London,
23
October
2018
|
17:41
Europe/London

Camden Council secures £30 million for new council homes

Camden Council has secured £30 million of funding from the Mayor of London to help continue building new council homes.

The council secured £30,800,000 from the Mayor’s ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ fund to help build 308 social rented homes through Camden's Community Investment Programme (CIP).

Councillor Danny Beales, Cabinet Member for Investing in Communities, said:

“Despite Camden Council’s budget having been cut in half by Government since 2010, we’ve not wavered in our commitment to delivering council and genuinely affordable housing for Camden residents. We have innovated via our Community Investment Programme (CIP) in order to deliver the first new council homes in a generation. We are determined to deliver the housing that our residents need. We welcomed the announcement of additional funding from the Mayor of London and applied to help us meet the costs of delivering our planned new council homes over the next three years.

“I’m delighted that we have today been successful in securing nearly £31 million of funding from the Mayor to deliver over 300 more council homes in Camden. In addition to this we expect to build a further 150 council and Camden Living homes over the next four years on top of this number. This great news also follows our successful campaigning to get the borrowing cap removed. Both of these steps are important, and enable us to continue our rate of delivery, having already delivered over 300 council and living rent homes in recent years. But we want to go even further. We await next week’s Budget, hopeful that the lifting of the cap will also be accompanied by further support to allow councils to build the council homes that London needs to get out of the housing crisis.”

 

Information about the Community Investment Programme:

The Community Investment Programme (CIP) is a 15-year plan to invest over £1 billion in schools, homes and community facilities in Camden. CIP is the Council’s answer to government spending cuts – an innovative way to continue to invest in our community despite massive reductions in central government funding.

To date CIP has:

  • Built 721 new homes of the following tenure:
    • 285 Council homes (156 additional homes and 129 replacing poor quality homes with brand new often larger homes to help meet demand)
    • 13 Shared Ownership homes
    • 65 Camden Living homes let at below market rent to people who couldn’t otherwise afford to stay in Camden (63% of tenants are public sector workers offering social value and a quarter are sons and daughters of social housing tenants in the borough).
    • 358 homes for sale to help pay for the new affordable homes, schools and community facilities. Including 70 units purchased by the Department of Transport and subsequently returned to the Council as replacement housing for residents displaced by the development of High Speed Two.
  • Invested over £100m into schools and children’s centres across the borough and built two new primary school buildings, most recently the award winning Kingsgate Primary School at Liddell Road which completed last year providing capacity for 420 new school places.
  • Built new community facilities such as the St Pancras Community Centre, a new tenant hall at Bourne Estate
  • Refurbished old work house style accommodation at Mount Pleasant to create a new state of the art residential training facility for homeless people