“… The £3bn fund will be made up of £1bn in short-term loan funding. This will be used for small builders, custom builders, and innovators, delivering 25,500 homes this parliament. A further £2bn of funding for infrastructure will be used to unlock sites for up to 200,000 homes over the longer term. Of this, £1.15bn is new money.
The action will see the government use surplus public land to build more homes more quickly by encouraging new developers with different models to enter the market, and to support small and medium-sized firms and constructors. This will help to close the housing supply deficit, ministers stated.
In addition, local planning authorities will be able to grant permission in principle on sites suitable for housing-led development, as well as turning abandoned shopping centres into new communities and increasing housing density around transport hubs.
Javid said that the government had made progress in boosting construction, with over 700,000 net additional homes delivered between April 2010 and March 2015, but it was now time to go further.
“We want to ensure everyone has a safe and secure place to live and that means we’ve got to build more homes,” he added.
“It is only by building more houses that we will alleviate the financial burden on those who are struggling to manage.”
Hammond stated there had been a housing shortage in this country for decades, and that the government was determined to tackle it.”
“We’ll use all the tools at our disposal to accelerate housebuilding and ensure that over time, housing becomes more affordable, that is why we are committing £2bn of additional investment towards this.”
http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2016/10/chancellor-pledges-ps3bn-build-25000-homes-2020
So, it’s short-term loans, selling off “public land” that the public will never get back or probably be able to replace, subsidising infrastructure that developers are supposed to pay for, decreasing the number of shopping centres and building little boxes near bus stations and railway stations.
And that’s a PLAN? The small builders will have to pay back the loans, public realm will be flogged off to developer friends at rock- bottom prices, WE pay for infrastructure instead of developers who still charge the same or more for the housing it leads to – AND we won’t be able to shop nearer home OR park our cars near bus stations and railways!
East Devon Watch 
The underlying assumption in the government’s thinking is that prices are related to costs. And that providing developers with cheap land and infrastructure paid for centrally rather than by developers i.e. reducing the building costs for developers will result in lower prices.
But economic theory (and our own experience – and indeed the government’s very own dogma of “market forces”) tells us that is not the case.
Developers sell homes at market prices – which are driven by supply and demand – and when demand exceeds supply, prices rise dramatically, which is why developers are landbanking and restricting the flow of new homes.
Developers build homes to make a profit – so they won’t build and sell homes at a loss. Reducing the price, simply lowers the point where if prices are low enough developers will stop building because they will make a loss.
The government supposes that these “incentives” will encourage developers to build more homes and reduce house prices, but developers don’t want lower house prices because that will seriously erode their profit margins – but taking the money and keeping supply of new homes below demand means that they can both have this extra cake and eat it.
Its not rocket science – and the Owl is not a rocket scientist, but can nevertheless see immediately that these subsidies are just going to increase profits. I cannot believe that the government, with its myriad of expensive consultants, special advisors, experts etc. cannot understand this – so either this is a deliberate repayment for the developers donations to the Tory party or yet again the government has outsourced policy decisions to the poachers..
LikeLike