Another failure, the millions of immigrants who have arrived here now need housing. Free homes, free schools, free healthcare, free social security. 3 million homes is not enough to sustain the migrant population. The UK’s population is projected to rise by 7.2 million from 2004 to 2031 and 6.0 million (83%) of this rise is due to immigration.

So who are these houses for?

steve tea, manchester, cheshire

Building cheaper houses in areas without real jobs is nothing else but one more PR campaign. They will transfer overcrowding to smaller villages so nobody will see them and 'problem does not exist'.
How will it look if a village of 3000 gets 1000 inhabitants more? Nobody will be happy.
Soon, new owners will lose jobs or interest to travel to work, so they will go on benefits, etc, etc, etc.
This looks like one more scheme where government will again waste a lot of taxpayers money and private sector (remember Abrahams) will profit most.

Savo, London, UK

Yet another spin ' proposal ' from Brown on so called 'low cost housing' . The new spin doctors appear to want to make vague annoucements on any subject to bolster Brown . The absolute lack of any numbers & budgets make any claim spurious. What is low cost housing, even Prescott's figures didn't add up. The costs were still unaffordable. Where is the budget for this? The story does not add up. Remember how Labour keeps saying Tory plans don't add up. Well without any numbers supporting this article , the story is just Labour hot air & spin. Is this the best Brown's new spin doctors can do?

Clive Kitchener, Pulborough, UK

Ahh, taxpayers paying to subsidise a cheap local workforce for the the wealthy - and who said socialism was dead?

Henry, Leeds, UK

Every single government initiative is a disaster waiting to happen. What will be different about this one? Nothing!
Incompetent planners will forget that a community will need access links in the form of new roads, new schools, new hospitals, water treatment facilities, power supplies, etc... It's not just a case of building a few houses - or in Brown's case a few hundred thousand new houses. If Labour have not succeeded in changing the fabric of society in their ten year social experiment, then uncontrolled housing plans surely will.
The law of supply and demand will dictate that existing houses will lose value. Large swathes of hard working, ambitious people will find themselves in negative equity situations. with absolutely no hope of salvation!
Tinkering with the natural order of things, is like messing with mother-nature. It will bit you back in the end, only much harder than you could ever imagine!

peterj, aberdeen, uk

Thank God that crashing houseprices will make this latest plan to concrete over every blade of grass completely redundant.

Brown and crew can't seem to get anything right. Idiots.

Ian, London,

Corrugated galvanized steel maybe had you not squandered the inherited wealth from the previous sleaze government.

wayne, huntingdon, cambridgeshire

houses for farm workers and craftsmen - do we have any left? All this is going to do is bring council estates to the countryside, destroy the greenbelt etc etc. This will be yet another Labour failure that we will have to endure on top of all the ill conceived failures once they are voted out.

stuart, london, uk

What cannot this government understand that they have preached everything about the cities and nothing about the rural life in this country. They have gone against everyone who lives in the rural areas by shutting post offices, vital village schools that "do not meet the needs" on vague educational ideas, restritcing planning , and placing restrictions on health and safety grounds on the use of village halls and worst of all virtually eliminated the village policeman.In fact anything which has the possibility of being a class issue. By chuking money at yet another" clear blue sky project" they forget that people in the country are just fed up with grandiose rhetoric that produces no jobs in the country but satisfies another ego trip , employing another army of beurocrats

Philip Hodges, Nottingham, Uk

What about single occupancy? Single people get no tax perks at all and seemingly no help with housing either!!!!!

Nan, Reading, UK

There is no point in housing low income families in villages just because they grew up there. There have to be real jobs otherwise we increase commuter villages and then have to provide them with cars to get to work.
If our policemen, teachers ets: are so badly paid that they have to be subsidised then the pay should go up to make the true costs transparent. Perhaps if the unions were more flexible regional variations could be used to enable people to work near their homes.
Rightly or wrongly, globalisation means the less skilled can only be rewarded at global rates for the job in the same way as highly skilled individuals expect to receive global rewards.
Throughout the world people gravitate to towns where there are jobs and are large enough to provide the amenities expected today. Most farming can be worked by a few skilled technicians.

William, London, England

Another review commissioned by Brown... following Elinor Goodman's report on rural housing two years ago. And what happened to the recommendations she made?

What makes anyone think that this latest review will result in anything other than the commissioning of yet another one by the man famous for the vast number of reviews he has ordered in the last eight months since he became Prime Minister?

This is a man noted for rhetoric, not action. And no, I haven't forgotten that he granted the Bank of England independence, but that was quite a while ago.

Vivien Aldred, Norwich, UK

Have a look at the Rowner Destruction website - we HAVE affordable housing here in Gosport, but THEY are trying to take it away. Perhaps Mr Brown should listen to the people here. Yes, we would settle for decent replacement homes, but NOT made out of ticky-tacky. A lot of things are possible, but not if you put developers first. Self-build? Not even given a chance.

Bryan Lawrence, Gosport, Hampshire UK

If Brown didn't let hundreds of thousands of immigrants to swamp our country every year, we wouldn't have such a housing crisis. It is also not helped by the government's flawed policy of demolishing old houses in the north of England, reducing the housing stock.

Brown (and all governments) should stop medalling with the market. If housing is too expensive in the south, that will force people to move north where housing is cheaper. If companies find themselves unable to recruit staff as a result, they will move to where the cheap labour is. Thus the country's wealth would be redistributed across the country rather than concentrated in London and the south east because of flawed government policy.

HC, London,

Might be OK as long as the exteriors don't look out of place - like about 99% of new houses do now !

Remember the song ? "Little boxes made of ticky tacky and they all look just the same".

Stan(expat), USA, USA