New Council Housing

New Council Housing for Islington

Introduction

Homes for Islington, working in partnership with Islington Council, has recently started building new council homes in the borough, for the first time in over 20 years. The first programme of work consists of building 14 new units across two different sites.

These two sites are:

Boleyn Road
Armour Close

Click on the links above for further information on each of the sites.

New houses, maisonettes and flats will be built. Where possible these will be larger family sized homes, as these are hardest to find in the borough and there is a high demand for this kind of family accommodation. They will help to relieve the borough’s overcrowded families and increase the number of family homes Islington Council can offer through HFI.

Q&As Islington New Build for Residents (pdf file 108Kb)

Who is developing the sites?
The homes being built will be council housing, owned by Islington Council. The council is funding the development and Homes for Islington will be managing this process as well as the day-to-day management of the new homes, once completed.

The building work will be carried out by a contractor, supervised by HFI, and appointed through a short competitive procurement process that will include the existing framework contractors working on the Decent Homes programme.

All the sites being developed are on council owned land and will remain in council ownership.

Mansell have been appointed as the constructor to build the homes at Boleyn and Armour and HFI are in the process of procuring contractors to undertake the works at Clifton Court, Neptune House & Docura House.

Standards
The new housing will be built to the same standards that are used by housing associations - the Housing Corporation Design Quality Standards.

The work will also meet the council’s sustainability standards as set out in the planning and policy guidance. It is also planned that one site will go further than these standards and set a new level for reducing the carbon-footprint.

Planning permission
The council and HFI have been working together on the two sites identified at Boleyn Road and Armour Close and will continue to do so for all future schemes. Planning permission has now been granted for Boleyn Road (on 24th January 2008) Armour Close (on 3rd March 2008) and Clifton Court (16th October 2008). Planning applications have also been submitted for both Neptune House and Docura House.

Funding the sites
The funding of the new building will be through Islington Council. The project will be funded from the capital receipts from the disposal of the council’s commercial property portfolio and £8 million has been ear-marked for these developments.

Click here (pdf file 291Kb) for full details of the decision by the council executive.

As for further new build phases, please click on the relevant links below for further information:

Neptune House
Clifton Court
Docura House
143 Seven Sisters Road