Government to spend £443m to build 8000 homes

Housing minister, John Healey, has unveiled £443m to build more than 8,000 homes.

He said £51m of this comes from the government’s £925m Kickstart fund and will go towards restarting work on 27 stalled sites to build 2,068 homes.

Last month, Healey unveiled the first 10 projects that would benefit from the scheme and unlocked £10m from the allocation. The schemes have been chosen from an initial list of 270 sites.

The government also allocated £392m of cash from the National Affordable Housing Programme (NAHP) which will be used to build 6,120 social homes.

The cash means that the government has now spent more than £1bn on helping housebuilding in the UK since June.

Healey also said that the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) was preparing to send out invitations to tender for its developer framework. Seventy housebuilders, RSLs and developers and contractors are expected to be invited to pitch for three the regional English panels.

Companies would be selected from the list to develop public land. Healey said that the “new model” had the chance to speed up housebuilding and that there was enough “surplus” public land to build 300,000 homes.

The government said it hoped to start testing the model on HCA sites by April next year with a completion date of a year later.