affordable housing

Terrie Alafat, chief executive of CIH, says new figures from the Office for National Statistics demonstrate the desperate need for new genuinely affordable housing.

Responding to the publication of Housing affordability in England and Wales by the Office for National Statistics, which demonstrates how unaffordable house purchasing has become, Terrie Alafat, chief executive of CIH said “The statistics released by the Office for National Statistics today make for bleak reading.

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.