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A government plan to provide discount housing has left 85,000 young people waiting in vain for an affordable place to live, in a policy called “deplorable” by a multi-party committee of deputies.
The 2015 initiative to build 200,000 homes and sell them at a 20% discount was formally scrapped this year without a single one being built. But £ 173 million was spent on the purchase of land, according to a damning report from the Commons public accounts committee. It is now on track to deliver just 6,600 homes and is being replaced by a new scheme.
The influential committee singled out the abandoned plan as a waste of time and resources as part of a barrage against the government’s housing policy, which it said has been “shackling expectant youth for years” with housing policies that “stay put. nothing when ministers come and go with alarming frequency ”- there have been 19 since 1997.
He also criticized the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) for not saying how it will achieve its ambition to build 300,000 homes a year in England and accused ministers of an “alarming confusion” of the definition of affordable housing.
The attack came a week after annual figures showed that construction of the cheapest social housing remained near its lowest level since the 1980s, with just 6,566 homes built between March 2019 and April 2020. Affordable homes of all kinds were built in England totaling 57,644. Social housing experts have estimated that 145,000 new affordable homes are needed each year. Official figures on Tuesday revealed that the start of home construction fell almost 40% during the pandemic.
“The ‘housing’ department is at risk of losing title,” said Meg Hillier MP, committee chair. “It has serially and consistently failed to deliver new affordable housing or even made a serious attempt to execute its own housing policies or achieve goals before they are abandoned, without warning – costs plunged and the results are unknown. … MHCLG must get rid of false promises and establish clear, organized and funded plans, backed by necessary laws and with a realistic prospect of compliance. “
The Starter Homes scheme failed when mortgage lenders raised the difficulty of valuing properties with discounts applied.
David O Leary, policy director for the Federation of Home Builders, said its failure “demonstrates the importance of ensuring that due consideration is given to the practical implementation of interventions and their impacts on the market as soon as possible.”
The PAC said the government was still unable to say when its new initial housing policy, called First Homes, which offers homes at a 30% discount to local first-time buyers, will deliver the first properties for purchase.
“Their reliance on contributions from developers to fund First Homes is part of an opaque and complex mechanism that runs the risk of local authorities having less money for housing and infrastructure,” the report says. “The department does not have a timetable or a target for the delivery of the first houses, but it is planning a pilot test to build 1,500 first houses ‘in the next few years’, which it wants to learn about before continuing to plan the new scheme.”
He also said it was “wearily familiar” that the MHCLG “can’t or won’t” clarify how it will achieve its ambition of 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s.
David Renard, a housing spokesman for the Association of Local Governments, said: “The government must give city councils the powers to build new houses on a scale not seen since the 1970s, when local authorities built 40% of the houses. new homes. The municipalities fully support the aspiration of people who want to buy their own home and help those who want to buy to do so. However, not everyone is willing to buy. “
“This report shows how the government’s approach to solving the housing emergency has focused on all the wrong solutions,” said Polly Neate, Shelter’s CEO. “The government has persisted in plans for expensive homes that are often not built. There is broad public and political support for social housing across the country, but progress is nonexistent. “
A spokesperson for MHCLG rejected the PAC report, saying it was “misleading.” “Since 2010, more than 663,000 households have been helped to acquire homes through government schemes,” they said. “We are also investing more than £ 12 billion in affordable housing over the next five years, the largest investment in a decade, and our new First Homes scheme will help local people and key workers buy their own home, in the area where they already live. , with a discount of 30% “.
