Britain’s Tory ministers recently announced a conservative plan to release an extensive number of new Brownfield sites that will ultimately provide enough zoning for 100,000 new homes.
Ministers believe that the move will help boost growth in Britain’s stale economy, while also boosting jobs. However, skeptics say that the decreased demand for houses caused by hesitant consumer spending due to high unemployment rates and unstable economic conditions, would even out the number of houses being bought to relatively the same percentage of the overall number of houses on the market.
Nonetheless, Tory ministers hope that the move to increase the number of homes in Britain will end the streak of 15 consecutive months of property prices dropping. Ministers have not only faced skepticism from the public and political counterparts, even some of the organizations involved in the increased housing development (including the National Trust) have caused difficulties by requiring them to simplify their planning regulations and reduce their written agenda from 1000 pages to only 52.
Ministers also face the challenges associated with hiring contractors and construction industry to build more houses. Many construction companies are hesitant to continue building houses, because although there are contracts that would allow them to build 300,000 homes as soon as possible, they’re not being given access to the type of funding needed to do so.
The difficulties being faced have caused the number of new home registrations to drop below 10,000, indicating a need for a different type of borrowing and planning system. As a result some Tory ministers have recommended that the building be done on a ‘bill now, pay’ later basis, in which land owned by public bodies could harbor housing development projects in a more urgent manner.
