£6bn cuts will hit housing budget hard
Housing providers will need to fight hard to get anything near their current funding settlement from the new government, industry experts warned today.
Speakers at the Council of Mortgage Lenders’ affordable housing conference in London said the emergency budget and comprehensive spending review would inevitably see a drop in the amount of government finance available to housing associations and councils.
Richard Capie, director of policy and practice at the Chartered Institute of Housing, said the sector would need to present strong arguments on the benefits of investing in affordable housing.
‘The difference a drop in funding would cause is that 100,000 [homes] won’t be built: you could say that’s half a million jobs lost,’ he said. ‘These are the kinds of arguments we’ll need to use.’
Consultant Andrew Heywood said housing would be very low on the new government’s list of priorities. He also said the sector would come under more pressure than others whose budgets enjoyed greater protection such as ring-fencing.
‘I think we have to assume that there’s going to be real pressure on housing,’ he said, adding that housing would probably sustain greater cuts to make up for budgets which the government would protect, such as the NHS.
Those fears were echoed this afternoon when the Tories and Liberal Democrats agreed on an accelerated programme of £6 billion worth of cuts to the public sector.
An email from prime minister David Cameron to party supporters said the coalition agreement ‘commits the next government to a significantly accelerated reduction in the budget deficit, to cut £6 billion of government waste this financial year’.
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Readers' comments (1)
| 14/05/2010 12:01 pm
Said this before but it is obvious that any requirement for new housing has been driven entirely by NuLab immigration. Those Migration Watch stats again:
"3million immigrants have arrived since 1997.
A migrant still arrives every minute.
We must build a new home every six minutes for new migrants.
England is already, with Holland, the most crowded country in Europe
(except Malta)"
Add to this the 1 million illegals and there is your housing crisis in a nutshell. Best way to deal with this so-called "crisis" is to do what Arizona did. Hand over responsibility for immigration law enforcement to the Police and start picking up and shipping back. The Italian Police already do this. Not legally here? Out you go. No appeal. The so-called housing crisis would melt away.
Of course such a sensible policy would affect property values, artificially inflated by immigration as they are, and so am not holding breath on this one...
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