Town Hall plans to borrow £35m to buy back sold-off council homes
Islington Town Hall. Photograph: Islington Council
Islington Council plans to return almost 200 former council flats to its housing stock in the hope of tackling rising homelessness in the borough.
On Thursday, the Town Hall executive will meet to discuss proposals to borrow over £35m to purchase 193 properties sold off under the Right to Buy (RTB) scheme.
A report authored by Islington’s housing chief, Cllr John Woolf, states that the borough has 400 more homeless households in temporary accommodation (TA) than it did a year ago, bringing the total number to 1,737.
Cllr Woolf’s report highlights that although 193 additional homes would not go far enough to address Islington’s housing needs, they will ensure homeless people get “safe and secure” places to live locally.
This would help them to improve their quality of life through better health and education for children, it adds, and homeless residents would spend less time in “expensive and inappropriate” temporary housing.
The plans are set to cost around £85m, nearly half of which is funded by borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board, which lends money to local authorities for capital projects.
The rest will be financed through a combination of government grants, funding from the Greater London Authority (GLA), and money from the sales of other council properties – aka ‘Right to Buy receipts’.
The Town Hall has so far bought back 552 RTB properties in the last four years, and has exchanged a further 110.
After receiving funding from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for both these purchases and another 52 properties, Islington is set to procure a total of 245 former council homes before the end of the financial year 2025/26.
Government policy around RTB has shifted in the last year, after the Ministry for Housing afforded councils the freedom to use the entirety of RTB receipts for replacement housing.
Under the previous government, local authorities were allowed to use 40 per cent of the money gained from selling off social housing to build or purchase more homes.
In buying back these properties, the council plans to use the ‘surplus properties’ within its Housing Revenue Account (HRA) for emergency housing.
Its plans come as analysis from the charity Trust for London shows that – based on the most recent government data – the number of households in the capital in TA has almost doubled in the last decade.
According to the London Poverty Profile, as of the second quarter last year, 11.6 per cent of households in Islington were in TA.
The charity also revealed that, for every London borough it has data on, these have a higher proportion of households in emergency housing than the national average.