Autumn Budget 2018: extension of first-time buyers’ stamp duty relief and other housing announcements

News29 Oct 2018Sarah Williams

Stamp duty relief will be extended to first-time buyers of shared ownership properties up to £500,000, the government has announced, with the relief applied retrospectively to the time of the last Budget.

Delivering his Autumn Budget today, chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond also confirmed the lifting of the cap on councils’ Housing Revenue Account borrowing.

The accompanying budget ‘red book’ document published by the government confirms that the change is in effect from today, and adds that the Welsh Government is taking “immediate steps” to lift the cap in Wales.

The chancellor also announced an additional £500m for the Housing Infrastructure Fund, which will “unlock a further 650,000 homes”, he said, raising the total to £5.5bn.

Meanwhile, a new scheme of up to £1bn of British Business Bank lending guarantees would “support the revival of SME housing builders”.

Mr Hammond said that the “next wave” of strategic partnerships with nine housing associations “will deliver 13,000 homes across England”.

The red book outlines that £653m in funding will be allotted to nine strategic partnerships to 2021/22 to deliver these, and states that a new five-year strategic business plan for Homes England will be published tomorrow.

The government will provide £675m of co-funding “to create a ‘Future High Streets Fund’ to support councils to draw up formal plans for the transformation of their high streets”, supporting them “to invest in the improvements they need to facilitate redevelopment of underused retail and commercial areas into residential,” Mr Hammond said.

Funding will also be provided to support local neighbourhoods to deliver housing to local people through the neighbourhood planning system, Mr Hammond said.

“Because we want to see parishes and neighbourhoods enabling more homes for sale for local people to buy at prices we can afford, we are providing funding to empower up to 500 neighbourhoods to allocate or permission land for housing through the neighbourhood planning system for sale at a discount to local people, in perpetuity.”

£8.5m of resource support will go to this, the budget paper outlines.

The document also states that a new version of the Help To Buy equity loan, first introduced in 2013, will run for two years from April 2021 before closing in March 2023, without plans to continue it. The scheme will be available for first-time buyers only, with a market value up to new regional property price caps, “set at 1.5 times the current forecast regional average first-time buyer price, up to a maximum of £600,000 in London”, it says.

On the question of Universal Credit, Mr Hammond said it was a “long overdue and necessary reform”, but recognised concerns regarding the implementation and the rates and allowances.

To address these, he promised an additional package of £1bn over five years to aid the transition, and said that work allowances in Universal Credit will be increased by £1,000 a year – at a cost of £1.7bn annually once the roll-out is completed.

This, he said, would benefit 2.4 million working families with children and people with disabilities by £630 per year.

On Sir Oliver Letwin’s review into accelerating build out, published today, Mr Hammond said that the report had found that “large house builders are not engaged in systematic speculative land banking”, and said that the government would respond in full in the new year.

In a nod to the collapse of Carillion, Mr Hammond also delivered strong words on public-private partnerships, saying that the government would abolish the use of PFI and PF2.

“We will honour existing contracts but the days of the public sector being a pushover must end,” he said. “I have never signed off a PFI contract as chancellor and I can confirm today that I never will.”