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London councils bid nearly three times their allocation for a programme offering extra borrowing capacity for housebuilding, it has been revealed.
At the 2017 Autumn Budget, chancellor Philip Hammond announced that local authorities across England would be invited to apply for a £1bn of additional Housing Revenue Account (HRA) borrowing headroom.
Half the spending was reserved for London’s 28 stock-retaining councils.
Just three days after the bidding closed, prime minister Theresa May unveiled surprise plans to scrap the HRA cap altogether, with town halls able to borrow freely for new housing from late October.
And a report before the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) Homes for Londoners board on Tuesday said the capital’s councils had thrown in for around £1.4bn of extra HRA headroom.
Inside Housing reported in July that the programme would be overwhelmed with demand in London – and later revealed that just 12 authorities across England had applied for the entire £1bn pot.
Just four councils – Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney and Tower Hamlets – applied for more than £510m between them, the entire London budget.
Ministers have said the huge interest in the £1bn programme informed the decision to remove the HRA cap altogether.
The scale of bidding from councils outside London has not yet been made public.
London councils also submitted bids totalling more than £1.5bn of grant for the GLA’s £1bn council housebuilding programme, which was allocated in October with 14,700 new homes expected.