Wednesday 10 March 2010

£83 million for Phase 2 of Kickstart Housing Regeneration Poject

Housing Minister John Healey, has announced that £83 million of recently secured funding will enable work to restart on the construction of over 5,500 new homes, which had previously been stalled by the recession.

The Department for Communities and Local Government announced the initial batch of funding allocations for the next round of its Kickstart programme. This will allow work on previosuly mothballed key projects to recommence. This is a positive sign of recovery for builders and planner alike.

Details of the 87 projects have been uploaded to Bing mapping service (free). This provides an rough guide of the location and a brief snippet about the individual projects. This is all set out onto an interactive map (click here).


A map of the first round of allocations from Kickstart is also available here.

The West Midlands, has done particularly well, and 16 schemes will receive funding, making it the region with the greatest number of successful projects. Conversely, in the North-East, only two schemes will receive funding from Kickstart’s second round, making it the region with the least successful projects.

Elsewhere, housebuilder Morris Homes will receive £768,000 of funding to build 69 homes on a former college site near to Pride Park football ground in Derby. Meanwhile, Housebuilder Barratt, will receive £1.1 million of funding to build 50 affordable homes in Stockton-on-Tees.

Whilst the provision of funding is undoubtedly a positive sign, which should go some way to correcting the imbalance between supply and demand, it remains to be seen whether the Kickstart initiative can learn from the first phase's failings.

Last year it was reported almost half of the housing schemes which received funding in the first round of the Kickstart scheme had previously been rated "poor" by design watchdog the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.


HCA's review of Kickstart round 1 - PDF (75 KB)

A summary of approved schemes by region - PDF (62 KB)

1 comment:

  1. The damming report from the HCA, doesn't exactly fill me with much optimism.

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