Community-led housing
The Mayor's London Housing Strategy sets out key community-led housing principles:
- meaningful community engagement and consent occurs throughout the development process. Communities do not necessarily have to initiate the conversation or build homes themselves
- a presumption that the community group or organisation will take a long-term formal role in owning, stewarding, or managing the homes
- the scheme's benefits to the local area and/or specified community group are clearly defined, and legally protected in perpetuity.
The Mayor wants Londoners to have the opportunity to play a leading role in building their own communities. To help them do this, he is acting to boost developinf new community-led homes by:
- creating opportunities for community-led housing at St Ann's in Haringey
- funding community-led housing groups through his Community Housing Fund;
- supporting the Community-Led Housing London Hub
- facilitating land for community-led housing through his Small Sites, Small Builders initiative.
Community-led homes at St Ann's
St Ann's is a flagship, 995 home development, delivered through a partnership between the Mayor and Peabody. The scheme will enshrine 60 per cent of homes as genuinely affordable, and up to 56 of these will be ringfenced and acquired as community-led homes.
In September, the GLA launched an opportunity for community groups to submit proposals for acquiring 56 homes at St Ann's New Neighbourhood Scheme, in the London Borough of Haringey. The selection process has now closed, and the GLA looks forward to announcing the outcome in coming months.
If you need information in an alternative format, email [email protected].
Community Housing Fund
The Mayor has secured London's Community Housing Fund share, and is delivering the capital's programme. Outside London, the programme is being delivered by Homes England.
You can see grant funding allocations by reading this Community Housing Fund allocations document, covering quarter 1, 2018-19 to quarter 4, 2023-24. This data is also published under the GLA’s Decisions or Delegated Approvals Log, as appropriate.
Funding prospectus
The Mayor published the Community Housing Fund prospectus in January 2019, which sets out fund objectives to:
- increase London's housing supply, by boosting the number of homes delivered by the community-led housing sector;
- provide housing that is affordable at local income levels (and remains so in perpetuity)
- deliver a legacy for the community-led housing sector, offering effective and self-sustaining expertise.
The programme is providing the following funding:
- revenue grants to community-led groups, helping cover project-specific activity costs that support developing proposals for new housing schemes, as well as pre-development costs and preparing for planning applications.
- capital funding to deliver new homes
- development finance to support delivering CLH schemes.
Organisations and groups who want to bid for revenue and/or capital funding should contact the Community-Led Housing London Hub at www.communityledhousing.london, to discuss their application.
How to bid
Following an initial discussion with the Community-Led Housing London Hub, bids for advanced revenue or capital funding should be submitted through the GLA's Open Project System (OPS). OPS is a streamlined system which partners should find simple to navigate. If your organisation has not previously used OPS, you must first register and create a new organisation profile to be able to bid. This process (along with further OPS information) is detailed in this user guide. Organisations bidding for capital funding should also look at the GLA's Affordable Housing Capital Funding Guide, and email the GLA if they need further help to use it, at [email protected].
The GLA has in place an Anti-Money Laundering Policy. This covers, in particular, checks undertaken when the GLA makes interest-free loans and recoverable grants to entities and individuals.
Community-Led Housing London Hub
For the first time, there is a one-stop shop giving organisations the information, capacity-building and technical support they need to get their community-led housing projects up, running and delivered.
The Community-Led Housing London Hub was launched in July 2017, and is hosted by CDS Co-operatives. The hub provides information, capacity-building and technical support, to help groups get their projects up and running.
Small Sites, Small Builders
Through the Small Sites, Small Builders programme, launched in February 2018, the Mayor earmarked two Tfl-owned sites for community-led housing: Cable Street in Tower Hamlets and Christchurch Road in Lambeth, and has supported boroughs in bringing forward other sites for community-led housing.
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