Shapps: we need 200k more homes a year

Housing minister Grant Shapps wants the Government needs to build at least a further 200,000 homes a year.

He told the Radio 4 Today programme that building more homes was the only way to choke off steep rises in rents and cope with meeting growing housing need.

Shapps said that the Government has a three pronged approach to stimulate house building: extending right to buy, releasing Government land on a build now and pay later basis and reforming the planning system.

He said: “We think there has to be a couple of hundred thousand new homes created each year. Over all you have to get all things working in tandem, there is not one single thing you can do to solve a housing crisis that has been building up over years and years.”

The latest comments followed his parliamentary private secretary’s remarks to the Housebuilder Housing Market Intelligence Conference that the Government expects to be building 230,000 homes a year by the end of the current parliament in 2015.

But Jake Berry MP, also said the government’s ability to meet this target could face severe set-backs if the proposals for the National Planning Policy Framework are back-tracked upon, or if the Government fails to release sufficient amounts of public land.

He said that the Government recognised to get the economy moving it needs to get Britain building.