HCA scraps flagship building schemes
The Homes and Communities Agency has confirmed that two of its key house building programmes will effectively be scrapped.
Kickstart, which aims to breathe life into stalled schemes, and the local authority new build programme, which has seen some councils provide their first homes for decades, will not continue after final decisions are made about which of this year’s schemes will go ahead.
Last week the government announced it is cutting the HCA’s budget for 2010/11 by £450 million, or around 10 per cent. The reduction includes £230 million of savings announced earlier in the year.
The agency is currently reviewing outstanding Kickstart schemes and all LANB projects that are not in contract to decide which will receive funding.
It has said all Kickstart round two projects approved before the 6 April are safe, leaving 74 projects that have applied for around £241 million to deliver 7,678 homes.
Ninety one LANB schemes are also on hold. They have applied for around £58 million and would deliver 912 homes.
Regional HCA teams will decide which projects will get the go-ahead in the next few weeks.
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Readers' comments (18)
Sidney Webb | 14/07/2010 1:19 pm
Housebuilding is an economic generator, providing needed homes and employment, consuming matterials and spreading business activity. Add in that the homes are desparately needed and the termination of newbuild schemes proves the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
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Michael Read | 14/07/2010 3:11 pm
Yup. Keynes reckoned paying people to dig holes and fill them up again was a useful economic activity in the round.
He had his tongue stuck in his cheek.
Maybe if the UK hadn't dropped all immigration controls for the last 13 years there wouldn't be such pressure on housing.
Funny that. Immigration never seems to figure in any equation when anyone working in housing is talking about shortages.
It's the elephant sitting in the armchair as far as I see.
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Anonymous | 14/07/2010 4:24 pm
People are so quick to blame immigration for the UK current housing problems. If you were clued up on UK Housing issues you would be aware that housing shortage is a legacy we have inherited long before slum clearance in the early 1900s and is still present today.
Stop “shifting the buck” don’t blame immigration for everything the reality is that, we are just not building enough homes and given the current economic crisis it will only get worse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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McMadman | 14/07/2010 5:34 pm
Michael Read has the visual aucity of Stevie Wonder. Immigration might be a pressure in certain areas of the South of england, but elsewhere there are areas of Britain whose populations are stagnant and/or reducing.
Of course, that aside, if all the RTB money had been invested back in repairs and new build, we wouldn't have the current shortage and the millions now being spent on decent homes and the repairs backlog could be poured into new build. Protecting jobs and housing the people.
Michael should take his racist ignorance elsewhere.
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| 14/07/2010 9:33 pm
Ah, is that the smell of burning martyr?
In case you didn't spot this, Mad Jack McMad, NuLab are history now and lefties calling people "wacist" for pointing out the bleeding obvious is just so passe. I could say, check my earlier posts, but once again, for the record:
http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/
"Net immigration quadrupled to 237,000 a year between 1997 and 2007. In 2008 it was 163,000.
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)
Immigration will add 7 million to the population of England in the next 24 years - that is 7 times the population of Birmingham.
---------------------------
But in lefty world, there is of course no connection between all of the above and the housing shortage. And the headlines about third world immigrants creaming the LHA system in Westminster mansions, no, doesn't exist, it's all propaganda from the "wacists".
Thank god your lot are of office now...
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Chris | 14/07/2010 10:37 pm
ONS:
76,000 more non-EU migrants left the country than arrived in 2008.
46,000 more EU migrants arrived than left in 2008.
48% of new migrants to the UK were already employed in the UK, i.e. their private sector employer had gone abroad to recruit them.
48% of arrivals to the UK are either EU residents or returning British ex-pats.
20% of arrivals to the UK are students attending our universities.
These facts spell out a story that does not concur with the horror hype of the Daily Mail or MWUK.
What is more important however is that this distraction from the real issue is not successful.
New build social housing is desperately needed and it is economically unjustified, indeed self defeating, to scrap it.
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| 14/07/2010 10:49 pm
There is no accurate way to count immigrants to this level of granularity as NuLab scrapped all counting in and out due to the obvious attention it would draw to their policy of flooding the country with third world Labour voting immigrants aka the Neathergate affair. These ONS numbers are thus completely unreliable. In addition the c 1m illegals don't appear in any official estimates yet represent considerable demand for PSL housing that is not reflected in official data.
Increase the size of the Border Police by a factor of 10, give them the same powers as Customs, scrap the Uman Rights Act, deport all illegals whenever possible and watch those PSL rents fall. Bye bye housing crisis...
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Chris | 14/07/2010 10:56 pm
If illegals claim HB they are likely to be noticed and at least counted, I'd have thought. Mr C promised to export all the illegals within a year, but has anyone noticed them being forced out yet!
How long does an immigrant need to reside in Briatin before qualifying for a vote? - honest question.
Meanwhile - it is possible to count house completions and homeless. The former is too low and the latter to high. A shame upon Labour and upon the Tories, and soon upon the Liberals if this government fails to act with fairness and economic sense.
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| 15/07/2010 0:24 am
"How long does an immigrant need to reside in Briatin before qualifying for a vote? - honest question."
When a council sends round an electoral registration form do they check the details with INS in Croydon before logging it on system?
Thought not...
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Michael Read | 15/07/2010 0:33 am
Racist. Indeed.
Immigration was a concern of 80% of the voters one week before before May's election.
McMadman shares his kneejerk prejudice with another madman called Gordon Brown who also chose to slime someone who spoke for others with "bigot".
We're all racists and bigots now.
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