Vladimir Putin's opening remarks at the meeting:

Good afternoon,

Today we will discuss progress in drafting the long-term strategy of large-scale housing construction and the complex of priority measures to implement it.

As we know well, the housing issue affects practically every Russian citizen, every person in this country. It has always been a very acute problem in the country - always.

How we are able to meet that demand determines the wellbeing of tens of millions of our citizens and the prospects for the development of many constituent parts of the Russian Federation.

Unless we achieve a breakthrough in housing we will be unable to sustain the positive demographic trends, to form a modern labour market, ensure energy saving in our economy as a whole because, as we know, the housing and utilities complex consumes enormous amounts of energy in a way that is by no means always effective.

The rate of commissioning of new housing has greatly increased in recent years: it has almost doubled from 38 million square meters in 2003 to 61 billion square meters in 2007.

The building of individual houses accounts for a significant share of total housing construction. Early projects of comprehensive development of territories have been launched.

But we have to admit that we are talking about "compensation growth". Housing construction has yet to reach the level of the period before the slump of the 1990s.

The prices of apartments are still too high. Only 18% of our citizens can afford such prices. Think of it, only 18%!

The shortage of suitable land, engineering, social infrastructure, power generating capacity and roads is increasingly felt.

In fact, the reserves for increasing the volume of construction have by and large been exhausted. Although experts speak about a measure of overheating in this sector, I believe that it is due to infrastructure limitations.

Our task is to form the prerequisites for moving on to a qualitatively new phase in housing development. I have said that only 18% of our citizens can afford to pay for their housing themselves. We must bring that figure to at least 60%, so that 60% of our citizens could solve their housing problems, given certain government instruments, independently.

We are planning to commission 115 million square meters of housing by 2012 and 154 million square meters by 2020.

The future belongs to comprehensive development of new territories, including the building of low-rise houses.

The Fund for the Development of Housing Construction is to begin functioning in the coming months. As we have said many times, land that is federal property will be handed over to the Fund. These are mainly lands within city limits or in the outskirts.

We should also think about new ways of providing incentives to the Russian regions and municipal entities to create conditions for increasing new housing construction.

The Ministry of Regional Development has prepared some proposals. The regions would be granted a uniform federal subsidy for the development of the engineering and social infrastructure because this is the bottleneck in solving the problem as a whole. The right to such subsidies will be granted to the regions that meet the established requirements.

As you know I had a meeting with the leaders of the Federation Council yesterday. We discussed, among other things, the option of switching from a multitude of small subsidies reaching the regions through various channels to uniform large subsidies that would solve major social and economic problems. I believe that the idea will be acceptable to the regional administrations.

It is necessary to work hard to make mass construction cheaper, in particular, by supporting housing cooperatives and similar associations of citizens. The situation in the building materials industry calls for serious analysis. We will have a separate and detailed discussion on the issue very soon.

The introduction of new technical regulations should improve the quality and reliability of residential houses. It is necessary to pay considerable attention to fulfilling our plans to provide housing for World War II veterans, servicemen, retired servicemen as well as implementing programmes for new families.

We have identified a complex of measures in this sphere. I very much hope that we will finalize the Strategy in the near future. Let us discuss the progress of this work.