Building houses revitalises our economy. It has been estimated that building 100,000 homes adds approximately 1% to the GDP, or growth, of our country so at a time when we haven’t seen even annual growth of 1% since 2007, it is clear how important it is that as a nation we get building.
Other evidence suggests that for every £1 spent on building a house there is £2.84 of further economic activity. House building not only provides people with homes it also creates jobs.
Not only do we need to ensure that homes are being built, and that enough are being built to keep costs as low as possible, we also need to make sure people are in the position to be able to buy a home once it is built.
The Government is ensuring this happens. The recent Help to Buy mortgage scheme is seeing thousands of people being able to enter home ownership who would have not have been able to before. Official Government statistics show that the average deposit now makes up 79% of a First Time Buyer’s annual income. In the early 2000s this was 36%. This is a staggering increase that was the result of a decade of neglect by the previous Government.
Now that this Government is guaranteeing mortgages potential home owners are able to afford deposits again and benefit from lower mortgage rates and developers are able to sell the houses they’re building giving them the confidence they need to build more.
However, if we only increase the availability of mortgages then one thing is inevitable– the price of houses will go up. The cost for our children, or our grandchildren’s, future gets harder and harder for them to bear. That is why increasing the supply of houses is so important. In order to rein in house prices we need to be building a lot more homes than we, as a country, have been doing in the past.
Thanks to this Government house building is increasing. The Government’s £570m Get Britain Building Fund is unlocking stalled sites and making it easier for development to go ahead. Official figures show the Government’s strategy has seen a 6% rise in the number of new homes being built in England in the three months to June of this year. On an annual basis, construction work started on 110,530 new homes. This would be enough to see the 1% of GDP growth referred to at the beginning of this article.
Rugby is leading the way in new house building. New development in our area not only means jobs in the house building sector but it also means prices can stay as affordable as they can be for hard working local families. We need to keep building to safeguard our future and Rugby, under the direction of the Conservative-led Borough Council is showing the rest of the county how this can be achieved.