An industry forum has made an impassioned plea to Chancellor Rachel Reeves to back housing in next month’s Budget.
The Housing Forum has set out what the housing sector knows is needed, what has been delivered and what is still to do.
It’s calling for a Budget include:
- Funding for the social housing sector to ensure landlords can maintain and upgrade their existing homes, alongside building new homes;
- The government must implement rent convergence to allow social landlords to increase social rents back to target rents, of at least £2 a week above the CPI+1% annual increase;
- Grant rates for affordable housing should be reformed so that they are at a rate per habitable room in order to encourage building larger family homes where needed. Additional funding would facilitate this without the loss of overall numbers;
- The Government should adequately and urgently resource the Building Safety Regulator to unblock the backlog in new and existing buildings;
- The proposed changes to landfill tax which could add around £25,000 to the cost of building a new home on a brownfield site need rethinking;
- Changes are needed to the way that the for-profit Registered Provider sector and Build-to-Rent sectors are taxed around SDLT, VAT and Corporation Tax;
- Government should support local authority housebuilding;
- Support is needed for first time buyers, targeted at newbuild. A DIY Shared Ownership scheme for newbuild homes could be a good option here;
- VAT should be permanently removed from retrofitting, regeneration and fire safety work undertaken by Registered Providers and the public sector;
- Additional funding must be provided to fully cover additional costs associated with meeting higher energy efficiency standards or a higher service level via the new Decent Homes Standard.
