Under the scheme, councils will be required to identify at least five years’ worth of sites ready for housing and a further ten years’ worth for future development.
 
A BPF spokesman told builderandengineer.co.uk the association is fully supportive of the new plans.
 
He said: “It’s clearly a carrot and stick approach and it will come down to local authorities to try to deliver this, and that’s has often been the problem with things like this. Central Government might understand an issue and have a policy in place but if you’ve got local governments, regional assemblies and all the other organisations in between who don’t act on it, then that’s when things don’t happen.
 
“Hopefully this initiative will be incentive to make it happen. It is something the commercial property industry welcomes because essentially they’ll be making money out if it and building the homes.”
 
The grants will be targeted at areas where there is a shortage of housing such as the South East. This will include four existing major growth areas of Ashford; Thames Gateway; Milton Keynes and the South Midlands; and London, Stansted, Cambridge and Peterborough.
 
Housing minister, Yvette Cooper will also disclose that a further 200 brownfield public sector sites have been identified, on top of the 500,000 already identified by Gordon Brown.
 
Commenting on the issues raised for housebuilders building on Brownfield, the BPF spokesman said that there was usually a misconception affiliated with brownfield. 
 
He said: “It doesn’t necessarily mean polluted, decrepit pieces of land, generally it means it is land that has already been built on. There is a common misconception of these things. Green belt isn’t necessarily plush green land, it is often nasty horrible derelict land and similarly brownfield is not always raw sewage and bits of broken glass. We hope this will stimulate even more to consider increasing the land they identify for housing development.”