Responding to reports over the weekend suggesting that the Affordable Housing Programme will receive £500m for social housing in the Budget on Wednesday, Antonia Jennings, CEO of Centre for London, said:

“£500m for social homes sounds like a lot of money, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the catastrophic scale of need for funding for social housing in this country.

The government has suggested £500mill will unlock potential for 5,000 social homes Meanwhile, evidence suggests 90,00 new homes are needed each year for the next fifteen to meet the scale of need.

New social homes are desperately needed, and nowhere more so than in London. Evidence suggests that a third of the 90,000 homes required across England should be built in the capital.

323,0o0 London households are on the social housing wait list – over double the population of Cambridge. These waiting lists are the longest in the UK, with Londoners being left for years, sometimes decades, before being allocated a suitable socially rented home.

While cutting the ‘right to buy’ discount on social homes will keep social homes in public hands, this will not increase the number of social homes. It will merely halt the erosion of current social housing stock.

We cannot wait for this crisis to worsen. With this compromise with Angela Rayner’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Labour are only taking a small step towards alleviating the scale of the emergency, and we urge the government to reconsider this ahead of Wednesday’s budget.”