Tweet
Low-cost housing plan for first-time home-buyers falls flat
Originally posted by 5corpio
Seven years ago, the then Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, announced plans to build homes for just £60,000 to help young first-time buyers priced out of the market - but did they ever get built?
He devoted much of his speech to the Labour Party Conference in 2004 to the problem of young people being priced out of the housing market. Since coming to power in 1997, he observed, the average price of a home for a first-time buyer had tripled to around £220,000 ($355,000). The former Labour minister's solution was to challenge the construction industry to build homes for just £60,000 ($97,000). They could do this, he argued, by embracing more modern methods of construction, like building homes off-site and using materials more effectively.
The price of the property would further be brought down for the first-time buyer, he said, because they would be paying only for the cost of building and not for the land. he said.
"So the first-time buyer pays the cost of building a home but not the full market cost of the land, which is helping to make it impossible for our people to buy those houses."
Strikingly different Nearly seven years on from the announcement, what has happened to his
Read more on this story: BBC News - Low-cost housing plan for first-time home-buyers falls flat
He devoted much of his speech to the Labour Party Conference in 2004 to the problem of young people being priced out of the housing market. Since coming to power in 1997, he observed, the average price of a home for a first-time buyer had tripled to around £220,000 ($355,000). The former Labour minister's solution was to challenge the construction industry to build homes for just £60,000 ($97,000). They could do this, he argued, by embracing more modern methods of construction, like building homes off-site and using materials more effectively.
The price of the property would further be brought down for the first-time buyer, he said, because they would be paying only for the cost of building and not for the land. he said.
"So the first-time buyer pays the cost of building a home but not the full market cost of the land, which is helping to make it impossible for our people to buy those houses."
Strikingly different Nearly seven years on from the announcement, what has happened to his
Read more on this story: BBC News - Low-cost housing plan for first-time home-buyers falls flat