AFFORDABLE HOMES
With average house prices set to exceed £300,000 in the coming years it isn’t just the government who are concerned about housing affordability for young people. Many parents worry how their children will get onto the housing ladder too.

Communities and Local Government (external link) is the department which sets UK policy on housing and as the title of its latest Housing Green Paper suggests, “Homes for the future: more affordable, more sustainable”, this issue is one of the central challenges it addresses. It is intended that almost one in three of the 240,000 new homes proposed annually should be affordable homes. This represents considerable growth and is an important trend that is worth knowing more about.

There has been much media coverage, but what exactly are the proposals and just what is meant by affordable homes? This section aims to help you learn more about this subject and the organisations that can help. Housing associations, not-for-profit social businesses, presently provide about 2 million homes in England. The National Housing Federation (external link) represents 1300 such associations.

Affordable housing is not just about homes rented at affordable rates. Increasingly significant numbers are sold through low-cost home ownership schemes (external link). Options offered include New Build HomeBuy (external link) where people buy a share in a home and rent the rest from a housing association. The NHF has warned ever increasing house prices could cause a generation of first-time buyers to have their aspirations dashed or be able to buy a home only at "enormous personal and financial cost".

Let’s hope the raft of measures being proposed will meet that challenge. There is nothing quite like the pleasure of owning a first home.