Government plans £40m fund to boost housing supply

A clutch of top housebuilders look set to benefit from a £40m government programme to unlock housing sites across the South and the Midlands.

Yvette Cooper, the housing and planning minister, this week announced 29 “growth points” that will share the money.

Schemes by Bellway, Persimmon, Redrow and Taylor Woodrow are among those that will benefit. The money will be used to provide transport infrastructure and amenities for housing and employment sites in high growth areas.

The government says the fund will help to build 100,000 extra homes over the next 10 years.

The announcement says that the £40m is the first tranche of funding for the growth points, with future money depending on the outcome of next summer’s Comprehensive Spending Review, which will map out expenditure for the next three years.

The idea behind the growth points is to make development more cost effective than in South-east growth areas such as the Thames Gateway, where billions of pounds of infrastructure is needed to bring forward housing. Some of the schemes to benefit are:

• A 12,000-home extension to the east of the A419 at Swindon
• Strategic development areas on the edge of Portsmouth and Southampton
• A Bellway Homes scheme to regenerate a north Solihull council estate
• A St James scheme of 1,250 homes and employment space at Southside Reading in Berkshire
• A railway station to serve a 5,000 home settlement at Cranbrook, Kent, being developed by Persimmon, Redrow and Taylor Woodrow
• A low environmental impact settlement in Leicester, and an urban extension in the Nottingham green belt.

Tim Lawrence, director of strategic developments at Taylor Woodrow, welcomed the announcement. He said: “It’s encouraging that the government has made this move to free up housing supply.”

However, he added that £40m was a “drop in the ocean” compared with the scale of the infrastructure needed to support the development that the government wanted.