3) Improving housing quality:
- Removal of VAT from retrofitting, regeneration and fire safety work undertaken by social landlords
- New funding to cover costs of meeting higher energy efficiency standards or the new Decent Homes Standard.
housingforum.org.uk/campaigns/th...

2) Support for the wider housing sector:
- Adequate resourcing for the Building Safety Regulator
- Rethinking planned changes to landfill tax which could add £25k to the cost of building a new home
- Tax changes to support the for-profit RP and Build-to-Rent sectors
- First time buyer support

The Housing Forum welcomes this consultation - many of these ideas are ones we've been calling for, in our paper on Streamlining Planning - housingforum.org.uk/wp-content/u...
It is important to strike the right balance between consultation and streamlining planning to build more homes.

The GLA allocates is own share of the grant for London. And announced today, six northern mayors will also £7bn between them to allocate. (Greater Manchester, West Midlands, North East, West Yorkshire, Liverpool City Region and South Yorkshire)

The key recommendations on Land Value Capture were:
1 ) New template clauses for S106 agreements
2) Reinstate funded Level 7 planning apprenticeships for students over 21
3) Dispute resolution for deadlocked negotiations between LAs and developers
4) Publish updated land value estimates data

The Housing Forum helped with some of the background research for this programme, and it was great to see several of our members feature in it, including Vistry's factory making new homes.

If private rents are not accessible to people on low incomes:
- people become homeless and go to the council for help, instead of finding a new private rental
- councils cannot rehouse into the PRS
- social tenants rarely move out - causing the decline in relets seen in recent years.