2007 spending review briefing: updated

• Additional spending on affordable housing supply is, at best, less than 20% of what is needed. The budget is cut by 6% in real terms in year one, before recovering in later years.

• In comparison to the 2004 CSR, the 2007 CSR has, overall, delivered planned spend on affordable housing 9% higher in real terms. However, this is against a backdrop of heightened expectations of investment and above inflation increases in land and building costs.

• We support measures to increase value for money in housing programmes but argue that their impact remains unquantifiable as yet and cannot be implemented quickly enough to compensate for the shortfall in the budget.

• Our best estimate at this stage is that, far from meeting the target of 30,000 affordable rented homes, the output in the three-year period will be less than 15,000.

• The budget has removed over half of what used to be in the housing portfolio into the local government portfolio.

• There is a high risk that homelessness and Supporting People budgets, now within overall local council budgets, will be seen as soft targets to fund other priorities. Shelter believes that they should be ring-fenced at least until Single Outcome Agreements are fully in place and adequate systems for tracking what happens to services have been developed.