£10 billion package to build more homes and level up communities

A package to build more homes, end rough sleeping and support and level up communities across England  has been welcomed by Secretary of State Robert Jenrick today (26 November 2020).

The measures were unveiled by the Chancellor as part of yesterday’s Spending Review. The Spending Review underlines the government’s immediate priority of protecting people’s lives and livelihoods as the country continues to battle the outbreak, and also sets out how the government will deliver stronger public services.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is receiving nearly £10 billion of funding in the next financial year.

The government is delivering more affordable, secure and greener homes for families across the country. Funding in the Spending Review will go towards our long-term investments in housing, including through a £7.1 billion National Home Building Fund and more than £12 billion being invested through the Affordable Homes Programme in the coming years.

The Spending Review also helps us go further in levelling up every part of the country, with a new £4 billion Levelling Up Fund to invest in local infrastructure and support economic recovery.

Councils across England will be supported with access to an additional £2.2 billion to deliver core services and more than £3 billion of additional support for COVID-19 pressures next year.

To help protect the most vulnerable in our society, the government has announced an additional £254 million of resource funding to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping – a 60% increase compared to Spending Review 2019.

Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said:

Councils have played a critical role during the pandemic. We’re ensuring they have the resources needed to deliver great public services and help their communities recover and prosper, including more than £2 billion of extra funding for core services.

Our £7.1 billion National Home Building Fund will help build the homes and the infrastructure communities need to succeed. Along with our Affordable Homes Programme, this brings investment in housing to almost £20 billion.

The new £4 billion Levelling Up Fund will provide a holistic approach to driving prosperity, taking the unique circumstances of each local area into account. And we will continue to tackle rough sleeping, helped by an additional £254 million of funding, including accommodation and substance misuse support.

This comprehensive package will help to build the homes the country needs, level up communities, protect jobs and public services while also supporting some of the most vulnerable people in society.

Delivering much-needed new homes

Investing in new housing is key to delivering more affordable, secure and greener homes for families across the country and in driving the growth and regeneration of local areas.

As part of the Spending Review, the government has announced a National Home Building Fund investing £7.1 billion over 4 years, which will shake up the housing market by backing smaller developers, unlocking brownfield land and supporting innovative construction techniques.

The fund will support up to 660,000 additional jobs and unlock up to 860,000 homes.  This includes funding for:

• a new ‘Help to Build’ equity loan scheme for people who want to build their own homes, providing access to low deposit mortgages
• £2.2 billion of loans for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and innovative housebuilders to support new housing in areas where it is needed most
• an additional £100 million of grant funding in 2021-22 for unlocking brownfield sites, supporting house building on land that may be less attractive such as ex-industrial sites

This funding is on top of our unprecedented Affordable Homes Programme, worth more than £12 billion – the largest cash investment in affordable housing for a decade.

Supporting local areas in recovering from the pandemic

The government has set out plans to further the levelling up agenda by launching a new £4 billion Levelling Up Fund that will invest in local infrastructure that has a visible impact on people and their communities and will support economic recovery.

The Spending Review also includes an initial £220 million of investment in the next financial year to help local areas prepare for the introduction of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

In time, total domestic UK-wide funding will at least match receipts from EU Structural Funds, which were previously funded by UK taxpayers’ money and seen as bureaucratic and inflexible.

Ending rough sleeping, supporting vulnerable people and strengthening communities

The government has taken unprecedented action to support the most vulnerable people in our society during the pandemic. By September, we had housed 29,000 vulnerable people – supporting over 10,000 into emergency accommodation and 19,000 into settled accommodation or with move on support.

We know that more work needs to be done to end rough sleeping altogether and this Spending Review will help us to do that. It includes an additional £254 million of resource funding to tackle homelessness and rough sleeping, including the £103 million announced at Budget 2020 for accommodation and substance misuse support next year.

This takes total resource funding in 2021-22 to £676 million, a 60% increase compared to Spending Review 2019. This will help us to end rough sleeping this Parliament and fully enforce the Homelessness Reduction Act.

The Spending Review also helps support vulnerable people and strengthen communities, including through:

• Continuing the Troubled Families Programme into a new phase in the coming financial year with up to £165 million of further funding. The programme has made a huge difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of families, reducing the number of children in care and young people in prison.
• Providing £125 million new funding to support domestic victims and their children within safe accommodation.  This is another big step towards tackling domestic abuse, ensuring victims will be able to access life-saving support to help them recover and rebuild their lives.
• Confirming support for the Windrush Memorial and related heritage programmes. This includes constructing a £1 million permanent monument at London Waterloo Station.

The government is also developing a strategy to tackle the inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities across the country. We will be working with other government departments and stakeholders to deliver this work and will be announcing further details in due course, ahead of publishing the strategy itself in 2021.

Supporting local government

We are supporting a sustainable, reformed and resilient local government sector that delivers services and empowers communities by providing councils with:

• access to an additional £2.2 billion to deliver core services
• councils in England are expected to receive over £3 billion of additional support for COVID-19 pressures next year. The £3 billion of additional support is:
  • an additional £1.55 billion of grant funding to councils to meet additional expenditure pressures as a result of COVID-19
  • an estimated £762 million to compensate local authorities for 75% of irrecoverable loss of council tax and business rates revenues in 2020-21 that would otherwise need to be funded by local authorities in 2021-22 and later years
  • £670 million of additional grant funding to help councils support the more than 4 million households that are least able to afford council tax payments
  • extending the existing COVID-19 sales, fees and charges reimbursement scheme for a further 3 months until the end of June 2021

The government is also providing a range of other funding sources to support councils, improve services, and develop local economies, such as the new funding for domestic abuse duties mentioned above.

Supporting our building safety and planning reforms

The Spending Review also supports reforms to building safety to make homes safer by providing an additional £70 million to help set up new regulators, build a new regulatory regime, empower residents to raise safety concerns and help remove dangerous cladding.

We are also investing in comprehensive changes to the planning system, including an additional £12 million funding for the first stages of planning reform to improve the speed, quality and beauty of development, and empower local people to engage in the planning system.