Community-led housing gets £60m boost

The community housing fund is to be re-launched from January 2018, with £60m annual funding until 2020.

The announcement was made by housing minister Alok Sharma at this week’s inaugural national community-led housing conference in London.

The fund will provide both capital and revenue funding and will also be used to develop an advisory network to support community groups trying to get projects off the ground.

Announcing the re-launch of the fund Alok Sharma said: ‘The community housing fund has been a great success in its first year.

‘It has helped get projects off the ground across the UK and the grants were paid to authorities that had the least affordable homes or the highest density of second homes.

‘We have committed to continue to provide a further £60m each year until at least 2019/20 which totals an investment of £240m over four years. This is another step towards helping people get a foot on the housing ladder’.

Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, chair of the National Community Land Trust Network, which hosted this week’s conference said: ‘We are delighted that the government has reinforced its commitment to community-led housing, recognising the valuable role it plays in delivering homes people need and diversifying the housing market.’

Tony Armstrong, chief executive of Locality, welcomed the move, saying: ‘All over the country community organisations are working locally to tackle housing problems and create the affordable homes we desperately need.

‘We believe community-led responses can play a bigger role in tackling our national housing crisis and we’ve been working with a range of partners to build capacity and develop solutions from the ground up.’