A new report has revealed that 6% of land in England and Wales is in public ownership.
A housing delivery fund worth £1bn, the ‘New Communities Partnership’, has been activated in order to assist the public sector to build 10,000 homes through the UK within the next 4 – 5 years.
This will result in the coming together of…
Kier Living,
The Cheyne Social Property Impact Fund (managed by UK-based investment manager Cheyne Capital),
The Housing Growth Partnership (a joint venture between the Homes and Communities Agency and Lloyds Banking Group).
The partnership will offer local authorities and housing associations with an advanced example model for developing new dwelling on the land in their local area. This will there for give them the option to decide between sale and rental developments. It will also offer an important choice in affordable development.
Public sector organisations will be enabled to conclude what the appropriate mix of tenancy for their site is, including rental homes and homes for sale, in a model designed to meet the needs of their specific communities, without the need for grant funding.
This will in turn be offering the public sector with potential opportunities to develop a revenue income from their land in a responsible way, this will be offering sustainable and economic benefits for the communities.
This will offer a distinguished model that will result in a notable increase in the amount of affordable housing that is being built, with the potential for a possible 50% of each site in order to offer affordable development opportunities.
In the meantime, according to a bespoke report by ‘Telereal Trillium and carried out by Savills’, Land Registry data that has been recently published implies that at minimum 900,000 hectares (which is 6% of all land in England and Wales) is publicly owned. This is a much larger figure than was originally expected.
They identified that some accounts in the past have focused on the public sector land holdings having 2% owned by the central government, when really its more likely to be 6% of all freehold land in England and Wales. Two thirds of this is owned by the local government.
According to this study, around 15% of all freehold land within urban local authorities is publicly owned. For the following 8 local authorities – “Brighton & Hove, Barking & Dagenham, Eastbourne, Rushmoor (Aldershot and Farnborough), Gosport, Leicester, Portsmouth and Stevenage” – the figure increases to more that 40%. When in the London Boroughs the figure is generally around the 25% mark, however in some boroughs this cab increase to more than a third.
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