Government plans to build three million homes in UK by 2020

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to build three million homes in the UK by 2020 in a bid to boost supply and make housing more affordable.

The announcement came as Brown made it clear that he would put housing at the top of his government's agenda, as he broke with tradition and announced the parliamentary programme for the next year months ahead of the Queen's Speech.

To achieve the target Brown indicated that the number of homes built in the UK would have to rise from 200,000 a year to 240,000 a year by 2016.

He also indicated that the government was committed to building 100,000 houses on around 550 site owned by central government such as the Ministry of Defence and the NHS.

He is understood to want to reduce pressures of affordability on first-time buyers by increasing the supply of housing built on brownfield land, as well as strengthening cooperation between the public and private sectors in order to boost delivery.

Housing Forum chief executive Shelagh Grant welcomed the move but cautioned that if the government wanted to deliver affordable housing long term, it would need to look at costing plans:

"For the short term, we are pushing for new business approaches to housebuilding including alternative means of funding land costs and for more providers, such as affordable homes builders, ALMOs and housing associations to get involved. In the long term, we want to see improvements so that funding mechanisms like equity release and PFI can deliver results," she said.

The news follows Hazel Blears' first speech in Parliament yesterday in her new role as Communities Secretary, in which she refused to rule out the possibility of building on green belt land.

Blears said that housebuilding took 'priority' over environmental concerns and refused to give 'categoric assurances' that the government would not redraw the green belt.