Housing Corporation money will be used to turn completed private homes into social housing units

The government is to use £200 million of Housing Corporation funding to prop-up ailing housebuilders by buying completed homes and turning them in to social housing.

The announcement was part of a raft of initiatives designed to reinvigorate the housing market, announced in the wake of Gordon Brown’s draft Queen’s Speech today.

These initiatives include expanding the government’s shared ownership programme – called home-buy – so that all first-time buyers earning less than £60,000 are eligible to access it, not just identified “key workers”.

However, the government is not going to provide any extra money for the programme, meaning the overall amount of people benefiting from shared ownership is unlikely to increase.

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