Miliband outlines housebuilding plans – including “New Homes Corporations” and public sector housing

Last year Ed Miliband committed Labour to ensuring 200,000 homes are built each year by 2020. Whether or not that target is ambitious enough has been hotly contested over the past year, but as he arrived in Manchester for Labour conference today, Ed Miliband outlined how that target will be met – as the first of a series of “Labour’s plan for Britain’s Future” announcements.

The proposals – the first to be revealed from an interim report of the party’s Lyons housing commission –  seek to learn the lessons of the “focused delivery of the 2012 Olympics” – identifying a specific site and then developing it on time and on budget. “New Home Corporations” will build on this approach from the Olympics, and are designed to ensure “all communities will have similar powers at their disposal as part of an extended devolution to English local government and its city and county regions”.

Established by local authorities (normally at devolved city and county region level where councils choose to collaborate) New Homes Corporations would be accountable to their communities and work closely with the private sector partners and housing associations commissioning a wider range of developers, including SMEs, to build out sites at pace. Crucially though, public sector housing will form a substantial part of their output (although likely less than half).

The policy, is designed to overcome three major constraints on house building:

• Too often land is held back because owners and developers do not have certainty that it will be built out
• Too often development stalls because of infrastructure uncertainty
• Not enough competition in housebuilding

Miliband’s announcement today builds on the party’s previous housing announcements – including “use it or lose it” to tackle landbanks, Garden Cities and giving landlocked councils a right to grow.