Britain plans to extend a scheme to encourage house building and develop a new town close to London, finance minister George Osborne said on Sunday, ahead of a budget announcement this week that will stick closely to his austerity programme. The government will extend until 2020 its programme of providing equity loans to buyers of newly built homes, adding a further 6 billion pounds ($10 billion) to the scheme.
"I want to extend the Help to Buy scheme for newly built houses," Osborne told BBC television. "It was going to end in 2016. We are now going to extend it for the rest of the decade. That would mean 120,000 new homes."
Asked about his budget statement which is due on Wednesday, Osborne stuck to his message that his economic policies were helping the recovery but he reiterated that further difficult decisions about fixing the public finances lay ahead.
Under the two-part Help to Buy Scheme, buyers of newly built homes worth up to 600,000 pounds can seek equity loans from the government. It had planned to set aside 3.7 billion pounds for the scheme by 2016.
Osborne also said the government would support the development of Britain's first new so-called garden city, which aim to combine town and country living with affordable housing and green space, in nearly 100 years to help provide more homes for the under pressure south-eastern region.
He said the government would invest 200 million pounds to support the construction of 15,000 new homes on the site at Ebbsfleet, which is on the high-speed rail line linking London with Paris and other cities in Europe.
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