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  1. Politics
21 November 2013updated 04 Oct 2023 9:55am

Balls challenges Osborne to offer new Treasury guarantees for housebuilding

If the Chancellor is willing to offer £12bn of guarantees for mortgage lending, why won't he support New Towns?

By George Eaton

While pledging to dramatically expand the rate of housebuilding in the UK if elected (to at least 200,000 a year by 2020), Labour has had less to say about how it will achieve this target. But in a speech to the National Housebuilding Council today, Ed Balls will begin to fill in some of the gaps. 

The shadow chancellor will promise to look at reviving development corporations along the lines of those that constructed the post-war New Towns, noting that they had the power “to acquire, own, manage and dispose of land and property; undertake building operation; provide public utilities; and do anything else necessary to develop the New Town.” But he will also warn that they are not a sufficient solution to the problem. Balls will say: “These Corporations generated revenue by selling land and housing, receiving rental income and receiving commercial income. However, they needed up front funding to build the infrastructure and housing which could later be sold at a profit.”

In a notable challenge to George Osborne, he will call on the Chancellor to expand the level of Treasury guarantees available for housebuilding. Having offered £12bn of guarantees for mortgages on properties worth up to £600,000 (in the form of Help to Buy), why won’t he do the same for New Towns? As Balls will say: 

George Osborne has shown himself willing to use the Government’s balance sheet to guarantee some house building – but in particular demand through guaranteeing household mortgages. And yet we read that the New Towns which you heard about a year ago have stalled.

The Government is providing guarantees of up to £12bn for Help to Buy. He should now step up to the plate to back the supply of new houses in New Towns.

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Providing guarantees to Development Corporations could be essential to provide backing for a large-scale growth programme to provide confidence, reduce risk and give credibility to the development.

We cannot afford to dither any longer – and I cannot see a stronger case for the full throated backing of the Chancellor than a step change in housing supply.

To do that we will need the full backing of the Labour Government, including the Treasury, for new towns – willing to devolve the powers, determined to provide the resources, and showing the leadership and vision that is sadly lacking in Government at the moment.

One issue not mentioned in the extracts released by Labour is that of council borrowing. Were the current cap on borrowing to be lifted, local authorities could fund a major expansion of social housing. The Chartered Institute of Housing estimates that raising the caps by £7bn could enable the construction of 60,000 homes over the next five years, creating 23,500 jobs and adding £5.6bn to the economy. As Boris Johnson argued in refrence to London in his recent manifesto 2020 Vision, “We should allow London’s councils to borrow more for house building – as they do on continental Europe – since the public sector clearly gains a bankable asset and there is no need for this to appear on the books as public borrowing.”

Yet for entirely ideological reasons, Osborne has rejected this suggestion. Unlike in other European countries, borrowing by councils appears on the national balance sheet making the deficit appear larger than it is. For a Chancellor determined to ensure that borrowing falls every year (to the extent that he delayed payments to institutions such as the World Bank and the UN and forced departments to underspend by £10.9bn), regardless of other policy objectives, lifting the cap is out of the question.

But if Labour is to even get close to building the number of new homes required, it will surely need to do so. As a recent Policy Exchange report noted, he UK needs a minimum of 1.5 million new homes from 2015 to 2020 simply to meet need, 300,000 a year. Around 221,000 new households are expected to be formed each year over this period and there is a significant backlog. Thus, even the eventual target spoken of in Labour circles – a million in five years – falls short. Unlike the Tories, with their reckless aim of stoking a new property boom, Balls and Labour are certainly asking the right questions, but they’re not offering all the answers yet. 

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