Brown housing plans ‘simplistic’ says council leader

THE leader of Oxfordshire County Council has branded Gordon Brown’s much heralded housing plans as ‘simplistic’ and says that they will not have the effect of helping people on to the housing ladder.
The Prime Minister today announced plans to build three million new homes by 2020 with 25-year fixed-rate affordable mortgages and a Homes Agency to oversee new developments.

Cllr Keith Mitchell, who is also chair of the South East England Regional Assembly, said he was pleased to hear assurances that the Green Belt would be unaffected but added that he was far from convinced that this would prove to be the case.
Councillor Mitchell said: “There has been a lot of talk but little detail from the Prime Minister. It is all very simplistic. We have a national stock of 22 million homes. Building 150,000, 200,000 or 300,000 new homes per year will have a very limited impact on housing prices.
“There needs to be a far broader approach with a range of carefully thought out measures to deliver the affordable homes that people want and desperately need.
“All of these measures need the government to make housing and infrastructure investment the top priority – something it has not been to date. Affordable homes must be built, social housing must be taken seriously and new schools, roads and other key infrastructure work must accompany this.
“In Oxfordshire and the South East, simply upping housing numbers without infrastructure will leave people unable to access school places, secure health care or even move freely on our road and rail network.

WHAT HAS MR BROWN ACTUALLY ANNOUNCED?
Here is an extract:
“In two eras of the last century – the interwar years and the 1950s onwards – Britain made new housebuilding a national priority. Now through this decade and right up to 2020 I want us – in environmentally friendly ways using principally brownfield land and building eco towns and villages – to meet housing need by building over a quarter of a million more homes than previously planned, a total by 2020 of 3 million new homes for families across the country.
“So for England we will raise the annual housebuilding target for 2016 from 200,000 to 240,000 new homes a year.
“We propose a new Housing Bill which will support and encourage initiatives on the ground by local authorities and other authorities and to do this will bring together English Partnerships with the Housing Corporation to create a new homes agency charged with bringing surplus public land into housing use to deliver more social and affordable housing and support regeneration. This will include new partnerships with local authorities, health authorities and the private and voluntary sectors to build more housing made affordable by shared equity schemes and more social housing responsive to individual needs.
“The Planning Bill will implement the Eddington and Barker reports to speed up the development of the major infrastructure projects that Britain needs to facilitate economic and housing growth, and to speed up planning generally.
“The Planning Gain Supplement Bill – to ensure the public receive benefit from planning gain – is provisional because if prior to the Pre-Budget Report a better way is identified of ensuring local communities receive significantly more of the benefit planning gain to invest in necessary infrastructure including transport – and it is demonstrated that these are a better alternative – the Government will be prepared to defer next session’s legislation.”
READ THE FULL SPEECH HERE