Government announces £1.3bn investment to deliver homes, infrastructure and jobs
The funding announced by MHCLG and BEIS will provide up to 45,000 homes, create up to 85,000 jobs and upgrade skills and infrastructure to help fuel a green economic recovery.
A new £2bn Green Homes Grant scheme will fund up to two-thirds of the cost of home improvements of over 600,000 homes. Over 300 successful “shovel-ready” projects in England will receive a share of the £900m Getting Building Fund to build homes and infrastructure. A further £360m investment will deliver 26,000 new homes on brownfield land and £8 million of funding will help speed up the delivery of the new homes on brownfield sites. Government is inviting bids from the Mayoral Combined Authorities for the remaining £40 million of the fund.
This provides another funding boost for broadband connectivity and some of the winning projects have provided details of further investment toward better broadband. For example, Worcestershire LEP will put £500,000 towards helping bring a full fibre network to the city centre (i.e. building a new datacentre site to support CityFibre’s planned £25m-£35m investment in the roll-out of 1Gbps FTTP broadband to local premises). Other winning bids will help provide new broadband connections in predominantly rural areas (Oxfordshire LEP), as well as for businesses and the care sector (South East LEP), and along routes between cities (Enterprise M3 LEP).
