The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has revealed he will use funds from the £1.67 billion secured from central government in the Spring Statement to kickstart council homebuilding in the capital.
A number of deals have now been struck with local authorities under the Building Council Homes for Londoners programme. Waltham Forest plans to start 525 new council homes with £26m of funding from City Hall over the next four years, while both Newham and Lewisham have each committed to starting 1,000 new council homes by 2022.
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In addition, the programme offers councils an innovative way to ringfence their Right to Buy receipts to help them build new homes to replace those sold in the local area.
Mayor Khan said: "I am proud to launch Building Council Homes for Londoners – the first ever City Hall programme dedicated to new council housing. I want to help councils get back to building homes for Londoners again, and I’m doing that with support from the £1.67bn fund I secured from government to help get 10,000 new homes underway over the next four years.
"I am offering councils expertise and resources from City Hall to scale up their homebuilding programmes, and I will help them to replace homes sold through Right to Buy. The government is failing to enable councils to replace the hundreds of thousands of council homes sold through Right to Buy, and so I will do all I can to help councils replace as many of them as possible."
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