Local authorities carried out their statutory assessments of housing needs on 31 March last and they have been asked to forward a full analysis of their assessments to my Department by 31 May. It will take some time to obtain returns from all 90 local authorities and to ensure they are comprehensive and complete. However, I expect the results to be published in my Department's housing statistics bulletin for the September quarter, as has been the practice with previous assessments.
The last statutory assessment of local authority housing needs was carried out on 29 March 1996 and the number of households assessed as being in need of local authority housing at the time was 27,400. Recent contacts with local authorities suggest a significantly higher number of households seeking local authority accommodation, and the Government's expansion of the local authority programme in 1999 to its highest level for many years is an immediate response to increasing needs in advance of the results of the assessment.
We intend to go further. I am delighted to inform Deputies that the Government has agreed to my proposal to introduce for the first time a multi-annual local authority housing programme. The new programme will be resourced to deliver 22,000 additional local authority dwellings over four years. This is equivalent to an increase of over a fifth in the number of local authority rented houses. There will be strong support from local authorities for the introduction of a multi-annual programme which should lead to a more efficient and streamlined delivery of local authority housing.
The local authority housing programme is not the only instrument of housing policy to meet social housing needs and it is supplemented by a range of other social housing measures under the aegis of my Department. The new multi-annual programme, the new affordable housing scheme and the improvements I made during 1998 in the voluntary housing capital assistance and shared ownership schemes will result in increased output from all these schemes in 1999. In addition, I intend to increase output under the voluntary housing schemes to 4,000 houses per annum over the coming years and will be shortly discussing ways of achieving this target with key representatives of the voluntary housing sector. I expect the local authority housing programme, together with the output from the complementary social housing measures and vacancies occurring in the existing housing stock, will enable the housing needs of more than 10,300 households to be catered for in 1999.
Comprehensive information on house prices for the first quarter of 1999 will be provided in my Department's housing statistics bulletin for the March quarter of 1999 due to be published around the end of May. In addition, my Department has recently put in place new arrangements for monitoring house price trends on a monthly basis based on provisional returns from the mortgage lending institutions. This preliminary data in respect of January and February indicate further easing in the house price situation and lend further support to the view that the rate of house price increase has peaked and should moderate significantly this year.
I have no proposals to attempt to impose artificial administrative control on house prices which was attempted in the past and proved largely ineffective. A range of further measures for the housing market were announced in the Government's statement of 9 March 1999 in response to the consultants' report The Housing Market – An Economic Review and Assessment. The key objective is to maximise and accelerate the supply of housing. These further measures, in conjunction with initiatives already under way, will reinforce the progress being made to ensure price stabilisation and balance in the housing market.
