Oral answer to question provided on Thursday, 14 May 2009 in the House of Lords, by Baroness Andrews (Labour).

Housing: Property Purchase

Answer: My Lords, the money that I spoke of—the £126 million to fund people—is now immediately available. I sympathise with the noble Lord’s suggestion that there should be one pot but, as I have explained, the diversity of need makes that difficult to provide. I know that this is no substitute but, because the terminology of some of these projects overlaps—HomeBuy Direct, Social HomeBuy, HomeBuy and so on—I propose to put a document in the Library that sets out the different schemes and the different forms of funding, which should help noble Lords. I am afraid that I do not recognise the figure of £300 million for HomeBuy Direct. What we have provided is £400 million to kick-start new land and new homes. HomeBuy Direct, which is the scheme where equity is shared with developers, may be funded from that, which might be what the noble Lord was thinking about.

This is an answer to the Oral question asked on Thursday, 14 May 2009 by Earl Cathcart (Conservative).

Question: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend Lady Gardner that this is an absurd situation and distressing for potential home buyers, especially when there is cash that is unutilised in other housing schemes. For example, the HomeBuy Direct scheme has £300 million available but, amazingly, according to Hansard, as at the end of March no transactions had taken place. It is therefore heartening to hear from the Minister that, at last, the extra funds will be made available to MyChoice. Will she tell the House when this cash will be available for use? Would it not be better to have one pot for all the HomeBuy funds, so that money is made available as and when it is necessary and none of the schemes will run out of money again?

Secondary information