Affordable housing in London: Mayor Sadiq Khan injects £550 million into new homes schemes in bid to hit annual target

It will be announced tomorrow whether he has hit his key target of starting at least 14,000 affordable homes this year. 
1/14

Sadiq Khan has injected a budget-busting £550 million into affordable housing schemes in a bid to hit his annual target for new homes.

The Mayor exceeded his £223 million annual budget by more than £300 million in 2018-19 in the hope of enticing developers back to the capital’s Brexit-blighted property market.

The revelation comes ahead of an announcement tomorrow that will reveal whether Mr Khan has hit his key target of starting at least 14,000 affordable homes in the last financial year.

Just over 6,000 had been started by Christmas, meaning work needs to have begun on a further 8,000 in the first three months of this year.

He only achieved the 12,500 minimum target in 2017-18 by 55 homes amid accusations of “double counting” — where construction had been stopped and then restarted — which Mr Khan denies.

The Mayor’s Homes for Londoners board, which met in private yesterday, was told that the “uncertain” housing market was posing “considerable risks” to the long-term plan of starting at least 116,000 affordable homes by March 2022.

It said that City Hall spending on the affordable homes programme in 2018-19 was forecast to reach £550.4 million.

Starts have risen each year under Mr Khan’s mayoralty, as have the number of affordable homes completed — but only to 5,355 in 2017-18.

The board’s report warned: “Delivering the Mayor’s affordable homes programme is challenging and achieving the 116,000 starts target by 2022 is not without risk.”

Last month Mr Khan offered an extra £200 million to housing associations struggling because of Brexit to use market sales to cross-subsidise affordable homes.

He said he was prepared to “push our funding to its very limits” to encourage them to make homes, initially intended for market sale, available for low or intermediate rent instead.

Andrew Boff, a Tory member of the London Assembly, said Mr Khan’s target for 50 per cent of homes to be affordable had scared off developers.

He told the Standard: “If he is trying to throw money at this stage, it does indicate he is desperate, but it might also indicate there are plenty of schemes to spend the money on.”

He claimed that Mr Khan double-counted last year in order to meet the bare minimum number of homes that he agreed with the Government.

A spokesman for the Mayor said: “Sadiq is committed to doing everything in his power to increase the delivery of much-needed affordable homes.

This level of investment reflects that a range of organisations — including housing associations — are drawing on the funding available from City Hall to fulfil their ambitious plans to build new housing.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in