Croydon Central MP Gavin Barwell was unable to attend the Develop Croydon Conference in person due to parliamentary commitments.
However, during a video address to the Placemaking Croydon event, held on Tuesday, November 22, Mr Barwell – appointed minister for housing, planning and London following the summer reshuffle – said the government stood “full square” behind Croydon’s housing ambitions.
During his video address, Mr Barwell outlined some of the work the council was doing to ensure more homes are built. Here is his speech in full:
The real question that you’re looking at today is can Croydon deliver on its housing ambitions and how can we ensure that as much housing as possible is genuinely within the reach of local people – two absolutely fundamental questions.
Starting on the question of delivery, when I was appointed to this job by the prime minister back in July, she made it very clear that she expected me to get this country building the homes that are desperately needed.
The government has an absolutely crucial role, working side by side with the Mayor of London and Croydon Council, to make sure our joint ambition to get more homes built is actually delivered on the ground.
We have already announced some concrete steps to take us in the right direction. Back in October my boss, Sajid Javid, announce a Home Building Fund which is a £3billion programme. Of that, £1billion is spent trying to diversify the market to support small builders, custom builders and to support the use of innovative technology in terms of how we build the homes we need in this country – off-site construction and other modern methods of construction.
The £2billion is dedicated to unlocking large sites – difficulty with the infrastructure or whatever else is holding up the delivery of those sites – so that fund can be a crucial asset to supporting the ambitions that Croydon has.
Tomorrow, here at Westminster, the Chancellor Philip Hammond will be delivering the autumn statement and later this year we will be publishing a housing white paper.
They will set out in some detail more of the things that we’re going to be doing as a government to help not just Croydon but local communities across the country address the housing need that they see in their area so that all of you there – whether you are part of the political leadership of the council, working for developers or interested in building in our town – can be confident that the government stands full square behind the ambitions the council has to get our town building the homes that our district needs.
The second question – the tougher question I think – is around affordability. When we talk about affordable housing as a housing policy what we tend to mean as affordable housing is housing association or council homes.
That’s not actually what ordinary people necessarily mean by it. Most people want to own their own home and when they talk about affordable housing they mean ‘are we going to build homes that I can actually afford to buy, to give me a chance of getting onto the housing ladder’.
I think here we’ve got to look at both a long-term and a short-term solution. The long-term solution I’m very clear about – we need to get this country building the homes that we need.
The reason why prices is so high is because for 30 or 40 years we’ve not built the homes that we needed to build. It’s a simple law of economics that if the demand for something far exceeds the supply, the price is going to go up.
The long-term ambition is to get this country building the homes that we need and we need to do that for a number of years before we see the real impact on affordability.
But in the short term both the council and the government have got to step in to help people. That’s both helping people to own – so our Help to Buy scheme, which tries to avoid people having to face huge deposits, our Starter Homes policy which is coming in that allows homes for first-time buyers at 20 per cent below the market price; a massive expansion of shared ownership for those that can’t afford initially outright ownership; we’re also very interested in the concept of Rent to Buy where people pay a subsidised rate giving them time to save up for a deposit and then being able to move into ownership of that property down the line.
But it also means recognising that some people are not going to be able to own their own home and making sure there is funding there available for sub-market rent.
So a whole range of products that help and assist people to get onto the housing ladder.
So that’s just a very brief few remarks from me about those two key questions that you’re talking about but one thing that I want to end by emphasising, was that as Croydon and – as indeed communities across the country – try to address these fundamental challenges, about how we make sure we get the homes build that are needed and allow people to access that housing, this government and myself as the housing minister stand full square behind you and we will set out in the coming days and weeks ahead further policies that will make a real difference to meeting those challenges.