Budget: Chancellor sees infrastructure role in solving housing crisis

The Chancellor unveiled extra money for transport infrastructure that is focused on getting new homes built, but fell short of the £50bn that the communities secretary Sajid Javid had reportedly said was necessary.

The Budget included a £2.7bn increase for the Housing Infrastructure Fund that takes total investment in the competitive fund for local authorities to £5bn and a further £630m to accelerate the building of homes on small, stalled sites by funding on-site infrastructure and land remediation. The measures are designed to help a Government bid to increase home building to 300,000 per year by the end of the Parliament, from 217,000 last year.

He also announced a new Strategic Infrastructure Tariff for Combined Authorities and planning joint committees so that other conurbations can pool funding from across a conurbation towards large infrastructure projects, as London has with Crossrail. And in a similar vein there will be a consultation to remove restrictions on the pooling of Section 106 monies from developers for a single piece of infrastructure where "significant development is planned on several large strategic sites".

However, Philip Hammond appeared to acknowledge that further measures would be needed to support additional house-building by "closing the significant gap between housing completions and the amount of land allocated or permissioned" by ordering a review to be chaired by Sir Oliver Letwin, to report in the Spring.