As Bernard Morgan House finally demolished government figures show City of London is as bad as the Isles of Scilly in building affordable homes

[Paul Lincoln]

As the last piece of Bernard Morgan House is demolished and carted away, figures published this week by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government show that the City of London was in the bottom five local authorities when it comes to building affordable housing. 

The New Homes Bonus Allocations show which local authorities did not receive any funding for new homes this year. There are just 5 local authorities in England in this group. They were the Isles of Scilly, Barrow-in-Furness, Adur, Epping Forest and the City of London.  

The New Homes Bonus allocation is a grant paid by central government to local councils to reflect and incentivise housing growth in their areas. It is based on the amount of extra Council Tax revenue raised for new-build homes, conversions and long-term empty homes brought back into use. There is also an extra payment for providing affordable homes.

The figures show that the City of London built exactly 0 new affordable units (compared to neighbouring Tower Hamlets, with 1085 – the highest in the country).

Only three local authorities did worse, including Barrow-in-Furness which demolished three whole streets of houses. The full details can be downloaded here.

Campaigners opposed to the building of the The Denizen by Taylor Wimpy on the site of Bernard Morgan House have consistently challenged both the developers and the City of London to build affordable housing on part of the site and yet Taylor Wimpy has not only consistently failed to do so but are only paying a fraction of their social housing contribution. Their excuse being that they paid too much for the site!

The Save Golden Lane Campaign is running a crowd sourced campaign to contest the City of London.  Details can be found here. Background information on the campaign can be found in the Open Golden Lane blog.

[Hussain]

As vacated properties become available within the Barbican Estate, the City of London Corporation is selling them on the open market, rather than using the same vacated properties to house our local doctors, nurses, teachers, key workers, and others, incidentally the Barbican Estate was built to house key City workers.

All new buildings, depending on size, offices included, should have an element of social key worker housing, if other councils can demand this from developers the City of London Corporation needs to look into this and consider a similar policy to housing for much key workers within its boundary.