Lewisham Council sitting on £16.3 million of affordable housing money

Newsshopper more or less just cut and pasted this from Huffington post. But is Lewisham really ‘hoarding’ money - there is surely no gain in deliberately doing that? No, it is spending it. Only £6m of this money is unallocated, the rest is already allocated to projects. £6m is a tiny amount of money in context of annual housing budgets for the Borough.

It should of course be allocated and spent on what it is earmarked for, as fast as reasonably possible. Many other councils across the country have similar or far higher amounts unallocated though, so it’s not particularly unusual. It takes time from receipt of monies to get across the complexity of planning, finding suitable locations for new affordable housing and so on so you’d expect there to always be some backlog.

In a recent budget statement (Feb 2018) the council said. ‘We are building 500 council homes and 2,000 new affordable homes in Lewisham to tackle the housing crisis.’

So not sure why Newsshopper find this anti Council ‘story’ particularly noteworthy – just before the elections?