Making sure the housing market works is a key priority for this Government. Today I am announcing a number of additional measures the Government are taking to ensure we deliver the homes this country needs and promote fairness for people, wherever they live.
The Government have set an ambitious target to deliver 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s. Last year more homes were provided than in all but one of the last 31 years. In September 2018, the Prime Minister announced an additional £2 billion to support long-term strategic partnerships with housing associations through to 2029. Today we are launching the bidding process for £1 billion of this funding through Homes England and are working with the Greater London Authority to launch bidding for a further £1 billion for housing associations in London as soon as possible. This marks the first time any Government have invested such long-term funding in new affordable homes through housing associations, supporting the development of more ambitious long-term plans to build the homes this country needs.
We are also announcing today that the Government will be providing £2.85 million to support the development of 19 new garden villages. These new communities stretch from County Durham in the north to Truro in the south-west and together have the potential to deliver 73,554 homes.
Planning is also a core part of ensuring we deliver our home-building ambitions but the process is currently too costly and decision-making takes too long. The forthcoming accelerated planning Green Paper must explore new approaches to meeting the cost of the planning service. We will invite innovative proposals to pilot new approaches to meeting these where this improves performance, including considering whether local authorities could recover a greater proportion of these costs and reinvest the additional revenue into improving the speed and quality of planning services.
The Government have also been clear that we must cultivate a housing market which provides people with the fair and decent housing they deserve. Yesterday, the Prime Minster announced that we will shortly be consulting on the removal of section 21 of the 1988 Housing Act. This will end so-called “no fault evictions”. As part of the consultation, we will also review the existing grounds for possession and provide additional grounds for when landlords need to move into or sell their property. We also plan to reform the court process for housing cases to make it more efficient, ensuring landlords can swiftly and smoothly regain their property where they have a legitimate reason to do so.
When moving home, some tenants struggle to provide a second deposit to their new landlord, while they wait for their first deposit to be returned. These tenants risk falling into debt or ultimately finding themselves trapped in their current home, missing out on the opportunity of finding a better place to live or a new job. We want to understand the scale of this problem, as well as seeking new approaches. That means tenants do not have to provide a second full deposit to move home. This could include approaches to allow tenants to directly “passport” their deposit between tenancies.