The new ‘Home Building Fund’ was announced as part of this week’s levelling up white paper
A loan fund designed to pay for infrastructure works needed to kickstart housing schemes will have £624m to distribute, the government has said.
The Home Building Fund was one of a number of funding packages announced as part of housing secretary Michael Gove’s levelling up white paper, issued this week.
The government’s housing agency, Homes England, on Wednesday said the fund would provide loans to developers, master developers and landowners of up to £250m to pay for site preparation, enabling or other infrastructure works on schemes needed before housebuilding can start – but didn’t set out how much funding would be available.
A spokesperson for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities said the Home Building Fund would be financed with £624m earmarked for infrastructure loans in November last year, using money allocated to the department in the spending review in December 2020.
The spokesperson also clarified that the separate £1.5bn Levelling Up Home Building Fund, designed to provide development finance for homebuilders and also announced this week, is also using money allocated initially in the 2020 spending review. Homes England will administer this funding pot too.
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Unlike previous such funding, both funds will not be forced to focus the majority of the loans on the areas of highest housing demand.
Both funds are separate from the further £1.5bn announced this week for a brownfield fund designed to kick start the regeneration of 20 of the UK’s most struggling towns and cities. Wolverhampton and Sheffield have been identified as the first recipients of this funding, which will not be administered by Homes England, with 18 further places due to benefitted to be announced in the coming months.
Gove’s levelling up white paper has been broadly criticised by the industry as lacking sufficient detail and new funding to match its ambition to “level up” poor performing parts of the country with London and the South east.
The government has not set out a formal process under which towns and cities will get selected to benefit from the brownfield fund.
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