Councils are on course to spend more than £1bn on commercial property this year, investing more in shopping centres, country clubs, hotels, offices and other assets than in building council houses. The £1bn councils are on track to spend could produce more than 8,000 new council homes
Town halls in England and Wales spent £758m buying up commercial property in the first eight months of this year, according to property market data from Savills, but are only building 1,730 council houses a year, government figures for 2016-17 show. About 77,000 households in England and Wales are living in temporary accommodation and 1.2 million are on council waiting lists.
Coventry city council decided last month to buy Coombe Abbey hotel in a multimillion-pound deal, prompting protests from locals that it was doing so while making wider cuts. The local authority has no council housing despite rising homelessness, with more than 600 households in priority need.
Kingston council in Surrey spent £54m buying two office buildings and a business park in the last year, but only invested in one new council house, a former school caretaker’s cottage. The borough has 9,524 households on an ever-lengthening waiting list.
A solar farm, and a shopping centre, cinema and bowling alley complex due for completion in 2020, in which Barnsley council invested £70m this year.
Town halls in England and Wales spent £758m buying up commercial property in the first eight months of this year, according to property market data from Savills, but are only building 1,730 council houses a year, government figures for 2016-17 show. About 77,000 households in England and Wales are living in temporary accommodation and 1.2 million are on council waiting lists.
Coventry city council decided last month to buy Coombe Abbey hotel in a multimillion-pound deal, prompting protests from locals that it was doing so while making wider cuts. The local authority has no council housing despite rising homelessness, with more than 600 households in priority need.
Kingston council in Surrey spent £54m buying two office buildings and a business park in the last year, but only invested in one new council house, a former school caretaker’s cottage. The borough has 9,524 households on an ever-lengthening waiting list.
A solar farm, and a shopping centre, cinema and bowling alley complex due for completion in 2020, in which Barnsley council invested £70m this year.
Spelthorne council in Surrey has spent more than £400m in the past 14 months on office buildings including the Sunbury-on-Thames campus of BP, and the headquarters of the contactless payment software company Verifone, located outside the borough. The council said it made the latest purchase because “the withdrawal of funding for local authorities means that many councils are having to find new ways to fund services”. There is no council housing in the borough and it has warned of “very long” waiting times for housing and said many people will not be housed.
The boom in commercial property investment dwarfs the amount spent on homes partly because central government restricts how much councils can borrow against their existing housing assets. However, the Treasury offers cheap loans that can be spent on commercial property. Councils have been using them in an attempt to create new income streams to fill budget holes left by cuts.
Martin Tett, the Local Government Association housing spokesman, said “As a nation, we need to build more than 300,000 homes a year, and we’re currently building roughly half that,” he said. “The last time this country hit that number, in the 1970s, councils built more than 40% of new homes.”
No comments:
Post a Comment