Housing White Paper ‘a missed opportunity’ says Saving Stream

Radical steps needed to get spades in the ground, says peer-to-peer platform

Responding to today’s Housing White Paper, Liam Brooke, co-founder of Saving Stream, the peer-to-peer property finance platform, says:

“The Housing White Paper, while a small step in the right direction, is a missed opportunity to take some radical steps to get spades in the ground on new residential properties.”

“There are a number of steps we would like to see the Government take to give a helping hand to developers and get spades in the ground for new houses.”

“Making sure that all land is registered with the Land Registry would be a great way to increase the supply of land on the market. About 20% of the land in England & Wales isn’t registered, making it very difficult to find out who owns it. That is a major barrier to purchases of land forhousing.”

“Obviously it’s critical to preserve environmentally valuable land like ancient woodland, but there is a lot of land in this country that has no particular environmental value or public access. So we would welcome a review of the Green Belt. There are many sizeable parcels of land at the fringe of the Green Belt that are not as green, environmentally valuable or attractive as many people would assume – for example it’s very hard for golf course developers to build housing around their courses.”

“It would be great to see the Government incentivise local authorities more to approve new housing developments, perhaps by ring-fencing a percentage of the final price for local community benefit.”

“A broader review of Section 106 agreements would also be welcome – that’s the money developers pay to local authorities in exchange for planning permission. The system is pretty murky and smaller developers simply don’t have the leverage in negotiation that bigger developers do.”

“But there are plenty of even more radical solutions that could be considered, such as incentives for older people to downsize and get their properties back on the market, or paying the legal costs of developers who are unreasonably forced to appeal to get planning permission.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

Alternative finance providers, such as P2P and other crowdfunding platforms, are increasingly stepping into the gap created by banks’ withdrawal. They are giving developers the opportunity to get their projects off the ground in a sensible timeframe.

Peer-to-peer lending is beneficial for investors, as well as developers, and people are increasingly turning to peer-to-peer in order to a better yield from their investments in the current low interest rate environment.

For example, the average cash ISA at a bank now only offers annual returns of 0.74% (Bank of England). This level is extremely low and it is no surprise that people are looking for a better option.

The outlook for the property market is good. Despite banks withdrawal for lending, it is important that developers realise that there are other options available to them. P2P lending allows important development projects to go ahead, and is beneficial to individual investors.