Darling unveils £1bn boost for housing
Chancellor Alistair Darling has unveiled a £1 billion funding package to help struggling homeowners, boost housing supply and help the house building industry through the recession.
The package includes £500 million pledged for new house building.
The bulk of this money will be spent helping developers to kickstart house building on sites that have stalled due to the credit crunch, which Mr Darling says will get building moving on thousands of new homes. He told MPs: ‘We want to work with the industry to help tackle the recession, which house builders say could prevent them from acting now to increase housing supply.’
£100 million of it will be set aside for local authorities to build new energy-efficient housing.
Mr Darling also announced a further £80 million extension to Homebuy Direct, the scheme which gives first-time buyers equity loans on new homes. He added that 32,000 people had expressed interest in the scheme since it was announced in September.
The chancellor pledged to extend the stamp duty holiday on homes of up to £175,000 until the end of the year, which will mean continuing the exemption for 60 per cent of homes.
And he said he would maintain the higher level of support to struggling homeowners through the Support for Mortgage Interest scheme for a further six months, as long as the recipients of the support look for new jobs.
Mr Darling also told MPs he would be bringing forward £50 million to modernise housing for the country’s armed forces. And he pledged £435 million to fund energy efficient measures for homes, businesses and public buildings.
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Readers' comments (1)
michaelbarratt | 22/04/2009 3:28 pm
Brown and Darling committed £500 billion to bailout banks according to Times online October 8th 2008. Just over HALF of this sum would have financed the building costs of nearly 3 million new council homes. It is not hard to see where New labour loyalties really lie. Do New Labour really believe they can buy off the dissatisfaction of hard working and hard pressed voters in the real economy with a mere £1bn investment in the entire housing sector or 0.2% of the sum they have pledge to bail out doggy bankers.
Why have New Labour not seized upon the multiplier potential of such large scale investment in the construction industry that would also feed through to sales on the high street?. Why didn't the Government stop mucking about and nationalise the banks to directly control loans to end users? Why didn't the Government create a National Development Bank to stimulate and support commercial and technological investment in these difficult times?
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