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Cllr Peter Box, LGA Housing spokesman, responds to housing announcements in yesterday's Spending Review.

"It is clear that tackling our housing crisis will require an increase of all types of housing, including those for affordable and social rent alongside those to support home ownership. Not everybody is ready to buy, and with 60,000 people currently living in temporary accommodation and over a million more on council waiting lists, it is crucial that councils are still able to ensure there is a mix of affordable homes right for everybody.

"Councils support measures to increase new housebuilding but, while private developers have a key role in solving our chronic housing shortage, they cannot build the 230,000 needed each year on their own.

"National housing reforms actually risk severely hampering the ability of councils to build new homes by taking £12 billion out of local investment in affordable rented housing by 2020. 

"Councils need to be able to ensure genuine affordable homes continue to be built for rent and sale across the whole country for future generations and the millions of people stuck on waiting lists. This is the best way to reduce waiting lists and housing benefit, keep rents low and help more people get on the housing ladder.

"Planning is not the barrier to growth, skills are. If we are to see the homes desperately needed across the country built and jobs and apprenticeships created, councils must also be given a leading role to tackle our growing construction skills shortage. The industry is clear that skills gaps are one of the greatest barriers to building.

"Devolving careers advice, post-16 and adult skills budgets and powers to local areas would allow councils, schools, colleges and employers to work together to help unemployed residents and young people develop the vital skills to build to ensure the Government's housing promises are met."

Notes

• Forcing councils to sell off homes to fund the extension of Right to Buy to housing association tenants could cost councils £6 billion by 2020. This would also discourage councils from building new homes as most would have to be instantly sold.
• Proposals to reduce rents paid by tenants in social housing in England by 1 per cent a year will cost councils £2.6 billion by 2020. This undermines 30-year local housing investment plans agreed with the Government just two years and removes the capacity and confidence of councils to use planned rental income to invest in new council housing.
• 20 per cent discounts on 200,000 new starter homes for first-time buyers will be funded by exempting developers from paying Section 106 contributions, taking £3 billion of vital investment for building new affordable rented housing.