Southwark Council approved just sixteen council homes last year, the Liberal Democrats have said.
Less than one per cent of the total residences signed off by the Labour-run authority in 2023/24 were council homes, data obtained by the Liberal Democrats shows.
Southwark Council responded that council housing finances had been “torpedoed” by the last government forcing it to “pause new build developments”.
But Cllr Victor Chamberlain, the local Lib Dem leader, said the data showed Labour’s housebuilding claims were “spin and smoke and mirrors”.
Southwark Council approved 173 council homes in 2021/22 and then 1,207 in 2022/23. But in 2023/24, the number of council homes approved plummeted to just sixteen while 2,656 non-council homes were rubber-stamped over the same period.
Southwark Council often claims to be one of the most ambitious council house-builders in the UK. In May 2023, it said it was building a third of England’s council homes after starting construction of 726 homes between 2021 and 2022.
Cllr Chamberlain said: “For Labour to continue to try to boast about their record is nothing short of insulting.”
Council homes are not the only way local authorities can create affordable housing. Housing associations and private developers can also provide social and intermediate-rent homes. Social-rent homes are typically 60 per cent of market rates while intermediate homes are typically 80 per cent.
In 2023/24, Southwark Council approved 424 social-rent homes and 270 intermediate-rent homes although these will not be council-run.
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Liberal Democrat Group Leader Cllr Victor Chamberlain said: “The more we scratch away at the surface of Labour’s housebuilding claims, the more we find spin and smoke and mirrors. Southwark is at ground zero of this housing crisis, so to approve just 16 council homes in the last year is a disaster for any hope of ending it.”
Cllr Helen Dennis, Cabinet Member for New Homes and Sustainable Development, said: “Council housing finances have been torpedoed by policy choices from our last government, leaving the system’s future in danger.
“Councils have had no choice but to pause new build developments to focus on keeping their existing residents in homes that are safe, dry and warm. We are working with the country’s top 20 landlords to agree what is needed to save the broken financial model, and we look forward to working with the new government to deliver more homes that our residents can afford.
“We are using every tool at our disposal to help meet the housing need in our borough, including taking a proactive approach to plan making and planning decisions. We have not refused a major housing scheme in the last three years and have issued planning consents for over 5,500 homes in the last two years alone with 39 per cent being affordable.”
This comes after Sadiq Khan was blasted by the statistics authority for his claim that “a record-breaking 25,000 genuinely affordable homes [were] delivered in the last year alone”.
Sir Robert Chote, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said in a letter that “the mayor’s use of the word ‘delivered’ could be misinterpreted by the average person to mean the housing had been completed rather than started”.
