The plan announced by chancellor Philip Hammond and local government secretary Sajid Javid also included new incentives to boost housebuilding on brownfield land.
The £3bn fund will be made up of £1bn in short-term loan funding. This will be used for small builders, custom builders, and innovators, delivering 25,500 homes this parliament. A further £2bn of funding for infrastructure will be used to unlock sites for up to 200,000 homes over the longer term. Of this, £1.15bn is new money.
The action will see the government use surplus public land to build more homes more quickly by encouraging new developers with different models to enter the market, and to support small and medium-sized firms and constructors. This will help to close the housing supply deficit, ministers stated.
In addition, local planning authorities will be able to grant permission in principle on sites suitable for housing-led development, as well as turning abandoned shopping centres into new communities and increasing housing density around transport hubs.
Javid said that the government had made progress in boosting construction, with over 700,000 net additional homes delivered between April 2010 and March 2015, but it was now time to go further.
“We want to ensure everyone has a safe and secure place to live and that means we’ve got to build more homes,” he added.
“It is only by building more houses that we will alleviate the financial burden on those who are struggling to manage.”
Hammond stated there had been a housing shortage in this country for decades, and that the government was determined to tackle it.
“We’ll use all the tools at our disposal to accelerate housebuilding and ensure that over time, housing becomes more affordable, that is why we are committing £2bn of additional investment towards this.”
