Only £1M of £525M Builders’ Finance Fund released

It has emerged that only £1M of a £525M government fund has been released help get housing projects that stalled during economic crisis under way again.

The Builders Finance Fund (BFF) was launched in April 2014 and is due to run until March 2017 but so far only two projects have benefitted from the fund. The two schemes, Poltair Developments’ Trecerus Farm project in Cornwall and Hallmark Developments for its Priory Hall Project in Essex, have shared just over £1M between them.

The news has come to light following the BBC’s Freedom of Information request.

The project was created to help restart housing developments that contained between five and 250 units that had stalled or slowed down, most likely due to difficulty accessing development funds, and also to help bring forward sites that had stalled but were otherwise viable.

In September 2014, the government published a shortlist of 165 schemes to go through the due diligence process to gain access to the Builders’ Finance Fund.

Industry experts have raised concerns that access to the Builders’ Finance Fund is overly complicated and putting developers off applying and called for the it to be simplified.

Rico Wojtulewicz, policy advisor for the House Builders’ Association, said: “The government stated that the fund would bring 13,000 new homes but that has clearly not been the case over the past year.

“More attention should be put into how to increase take-up.”

The government has pledged to build a million new homes by 2020 in an effort to deal with the housing shortage.

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