You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Government official reveals HRA £1bn can be used with Right to Buy receipts
Councils will be able to blend funding from the government’s £1bn Housing Revenue Account (HRA) borrowing programme with grant and Right to Buy receipts, a senior government official has said.
Chancellor Philip Hammond announced that town halls in areas of “high affordability pressure” would be invited to bid for the extra borrowing capacity from 2019/20 at the Autumn Budget in November.
A similar programme offering £300m in 2012 was quietly wound down with £220m allocated to build just 3,000 homes, well below ministers’ 10,000 homes target.
At the time, councils blamed red tape for the policy’s failure, with the headroom not eligible for use in combination with other funding such as Right to Buy receipts.
READ MORE
Speaking at the National Federation of ALMOs conference last week, Rebecca Shrubsole, deputy director for Right to Buy and local authority housing at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), confirmed that would not be the case this time around.
She said: “There won’t be any restrictions as with the last HRA borrowing programme where there was a lot about you having to find your own resources to set alongside the borrowing.
“That’s not the case with this programme. This programme’s about enabling those other sources of funding like the social rent programme and the Right to Buy receipts to be used effectively to deliver housing, so you will be able to combine that with the borrowing.”
Sector leaders have been calling for greater flexibility in the new programme.
Ms Shrubsole said there would be no maximum bid – suggesting that £220m would not be too large to be considered.
She added: “What we would love to see is people coming forward with some strong and ambitious bids. I think we’d like to demonstrate that we need to go further in terms of the borrowing.
“So we very much see this, I suppose, from an officials’ perspective as an opportunity to show what the sector can do, a good way to build up further evidence to go further in terms of borrowing capacity.
“So obviously we can’t promise anything but the more that we get some really ambitious bids in, the more that we can really see how councils are responding will be really, really helpful to us, I think as we move forward on this area of work.”
However, she also revealed that MHCLG had not worked out how “high affordability pressure” will be measured, but insisted: “That will be made very clear when we publish the prospectus for the borrowing programme which we hope to do very shortly.”
She said the department aimed to publish the bidding criteria – previously expected to appear before Easter – before the summer recess alongside an announcement on the Affordable Homes Programme.
