Boosting brownfield

摘要

There is enough brownfield land to deliver up to 200,000 new homes across the country," said the Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on 13 August. His latest prospectus offers to release funding of £2oom with the aim of creating 30 housing zones on brownfield sites across the country. Each of the brownfield housing zones (BHZ) must be a minimum of 750 dwellings, with the hope that many will contain circa 2,000 homes. So what does this latest offer from the government mean? Essentially, it is a loan to the private sector developer, via a local authority bid to the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) for a share of long-term investment funding over three years. This is all very positive for encouraging local authorities to prioritise their major brownfield opportunities. First of all though, not only do they need to request for an area to be designated as a BHZ, they also need to bid for investment funding to be paid to one or more private sector development partners. Funding is, of course, always welcome and the idea is that it should act as a catalyst to genuinely | encourage development. The big question, however, is whether this initiative will indeed accelerate the number of homes in the next three years and encourage local authorities to seek out private sector partners.