme,’ which will form part of Help to Buy (Scotland), will increase growth in the small house building sector, according to the Federation of Master Builders (FMB).

Gordon Nelson, Director of FMB Scotland, said “Like the Scottish Government we want Help to Buy (Scotland) to stimulate sales of new homes across both urban and rural Scotland, thereby helping more people across the whole country to buy new homes. This is only achievable with the participation of smaller local building firms and we therefore welcome the move to ring-fence £30 million specifically for buyers who want a new property built by one of these companies.”

MacCulloch said that the lack of adequate housing is “to a great extent, a problem caused by the University and Colleges themselves in modifying existing student accommodation to make it ensuite, to make such rooms viable for the conference trade, to generate revenue. That has resulted in the amalga

Rightmove report that the housing market is showing signs of a “new year bounce,” with new sellers increasing asking prices by around £4,000 in January.

Despite January generally seeing asking prices fall historically, the price of property coming on the market increased by 1.4% or £3,798 compared with December, according to the property search website.

Scottish government will abolish right-to-buy in 2017. Now social housing tenants in Wales could lose the right to buy their homes if Labour wins the 2016 assembly election. Is this the end for the controversial government scheme?

Now a relic policy from the Thatcher-era, ‘right-to-buy’ allows most council tenants to buy their council home - at a discount. Since its inception in 1980, more than 1.5m homes in the UK have been bought under the scheme; over 130,000 of these were in Wales. Following on from Scotland’s announcement last year to discontinue the policy, right-to-buy now faces abolition in Wales by ministers who say that in the midst of a housing shortage, they want to protect the stock of social housing for those who truly need it.

A Conservative council has been accused of “social cleansing” and manipulating the boundaries so as to favour one party or class - in an attempt to force families to sell their homes for less than half the price of planned replacement apartments.

A senior official at Westminster city council, a Conservative-led borough, has described the government’s new vacant building credit as insane and estimated it could lose as much as £1bn in housing payments, deepening the accommodation crisis afflicting the poorest people.

On 28th November 2014 the government announced the introduction of the ‘vacant building credit.’ This will mean that when a vacant building is brought back into any lawful use, or if it is demolished and replaced by a new building the developer will be offered a financial credit by the local planning authority and deducted from the overall affordable housing contribution calculation.