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Chancellor unveils infrastructure funding to boost housing in Spring Statement
The government has announced that £717m will be made available from the £5.5bn Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) to unlock up to 37,000 homes at sites including Old Oak Common in London, the Oxford-Cambridge arc and Cheshire.
Chancellor Philip Hammond announced the funding during his Spring Statement to the House of Commons on Wednesday.
The fund was launched in 2016 to fund infrastructure schemes in areas of high housing need, and council-led projects were invited to bid for a slice of the money.
Just hours before Mr Hammond’s speech, Liz Peace, chair of the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation, raised concerns about the pace with which the government has released money from the fund, saying that the Treasury has been silent about its bid for an additional £250m submitted nearly six months ago.
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More than 25,000 homes are planned for the Old Oak Common area alone, while the corridor between Oxford and Cambridge is experiencing increased demand, in part thanks to the number of science and technology businesses that have sprung up in recent years. Funding for infrastructure in the area could help deliver around 22,000 homes, Mr Hammond said.
These measures would help the government reach its ambition of building 300,000 homes a year, he said.
He also announced that he had allocated £260m for a growth deal for the areas around the Scottish border, on both the English and Scottish sides. Growth deals provide funds to local enterprise partnerships for projects that benefit the local area and economy.
Mr Hammond also said that the government had published a consultation on infrastructure finance to seek views on how it “can best support private infrastructure investment in the context of the UK’s changing relationship with the European Investment Bank”.
In a written ministerial statement published alongside the Spring Statement, housing secretary James Brokenshire said that new planning guidance on housing diversification would be published “shortly”.
This follows the review of building out large sites by Sir Oliver Letwin, which recommended a greater diversity of tenures, such as affordable housing and build-to-rent, as a condition for receiving government support on large sites.
Mr Brokenshire said: “I will keep the need for further interventions to support housing diversification and faster build-out, including amendments to primary legislation, under review. My department will also work closely with Homes England to identify suitable sites and will look for opportunities to support local authorities to further diversify their large sites.
“Once again, I am very grateful to Sir Oliver and his panel for their important analysis and recommendations, and for their hard work over the course of the review.”
He said that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government would also publish an Accelerated Planning Green Paper later this year to discuss ways to speed up planning.
