Mayor's £50m stalled-estates fund passes its spend deadline with no estates named

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, approved £50m of government capital on 7 October 2024 to restart stalled estate regeneration schemes, the decision record shows. It sets the money against "up to 380 affordable homes and up to 850 new additional homes in total", in the decision's wording.

The money came from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, split as "£25m to the GLA in 2024-25, and the remaining £25m in 2025-26". The decision states that "all funding must be spent by March 2026", a deadline that passed five months ago.

Both housing figures are ceilings, so the money per home is a floor. If all 850 homes are delivered, £50m is about £58,800 each. If 380 affordable homes are delivered, the fund is at least about £131,600 for each of those, and more if fewer arrive.

The decision attaches the fund to the Mayor's existing programme, naming the "Homes for Londoners: Affordable Homes Programme 2021-2026 Funding Guidance" and an addendum to it.

That programme has run behind its own targets. The London Assembly's research unit reported on 8 July that it recorded "14,335 starts against a target of 17,800-19,000", with 11,383 of those starts for social rent. The fund's 380 affordable homes are about 3 per cent of the starts recorded. The Smoke reported those monitor figures this week in its coverage of the Mayor's draft London Plan.

The same release puts net additional affordable homes at 8,184 in 2024-25, against an estimated need of "45,500 new affordable homes every year over the next decade", and "341,421 households on waiting lists in March 2025". Lord Bailey of Paddington AM, chairman of the Assembly's housing committee, said in it: "Affordable housing delivery is still falling far short of what London needs."

Bidders had to clear conditions. The decision requires projects to "evidence viability gaps, which could not proceed without the financial support of additional grant funding through the LERF", to "demonstrate that funding can be spent in 2024-25 and 2025-26", and to be "at an advanced stage of planning consent and resident engagement, preferably already achieving a positive ballot result".

A ballot is the vote residents of an estate get on a regeneration scheme where the Mayor's funding rules require one. The decision names "Better Homes for Local People: The Mayor's Good Practice Guide to Estate Regeneration" as the standard providers must work to.

The Mayor did not pick the estates himself. The decision records him "delegating authority to the Executive Director of Housing and Land to approve individual funding allocations in line with the above decisions", across an "expected four to six estate regeneration sites".

No estate and no borough appears anywhere in the decision. A search of the Greater London Authority's decisions register for the fund's abbreviation, LERF, returns MD3262 and nothing else. A search for the fund's full name returns MD3262 alongside older regeneration decisions, back to a 2015 extension of the Mayor's Regeneration Fund, none of which allocates money from this one.