Affordable housing at Budget 2020 – at a glance

Thanks to today’s Budget 2020 meeting, the new Affordable Homes Programme will get a much needed £12bn multi-year settlement and £400 million for ambitious Mayoral Combined Authorities and local areas to establish housing on brownfield land across the country.

Tom Slingsby, chief executive of property developer Southern Grove, which focuses heavily on creating affordable homes, comments: “This cash boost for affordable homes will underpin building for many years to come and is a declaration of war on a housing crisis that isn’t going away.

“Only sufficient provision of affordable homes in the right areas can prevent the sort of social inconsistencies that appear when high property prices put key areas of UK cities off limits to younger workers and their families.

“We know from conversations we have constantly with housing associations that the appetite is there to keep building through economic cycles and this fund will ensure that will happen.”

The government has made progress in boosting housing supply with over 240,000 new homes created in 2018-19, the highest level in 32 years.

The government has now committed to creating at least 1 million new homes in England by the end of this Parliament and an average of 300,000 homes a year by the mid‑2020s.

The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government will soon set out comprehensive reforms to bring the planning system into the 21st century, followed by a Planning White Paper in the spring. 
These reforms will aim to create a simpler planning system and improve the capacity, capability and performance of Local Planning Authorities to accelerate the development process. 

Where Local Planning Authorities fail to meet their local housing need, there will be now be firmer consequences, including a stricter approach taken to the release of land for development and greater government intervention. 

The government will also explore long-term reforms to the planning system, rethinking planning from first principles, to ensure that the system is providing more certainty to the public, Local Planning Authorities and developers.

Read the full Budget 2020 document here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/budget-2020-documents/budget-2020