The homes are primarily one, two and three-bedroom flats contained within the housing developments of Royal Arsenal, Kidbrooke Village and Greenwich Millennium Village.
Money to purchase the flats will come from the near £400 million of funding assigned to phase two of the council’s house-building project, Greenwich Builds.
Cllr Majid Rahman, who presented the proposal to Greenwich Council’s cabinet at a meeting on Wednesday (June 11), said: “What we are proposing here is an opportunity for us.
“It’s an opportunity to celebrate what Greenwich Builds has already achieved in phase one with having over 750 council homes in progress.”
Cllr Rahman acknowledged that phase one was more focused on building houses rather than buying them, but in phase two—which aims to deliver over 1,000 homes in Greenwich—the council now had to “pivot and take opportunity of the changes in the market as it is”.
“Where we have predominantly built, we are looking to acquire,” he said. “Given the current climate we have been given the opportunity to increase our supply of council homes through acquisitions.
“We have to be agile and take advantage of this opportunity where developers are not able to sell to registered providers because of the current climate. We are stepping in to acquire homes at a discounted rate.
“This adds to our housing supply, now rather than later, and provides quality homes for residents on the waiting list.”
The Cabinet Member for Housing, Cllr Pat Slattery welcomed the potential acquisition. She said: “The 28,000 households on our register—of which 5,000 are priority—will be delighted as well.”
Officers were not able to confirm exactly how much grant funding the council would receive from the Greater London Authority (GLA) to help acquire the 253 homes, but they expected it to be a “significant amount”.
The residential element of the new Woolwich Leisure Centre was also discussed at the cabinet meeting, with members deciding to alter the development agreement the council had entered with developer Hill Residential back in 2021.
The initial agreement had the council purchasing 50 of the nearly 500 new homes for social housing, with another 100 being available via shared ownership schemes.
The council has now decided not to purchase the homes. Instead, they will be purchased by a housing provider and over 180 homes will be ‘affordable’ and all of them for social rent, an increase on the original proposal.
Although the exact details of the agreement were kept exempt from publication due to ‘sensitive financial information’, council officers confirmed that “viability challenges” proposed by construction costs and inflation had driven the decision not to purchase the homes.
In response to Council Leader Anthony Okereke’s question about what had been “dropped” from the residential element of the leisure centre scheme due to the agreement change, a council officer said: “There isn’t really anything being dropped per se.
“The changes that we are discussing here is that the council will not be the purchaser of the social rented element of the affordable homes package. Instead, a registered provider will purchase those, but the big gain is that instead of only one third of it being social rented, all of the affordable will be social rented. There will be no shared ownership.
“There’s a change in who’s doing what, but the overall picture is that the scheme gets more social rented homes for the borough and the borough will have nomination agreements for its residents into that.”
The officer confirmed that Greenwich would “retain the rights to put our residents in there first”.
