Havering will receive just over £24m to build new council houses across the borough.
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has allocated £24m to Havering Council to build around 280 new council houses.
As part of the Building Council Homes for Londoners scheme, Khan announced yesterday (Tuesday, October 23) he’d be distributing £1bn to 26 boroughs to build council homes.
Havering will be receiving £24,046,000 from the programme, to build 282 council homes.
The highest single amount received by any borough was Newham, that received £107.4m which will allow the council to build 1,123 homes.
The Mayor of London 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.
“Today, City Hall is using money we secured from government to help councils go much further.
“It is welcome that the prime minister has recently listened to calls that I and others have long made for councils to be able to borrow more to build. 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.
“The scale of what I have announced today shows the ambition is there in London to build a new generation of council homes – Ministers now urgently need to step up and go the distance too.”
Speaking about the £24 allocated to Havering, Londonwide assembly member, Tom Copley AM, said: “With too many local families priced out of the housing market and stuck in temporary accommodation, it has always been of the utmost priority that we get to grips with the housing crisis as a matter of urgency.
“The government have sat on their hands when it comes to council homebuilding, which fell flat during the 1990s.
“However, we now have an opportunity with this funding to kickstart an ambitious new building programme and provide the next generation of homes for social rent that our community desperately needs.
”This could be boosted further if the government provides the extra £2 billion of funding needed per year to cover the full-scale of the demand for all types of genuinely affordable housing in London”.
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