£5bn fund confirmed for victims of cladding crisis

“The Chancellor’s announcement that funds are being put into fixing unsafe cladding, is a vital move to help first-time buyers, who have been stuck in their properties unable to sell them and facing crippling costs.
“The resolution of this has to be a priority, to open up a section of the housing market where people have been unable to mortgage the property and release those looking to move up the ladder.
“We just hope that this move is enough to cover the scale of the problem.”

The Chancellor has confirmed that £5bn will be put towards remediating buildings with unsafe cladding.

This will be part-funded by a new Residential Property Developer Tax (RPDT), which was originally announced in February.

The new tax will come into force in April 2022. It will be charged at a rate of 4% on annual developer profits over £25m.

The government says the introduction of RPDT will ‘ensure that the largest developers make a fair contribution to help pay for building safety remediation’.

The government has also confirmed funding for its housebuilding programme, as it seeks to ‘turn Generation Rent into Generation Buy’.

A further £1.8bn will be invested as part of the government’s commitment to spend £10bn ‘unlocking’ more than a million new homes between now and 2026. The latest funding will be spent on turning brownfield sites into ‘greener’ new homes.

The Chancellor also reconfirmed the planned £11.5bn investment into the Affordable Homes Programme. He said the £7.5bn invested in the spending review period will represent the largest cash investment in housing in a decade.

The government says the Affordable Homes Programme will deliver up to 180,000 affordable homes, with around two-thirds of funding being spent on homes outside London.

Source: Which?