Islington Council snaps up more than 150 ex-right to buy homes in a year

Islington Town Hall. Photograph: Islington Council

Islington Council has purchased 38 per cent of the 410 ex-right to buy properties that it has earmarked as part of a £1 billion project to tackle homelessness.

More than 150 properties have been purchased in the past year, and a further purchase of 90 properties is “due to be completed soon”.

Most of these ex-right to buy flats and houses between one and three bedrooms.

The council’s housing operations services report said it aims to complete the purchase of a further 254 ex-right to buy properties within the next 18 months.

Last October, £1 billion in grant and revenue funding was allocated to the purchasing of these properties.

Forty of the one-bedroom properties have been allocated to “care experienced young adults and people sleeping rough”.

Sixty properties with either two, three or four bedrooms will be for “people who are homeless from Afghanistan and the Ukraine as part of the council’s humanitarian housing work”.