Select committee: Built Environment Committee
Conclusion 110
1st Report - Meeting housing demand
Published 10 Jan 2022
Built Environment Committee Meeting the UK’s housing demand All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
Homes England told us that they provide debt and equity finance through programmes such as the £4.5 billion Home Building Fund, which was announced in November 2020. Homes England’s aspiration is for the programme to deliver more than 73,500 homes; this finance has already supported 306 SMEs who hold contracted or approved deals. However, we heard that the value of loans agreed through the Home Building Fund reduced by 44% last year. 185 The Government has also set up the ENABLE Build Guarantee with the British Business Bank which will make available up to £1 billion of guarantees to support finance for smaller housebuilders. 186 The Minister said that Homes England supports SMEs through “resources and expertise to help SMEs, essentially, grow their businesses and help them to learn the softer skills that you need to build a business from a smaller scale to a slightly larger scale.” 187
From: Built Environment Committee, 1st Report - Meeting housing demand, 10 January 2022
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 28 March 2022 (deadline 10 March 2022).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The Government welcomes the Committee's report and says it is "taking action on a number of the issues identified", agreeing with some recommendations while disagreeing with others, including on home ownership schemes and the Apprenticeship Levy.
- It "disagrees with the report's assessment that homeownership schemes do not provide good value for money", citing independent evaluations and its own evaluation of Help to Buy.
- On older people's housing, it is launching a new taskforce "this year", chaired by the Minister for Housing, to look at better choice, quality and security of housing.
- It does "not intend to set out a proportion" of Affordable Homes Programme funding for social housing, though "around half" of the affordable homes are to be for social and affordable rent.
- On the Apprenticeship Levy it says it has "no plans to review" it. On planning fees it is "exploring options" to increase them, and on local plans it will make an announcement "in due course".