What will the prime minister's housing contribution mean for the industry
Hard to say how many votes it will win him, but Gordon Brown鈥檚 拢1.5bn contribution to the Homes and Communities Agency deserves a few cheers from the construction industry. The money is intended to deliver 20,000 affordable homes and build the infrastructure to stimulate another 10,000 private ones. The government has also initiated a new model for housebuilding: councils are to begin building again, and contractors will be given land in return for a share of the equity in the finished product. If these ideas work, they could create a whole new way of doing social housing.
As our news story points out, the total amount built will probably be 10,000 short of the 70,000 target that was to have been reached in 2010/11. But given that it was set in 2007, before the recession turned all those section 106 agreements into fish and chip paper, it鈥檚 thousands more than anyone expected.
This article continues at Denise Chevin's
