Private Rented Sector

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Written Statements

[The Minister for Housing (Mr Mark Prisk)]

Helping the construction industry into a sustainable recovery is key to the overall economic recovery of the country. As part of an impressive large-scale housing package, the Chancellor increased the build to rent fund from £200 million to £1 billion in Budget 2013. This will provide much needed development finance to house builders and developers building new homes for market rent.

Today, I can announce to the House the first projects we will be taking forward. These 45 bids provide strong investment propositions which will move forward for competitive clarification and due diligence. We expect these projects to receive a share of up to £700 million as they go under contract to deliver up to 10,000 new homes. A further bidding round for additional projects is expected to open later this year.

These projects represent a wide range of innovative models including new delivery partnerships and building design, and will provide a good spread across England, with around one quarter in London. We will be working with a range of developers and house builders of varying sizes. This includes well-established organisations, as well as new players.

For many of the projects we are not taking forward at this stage, advice will be offered by the newly created expert private rented sector taskforce who will work with bidders to support them in refining proposals for future viable investment. The private rented sector expert taskforce is headed by Andrew Stanford, former head of Cluttons Residential. Further team members join the department this month and they include:

Julian D’Arcy of Kirkby Capital, a former regional chairman and proprietary partner at Knight Frank.

Joanna Embling, a property consultant and chartered surveyor, specialising in urban redevelopment and a former equity partner at Cushman Wakefield.

Tracey Hartley, a specialist asset manager for large-scale residential landlord Grainger plc.

Dominic Martin, senior analyst at EC Harris and a qualified surveyor.

Work continues to get the housing guarantees up and running. Bidding has closed for delivery of the guarantees, and we will be announcing the arrangements later, in May. Further details are available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/improving-the-rented-housing-sector--2/supporting-pages/private-rented-sector.

Projects being taken forward to competitive clarification and due diligence stage: