Birmingham: we’ll take the whole £100m

Birmingham Council emerged as one of the front-runners in a bidding war to lead the new council house building boom after its cabinet member for housing, John Lines (pictured), announced it would chase ‘every penny we can get’ to build homes.

Birmingham is one of a number of councils already looking to compete for the £100 million pot.

Broxtowe Council is set to apply for £1 million and Cornwall Council is looking at a bid to help fund a £120 million plan to build 1,000 new homes within three years – the maximum number of homes the Chartered Institute of Housing estimates the entire fund could deliver.

Leeds Council wants to apply for funding to enable it to get a 25-home scheme off the ground. But Mr Lines confirmed the scale of Birmingham’s ambition, stating: ‘We’ll go for the lot.’

He stressed that the government should be ‘ashamed’ of itself because the ‘pathetic’ amount of money available did not match councils’ desire to build.

Mike Owen, chief executive of arm’s-length management organisation Carrick Housing, said that if councils spent the money efficiently it could lead to more funding in the future.

Charlotte Harrison, director of policy at the Northern Housing Consortium, said that due to the level of interest, the Homes and Communities Agency would have to look at whether it ‘invests in something [as large-scale as] the Birmingham example’.

‘You could see two or three large-scale schemes that give us an opportunity to test out radical thinking about how we go about procuring new homes,’ she added.

The HCA is expected to publish details about how it will implement the new funding next week.

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