Support for families and first time buyers to making housing more affordable

Local estate and letting agents

Local estate and letting agents have given a cautious welcome to Gordon Brown's plans to bring some much needed sanity to the housing market.

The Government announced further plans to boost housing supply and deliver more affordable housing as part of the Budget.

The proposals will help young people get a foot on the housing ladder, provide more homes for rent and improve the environmental sustainability of Britain's homes.

The key measures include:

• More support for first-time buyers with the launch of a new Shared Equity Taskforce and tailored help to give people a first step on the housing ladder to be launched next week.
• Increased investment of £970 million through the National Affordable Housing Programme to deliver 35,000 new low cost home ownership properties over the next two years, ensuring the UK pioneers shared equity to bring home ownership within reach of first-time buyers.  The NAHP will also invest significantly in social housing for rent and details will be announced shortly.
• Bringing forward public sector land to deliver a further 30,000 new homes, contributing to the 100,000 new homes being provided through public sector land over time.
• Piloting an extra homes scheme to invest in bringing sites back into use and build more social housing for rent, potentially reducing Housing Benefit costs.
• £50 million for the installation of microgeneration technologies like wind turbines for social housing and other buildings to improve the sustainability of development.
• Extended support through energy companies to provide subsidised insulation for 1/4 million installations to improve the energy efficiency of existing homes.
• Extension of the Landlords Energy Savings Allowance to cover hot water system insultation and draught proofing to incentivise landlords to improve energy efficiency in the private sector.

The new measures build firmly on the Government's reponse to Kate Barker's Review of Housing Supply last year, which set an ambition to increase house building to 200,000 per year to help meet demand and address affordability problems.

Yvette Cooper said:

"We have an ageing and growing population and face growing housing pressures and we need more homes for the next generation.  That means more social housing, more market housing and more shared equity opportunities to help first-time buyers, as we have set out today. The new homes also need to be environmentally sustainable for future
generations too.

"If we don't build more homes recent research shows that two thirds of thirty year old couples will not be able to afford a home of their own in 20 years time.  That's why it is so important to invest in new homes now."