Sadiq Khan
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has agreed plans worth more than £1bn with 26 London boroughs to build 11,000 new council homes over the next four years.
The plans are part of the ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ – the first-ever City Hall programme dedicated to council homebuilding.
Under the scheme, allocations for 11,154 new council homes at social rent levels have been agreed, as well as a further 3,570 other homes, including those for London Living Rent.
Khan secured the funding for the homes from government earlier this year, after council homebuilding fell to nearly zero in the 1990s, with councils’ ambitions held back by a lack of resources and limits on borrowing.
Under the new plans, building rates over the next four years are estimated to reach around five times those over the previous four years.
But Khan warned that the Prime Minister’s recent announcement that councils would be allowed to borrow more would not fix the housing crisis – and said the capital needs an estimated £2.7 billion per year to build all the council, social rented, and other affordable homes required in the capital.
He said: “London’s housing crisis is hugely complex and has been decades in the making. There is no simple fix – but council housing is the most important part of the solution. 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.
"But let me be clear: lifting the borrowing cap for councils must be just the first step of reform, not the last.
“We need at least four times the amount of money we currently get from Government for new social and affordable homes, and we need far greater powers to step in and buy land for new council housing.”
How the funding will be allocated:
