Government scrapping affordable starter homes ‘deplorable’, say MPs
Another housing story showing just how fundamentally broken the current arrangements for providing people with a start on (or for that matter in terms of older people – off) the housing ladder are. It tells us:
A government plan to deliver discounted starter homes has left 85,000 young people waiting in vain for an affordable place to live, in a policy branded “deplorable” by a cross-party committee of MPs.
The 2015 initiative to build 200,000 homes and sell them at a 20% discount was formally scrapped this year without a single home being built. But £173m was spent buying land, a damning report by the Commons public accounts committee said. It is now on course to deliver only 6,600 homes and is being replaced by a new scheme.
The influential committee highlighted the abandoned scheme as a waste of time and resources as part of a broadside against government housing policy, which it said has been “stringing expectant young people along for years” with housing policies that “come to nothing as ministers come and go with alarming frequency” – there have been 19 since 1997.
It also criticised the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) for failing to say how it will reach its ambition of building 300,000 homes a year in England and accused ministers of an “alarming blurring” of the definition of affordable housing.