Treasury considers expanded central government housing role

8 Oct 14
Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has asked officials to examine what role Whitehall could have in commissioning new homes, to ensure national targets for construction can be met.

By Richard Johnstone in Glasgow | 8 October 2014

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has asked officials to examine what role Whitehall could have in commissioning new homes, to ensure national targets for construction can be met.

Speaking at a Local Government Association fringe event at the Liberal Democrat conference yesterday, Alexander said there was a need to put measures in place to meet the target of party’s target of getting 300,000 homes a year built.

An idea I’ve asked people in the Treasury to work out is – if you want to get to that 300,000 homes a year we need housing associations to be doing their bit, we need local authorities to be doing their bit, we need developers to be doing as much as possible.

‘But we can’t just leave it to chance as to whether those three things add up to 300,000 in any given year. So I think we have to be looking more radically at the idea of the state – central government as well as local government – to act as a commissioner to make sure that we build that number of houses.’

It was right that the party was ambitious for the amount of housing that can built, and there was a need to make sure measures were in place to make sure this can happen, Alexander added.

‘The idea I am floating is one where we don’t just say we’ve got a bunch of ideas from the bottom up that we think will give us 300,000,” he said. ‘I think we need to look from the top down and say ‘how do we make sure that we get to our 300,000 a year?’, so this is essentially a sort of backstop.

‘We’re doing some work about this idea in more detail and there are some challenges, not least the fiscal challenges, not least the role local authorities can play.’

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