Jim Coulter, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, said: “If the roll-out of allowing non-RSLs access to the whole of the corporation’s development programme goes ahead it will have massive implications for the whole of the sector as well as causing fundamental changes at the corporation.

“The whole of the current regulatory system would disappear within five years and be replaced with the contractual system that would need to be used to regulate the relationship with private developers.”

Terry Fuller, chair of the affordable housing committee at the House Builders Federation, said: “To open up the whole corporation programme to housebuilders makes a lot of sense.

“There is one developer in the South who controls land for 15,000 units of affordable housing and he’ll be looking for £750m in social housing grant over the next five to eight years. This is the sort of scale we are looking at and obviously £200m would nowhere near cover that.”

A corporation spokesman said: “We are proposing a £200m pilot programme to be launched in 2005-06 and we will take decisions on how to widen this following evaluation of the pilot.”

Source

Housing Today