Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce in Wednesday’s Budget an extra £550m next year to get the school building programme on track and an extra £500m to boost affordable housing.

The extra spending on schools will lift next year’s school building programme spend up to £1.4bn.

Her cash injection aims to get the 10-year rebuilding programme, unveiled by Boris Johnson in 2021, back on track towards delivering an originally promised 50 new schools a year.

So far just 23 schools have completed. While many more projects are under construction, still more at pre-construction are caught in a budget impasse because of industry-wide cost inflation.

There are currently 518 projects in the programme, including many schools that have been identified as having dangerous crumbly RAAC concrete.

Detailing some of her plans this weekend ahead of Wednesday’s Budget, Reeves also said she was committed to releasing an extra £500m to deliver 5,000 more new affordable homes.

The cash would be a top-up to the existing Affordable Homes Programme and comes ahead of the Government’s Housing Strategy due to be set out in detail in the Spring.

Measures to increase affordable house building come in tandem with plans to reduce Right to Buy discounts to protect the existing social housing stock and craft a five-year social housing rent settlement.

The Chancellor said: “We need to fix the housing crisis in this country. It’s created a generation locked out of the property market, torn apart communities and put the brakes on economic growth.

“We are rebuilding Britain by ramping up housebuilding and delivering the 1.5 million new homes we so badly need.”

The government also confirmed at the weekend £128m of funding to deliver new homes at complex brownfield sites.

This will be allocated to:

• £56m at Liverpool Central Docks for a scheme to deliver 2,000 homes in North Liverpool, along with office, retail, leisure, and hotel facilities.
• £25m to establish a new fund with Muse Places and Pension Insurance Corporation to deliver 3,000 energy-efficient new affordable homes across the country
• £47m to local authorities to tackle pollution in rivers, which has halted house building. This funding could support the delivery of up to 28,000 homes that cannot be built currently due to restrictions.