Bidding open for local authorities to access £10m of government funds for preparing brownfield sites for house building

The Starter Homes Local Authority Funding Programme opened for bids on 12 October but only for three weeks, closing on 2 November 2015. The Homes and Communities Agency said local authorities bidding for the money must be prepared to spend it "by March 2016" so that the starter homes can be built in 2017 and 2018.  Local authorities will be expected to use all reasonable endeavours to ensure that practical completion of starter homes will occur by 31 March 2019.

Environmental law expert Helen Peters of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com said there are many factors which have served to constrain development on brownfield sites, including planning issues, land banking and also practical viabilities particularly the cost of remediation works.  

Peters said that many local authorities have suffered from the steady decline in central government funding for remediating contaminated land and access to this new fund will be welcomed, notwithstanding the narrow window for submitting applications and the conditions on funding.

Land eligible for the Starter Homes Local Authority Funding Programme must be in the ownership of the local authority. It must also be either commercial, including retail, industrial, leisure or other non-residential institutional land, such as redundant health and education sites, and be vacant, under-used or unviable in its current or former use.

Local authorities that win a share of the funding will be able to use the money for site preparation works relating to remediation, demolition, site investigation and ecological works.

According to the government's briefing paper on the new Housing and Planning Bill, a study published in 2014 by the University of the West of England, which had been commissioned by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, estimated that at least 976,000 homes can be built on existing brownfield land in England.

The government's briefing paper on the new Housing and Planning Bill said: "To remediate land for apartment-style buildings without gardens, costs per hectare can be as low as £50,000 or as high as £1,230,000. For more sensitive new developments (including dwellings with gardens, schools, and allotments) costs are likely to start at £75,000 per hectare and go as high as £1,765,000 per hectare."