You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Khan allocates £1bn for councils to build 14,700 more homes
Sadiq Khan has allocated £1bn of funding to local authorities under his ground-breaking council housebuilding fund which will allow them to build 14,700 new homes in London.
Twenty-six London boroughs have received funds from City Hall as part of the programme, which aims to fund 11,000 new low-rent council homes at London Affordable Rent over the next four years.
Councils can access grant rates of up to £100,000 per home for London Affordable Rent.
This rate tracks what a new build social rent home would be worth, making it marginally more expensive than average social rents.
City Hall estimated that the plans will see councils increase their building rates by five times over the next four years compared with the previous four.
READ MORE
The funds come out of the £1.67bn of grant the mayor received at the Spring Statement earlier in the year and will pay for 11,154 homes at London Affordable Rent as well as 3,570 other homes, some of which will be for London Living Rent, which is set at a third of local incomes.
Mr Khan said: “Londoners need more council homes that they can genuinely afford, and local authorities have a fundamental role to play in getting London building the homes we need for the future.
“Today, City Hall is using money we secured from government to help councils go much further. It is welcome that the prime minister has recently listened to calls that I and others have long made for councils to be able to borrow more to build. But let me be clear: lifting the borrowing cap for councils must be just the first step of reform, not the last.”
A number of boroughs, including Brent, Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Havering, Hounslow and Lewisham, received significantly less than they bid for, with Havering receiving only 20% of the money it bid for.
Mr Khan said London needs “at least four times the amount of money we currently get from government” to build council housing.
Newham Council received the largest allocation of £107m which it said will help it build 1,123 homes. The authority, as Inside Housing reported last month, had planned for the bid to potentially increase to £150m.
Rokhsana Fiaz, mayor of Newham, said: “Newham residents are at the forefront of the housing crisis. Too many families are desperately in need of a sustainable home they can genuinely afford.
“We have over 27,000 households on our housing waiting list and more than 4,800 households in temporary accommodation. This is why I have committed to build over 1,000 new council homes at social rent levels over the next four years.”
