Writing to Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Florence Eshalomi, chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government committee, said the committee believes a “generational increase in social and affordable housing investment is required” if the government wants to meet its 1.5 million housing target during the parliamentary period.
“Despite the cross-party consensus of the need to increase housebuilding, successive governments have for decades failed to deliver enough new homes. This has resulted in… a housing affordability crisis, with families waiting years on social housing waiting lists and the dream of homeownership fading for many. It is now imperative that the government seizes the opportunity at the Spending Review to meet the scale of its housing ambition,” she noted.
Eshalomi continued on to say she was “deeply concerned” about media reports that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government department is an “unprotected” department so could also face “significant cuts” to its budget next week.
In the Spending Review, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will lay out departmental budgets for the next three years and investment budgets for the next four years.
There are suggestions that the proposed increase in defence spending, which Prime Minister Starmer said could go up to 3% of GDP earlier this week, could mean that other departments could face cuts.
Renters’ Rights Act: what landlords may be getting wrong
Sponsored by BM Solutions
She said she understood the “pressures on public finance will mean difficult policy decisions are needed”, but that it also had an “unwavering commitment” to deliver 1.5 million new homes in the coming years.
Govt will fail to meet housing target if it solely relies on private sector
Eshalomi said the government would fail to meet its housing target of 1.5 million if it relies solely on the private sector.
She noted that the National Housing Federation (NHF) has highlighted that a 10-year Affordable Homes Programme with an average of £4.6bn per year over its first five years could deliver 320,000 new affordable homes.
The NHF has also called for a 10-year rent settlement and targeted grant funding to finance repairs and remediation of existing housing stock.
“We note the recommendation of Shelter, Crisis, and the NHF that the government should set a target to deliver 90,000 social rent homes per year to begin to tackle the growing waiting list for social housing in England,” she added.
Eshalomi noted that the last time that over 300,000 homes were built in a single year in the UK was 1977, and in this year, more homes were built by local authorities than private enterprise.
