Theresa May warned her housing revolution will fail unless she scraps £4.5billion cap on council borrowing
Nicky Morgan led calls to allow town halls to borrow billions to help reach a target of 300,000 new homes a year
THERESA MAY was told her housing revolution will fail unless she scraps the £4.5billion cap on council borrowing.
A former Tory Cabinet Minister led calls for the Government to allow town halls to borrow the billions they need to help reach a target of 300,000 new homes a year.
Britain last built 300,000 homes a year in 1969 - the year of the Moon landing.
Nicky Morgan, the Tory chair of the cross-party Treasury Select Committee said: “The Chancellor pledged to ‘fix the broken housing market’.
“But the Government is going to find it very difficult to meet this ambition. The increase in the cap on borrowing for local authorities to build homes is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.”
Councils are only allowed to borrow £4.5billion a year between them.
But the Treasury Select Committee said private housebuilders were consistently only reaching 150,000 a year between them.
The Committee chaired by Ms Morgan, former Education Secretary, also said the Chancellor’s stamp duty cut was unlikely “in isolation” to achieve its aim of seeing more people climb on the property ladder.
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And it called on the Government to stop using the higher “Retail Prices” measure of inflation as a benchmark for annual increases in rail fares, student loans and Air Passenger Duty.
It has already stopped using RPI to calculate the annual rise in pensions, benefits and tax allowances.