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GLA keen to ‘flex’ grant programme to allow more social rent
City Hall is eager to “flex” its affordable housing grant programme to deliver more homes for social rent but is constrained by government rules, London’s deputy mayor for housing has said.
During a Q&A session with the London Assembly yesterday, deputy mayor Tom Copley said the Greater London Authority (GLA) is limited to allocating 53% of its portion of the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) for social rent.
At least 47% is required by government to be for intermediate tenures, he added, with “most of that” likely to be for shared ownership.
The GLA has been handed a £4bn chunk of the £11.5bn available through the government’s AHP from 2021 to 2026 to administer to new build schemes.
London mayor Sadiq Khan announced in November that more than half of the homes delivered in the capital using the money would be for social rent, the most affordable housing tenure.
Asked whether more social rented housing could be delivered if the government agreed to change the 53% limit, he said: “So I think we would like to be able to flex the programme parameters to allow a greater amount of social rented housing within the existing programme.
“Of course we have to still make sure, given that social rented housing costs more to subsidise, that we have the funds available to do that.
“But we would like to be able to have that flexibility to be able to demonstrate that we can do that, and of course, as I’ve said, we would like even more funding to be made available as well.”
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In November, the programme was expected to deliver 82,000 homes in total, but Mr Copley referred yesterday to a 79,000 target over the next five years.
The GLA told Inside Housing the discrepancy is because the target includes the remainder of the 2016-2021 funding programme and around 3,000 more starts were made for 2020/21 than forecasted in November.
The latest £4bn is tied to a 35,000 starts target.
Elsewhere during the session, Mr Copley said the GLA is currently awaiting sign-off from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) on £1bn of strategic partnerships affordable housing funding for London.
And he claimed he is “confident” that City Hall will meet its target to make 116,000 affordable housing starts between May 2016 and March 2023 – a deadline which was extended by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic – but warned the task will be “extremely challenging”.
He was unable to provide fresh details about plans for the GLA-owned affordable housing developer promised by Mr Khan ahead of his re-election in May, saying that the work is at the “very early stages” and is “something that’s very ambitious and for the long term”.
Governance structures will be put in place to ensure that the developer does not face similar issues to Croydon Council’s beleaguered Brick by Brick, he added.
Asked about housing association residents dealing with poor services, as highlighted in reports by ITV, Mr Copley said: “There’s been some quite shocking cases where housing associations are not performing as they should be.
“I think first of all, you know, we need the government to get on with reforming some of the regulation relating to housing associations.”
He added: “I’m always happy to intervene with housing association chief executives where there are particular cases where they are not behaving as they should be.”
The GLA is currently working on an update to its shared ownership services charter, he said, while pointing to the mayor’s promise to allow shared owners to secure 990-year lease extensions following some examples of “ridiculous charges” by housing associations.
A spokesperson for MHCLG said: “We’re increasing the supply of affordable housing to both buy and rent with over £4 billion to address the need for more housing in London and its right we’re ensuring there is a mix of tenures available.
“Our largest investment in affordable housing in a decade is helping many more people get the keys to their own home, with a significant proportion delivered through this programme available for social rent.”
Update: at 13.13pm 02/07/21
A comment from MHCLG was added to the story
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