Putting social housing first: Mayor’s money to fund 100 new Council homes
A hundred more homes being built by Hackney Council will be let at a social rent to those most in need using funding from the Mayor of London, under changes agreed last night.
The plans, approved by the Council’s Cabinet, will increase the number of genuinely affordable Council homes delivered on eight developments as part of its in-house, award-winning housebuilding programme.
The Council will use £10 million it was awarded from the Mayor of London’s Building Council Homes for Londoners programme to fund the swaps. Without this grant, the 100 homes would have been for shared ownership or sold outright to cover the costs of building new Council housing.
A further £35.5 million of funding will be used to help build a further 2,000 new homes, on sites yet to be identified, which will start on site by 2022 – as well as supporting the delivery of homes for shared ownership on existing schemes. Further details on these new projects, which will be delivered using the Council’s existing direct delivery approach, will be released once initial assessments on where they could be built take place.
Acting as its own developer, rather than selling off land, Hackney Council is already building 2,000 homes, three schools and a leisure centre between 2018 and 2022, with more than half of these homes for genuinely affordable social rent or shared ownership.
I’m proud that Hackney is building thousands of homes across our borough, but housebuilding is an expensive business. Without a penny of government support, we have to sell homes outright to pay for new Council housing.
This funding from the Mayor of London is vital, and means 100 more families in desperate need of a genuinely affordable Council home will have one.
Sadiq Khan’s support for council housebuilding means we have the long-term financial security to invest in finding new sites to develop homes – demonstrating the real effect direct funding can have in transforming our residents’ lives.
The 100 extra Council homes for social rent will be built as part of existing projects – some subject to planning permission – due to be delivered at:
Kings Crescent Estate: 28 homes
Nightingale Estate: 25 homes
De Beauvoir Estate: 23 homes
Colville Estate: Nine homes
Frampton Park Estate: Six homes
Two projects in Hoxton West: Six homes
Tower Court: Three homes
On average, it costs around £300,000 to build each new Council home. The Mayor of London’s grant will cover around £100,000 of this cost, which the Council would otherwise have to find by selling some of the homes it builds outright. The remaining £200,000 is usually covered by borrowing against future rental income, and money the Council receives through sales of existing homes under the Government’s Right to Buy policy – which ministers dictate can only cover a third of the cost of a replacement home.
The Council has also taken advantage of the Mayor of London’s offer to ring-fence income from Right to Buy sales to reinvest in future programmes – allowing it to plan for the long-term, rather than being forced to return the cash to the Government under arbitrary restrictions which constrain the ability of councils to build new homes.
To find out more visit the Hackney is Building pages.