20 things

The ODPMs Five Year Plan

28 January 2006

• On 24 January 2005 the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announced a plan which will attempt to get more people on low and middle incomes onto the home ownership over the next five years.
• The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Five Year Plan, called Homes for All, has a range of measures aimed at extending oppurtunities for home ownership.
• Some of the measures include: the aim to help 80,000 people into home ownership by 2010, included a first-time buyer’s initiative (FTBi) using publicly-owned land for new homes; Homebuy – a new scheme that will allow tenants of Local Authorities and Housing Associations to buy a stake in their home which the ODPM says will extend the opportunity for home ownership for up to 300,000 families.
• The ODPM say they will ensure the proceeds from Homebuy sales are re-invested in housing.
• Other aims for Homes For all include: investing £1.1 billion in four Growth Areas across the wider South East and up to £40 million to support other areas which want to pursue growth.
• The ODPM plans to ‘protect the environment and urban heritage through new powers to limit low density development and protect the green belt’. It also plans to introduce a new code for sustainable buildings.
• It also plans to extend ‘the £1.2 billion market renewal programme in the North and Midlands to cover new areas suffering from low demand and abandoned homes’.
• Homes For All plans to ‘provide all social tenants, and seven out of ten vulnerable people in the private sector, with a decent home’ and deliver ‘an extra 10,000 social homes per year’. It also aims ‘to cut by half the number of people in temporary accomodation by 2010’.
• The plan will ‘extend the market renewal programme to revive housing markets to new areas suffering low demand’ and ‘provide support for people who choose alternative types of accomodation, such as gypsies and travellers, but taking action to crack down on unauthorised development’.
• The ODPM has pledged to continue the right-to-buy and right-to acquire schemes for people who qualify to purchase their home from their local authority or housing association.
• John Prescott also announced details of a competition the ODPM will be running for developers to build a home for £60,000. The aim is to show that quality homes can be delivered at lower costs.
• The plan also announced ‘changes to the planning system to ensure more affordable housing for key workers and young families in rural areas’; and ‘maintaining a strong social housing sector’.
• The ODPM has ‘plans to extend quality and choice for people renting their homes’ such as ‘ building 10,000 extra social homes a year by 2008 – a 50 per cent increase on current rates’.
• The plan aims to ‘extend choice-based letttings nationwide by 2010, giving tenants more say over where they live’.
• Prescott unveiled MoveUK – a online system designed to bring together information about jobs and housing opportunities, ‘giving people the chance of a fresh start in a new area’.
• The ODPM also plans to tackle homelessness ‘with the aim of halving numbers in temporary accomodation by 2010; and providing more than £5 billion housing-related support to help over 1.2 million people, many of them older or disabled people, to live independently in their own homes’.
• Later this month a partner document, entitled People, Places and Prosperity. The ODPM claim this ‘will set out a five-year plan of action for revitalising communities, invigorating local democracy and strengthen accountability from neighbourhoods to regions’.
• The government is also ‘exploring with the CML the scope for introducing private finance for the funding of equity loans’. It says ‘initial discussions are promising and have the potential to reduce the cost to government enabling assistance to be given first-time buyers’.
• The government is ‘looking to encourage local authorities and other landowners to use the FTBi model to contribute to increasing the provision of affordable housing’.
• For full details on the ODPM’s five year strategy, visit www.odpm.gov.uk/fiveyearstrategy.