Flint insists housing targets will not be scrapped

Housing and planning minister Caroline Flint has insisted that the Government will not scrap its ambitious housing targets.

Her comments, made at the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, came as a housing expert warned that the current credit crunch was undermining the target of up to three million new homes by 2020.

National Housing Federation chief executive David Orr warned that the 2020 target could be missed by up to nine years without further Government intervention in the housing market.

Orr argued that without radical action, only just over half the target is likely to be built by 2020. He calculated that on the present showing some 1.6m homes could be built by the end of the next decade.

However, he said housing associations could more than double their present housing rate, with help from the Government, to make the target more feasible.

Orr argued: "With the global credit crunch worsening and conditions getting tougher for all house builders, it is time to recognise that the very commendable 2020 target is now almost impossible."

Flint, though, stressed that the original 2020 target remains in place.

She told the party conference: "Sceptics ask me to scrap our target of 240,000 new homes a year – three million more homes by 2020. They want us to admit defeat. We won’t give up that easily. Labour will build the homes Britain needs."

Read the National Housing Federation news release.

Roger Milne

25 September 2008