Over the next few years in England, you can expect fifty thousand fewer affordable homes, which includes 45,000 fewer to be built in London.
The details were revealed last week and the Homes and Communities Agency, who help fund most low-cost homes for rent or sale, has significantly reduced its targets in agreement with the Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
Richard Hill, head of investment for the agency wrote a letter confirming its London targets to be cut from 44,000 to 37,000 and new starts to go down from 66,000 to 28,000.
The cutbacks mean that Gordon Brown?s promise of building an extra 20,000 affordable homes looks likely to be unfulfilled.
While a HCA spokesperson was reluctant to comment on how many homes had been cut nationwide, they did have a reason for it: ?The targets have been reduced across the board. A lot more grants have to go into building homes for various reasons, one of them being that social landlords would have made sales revenue
With London feeling the brunt of the cuts, it?s sparked outrage from London Mayor Boris Johnson?s office, with Richard Blakeway, the mayor?s director of housing finding the plans ?totally unacceptable? with no long-term solution.
Also disappointed is the campaign group Defend Council Housing (DCH), who now feel the proposals fall short, with DCH saying there was a lack of a ?level playing field?.
A DCH spokesperson said: ?Our message to the minister is clear: tenants and their landlords will not be bullied into accepting unsustainable levels of debt based on poverty standards. We will not accept anything less than fair funding to bring homes and estates up to genuinely decent standards and maintain them for a sustainable future.?
