Government to introduce £300m brownfield property grant

Coming as part of the 2021 budget, this would be partly funded by a Residential Property Developers Tax, which will be levied on firms with profits of over £25m at a rate of four percent.

The £5bn figure is however believed by some to be less than the sums that would be required to get through this work. Ahead of the budget, law firm Irwin Mitchell published a 10-point plan to take action on cladding and fire safety concerns, with a minimum of £15bn believed to be required.

As part of this, it says that access to government funding for remediation works must be easier and faster, and that planning and building regulations must have greater cohesion and work in tandem with digital and regular on the ground oversight.

Commenting on this, Irwin Mitchell partner Jeremy Raj said: “Government measures, while a step in the right direction, don’t go far enough. It is essential that the chancellor doesn’t assume that with £5bn from the treasury for remediation and the residential property developer tax on the horizon, the cladding and fire safety issue has been dealt with.”

The budget also saw the introduction of a multi-year housing settlement totalling £24bn, which included the confirmation that the government would be investing £11.5bn designed to build up to the 180,000 new “affordable homes” between 2021 and 2026.

In addition to this, the government will be bringing forward £300m of grant funding to unlock smaller brownfield sites for housing, and £1.5bn to regenerate underused land and deliver transport links and community facilities - “unlocking” 160,000 homes in total.

Responding to the budget, estate agents Barrows and Forrester’s managing director James Forrester said: “Time and time again we’ve seen the government pledge to fix the housing market using recycled rhetoric and funding from previously announced initiatives.

“Today was no different and reading between the lines, we can expect to see them continue to overpromise and under-deliver in their attempts to address the housing crisis. While Boris Johnson might not be a fan of recycling, his chancellor certainly is and so the 180,000 new homes pledged today is certainly no step forward.

“The only bone thrown to a nation of ravenous homebuyers starving of housing stock has been a scrap of properties built on brownfield sites.”