Greater London Authority, London Social and Affordable Homes Programme

This Greater London Authority, London Social and Affordable Homes Programme will provide capital grant funding to deliver affordable housing in London from the 2026/27 financial year, as part of the broader 2026-2036 Social and Affordable Homes Programme. This scheme will award up to £11.7 billion of capital grant funding (this is up to 30% of the total budget).

Our key takeaways from the Subsidy Advice Unit (SAU) report are:

• Assessments should describe in detail how its processes, including the viability gap and benchmarking checks, help ensure that subsidy funding is kept to the minimum necessary. This includes any comparative exercises undertaken when allocating funding in the initial bidding round and if the scheme and Section 106 regulations work together to ensure proportionality.
• Detail should be provided on the possible competitive distortions, for example like those in the London housebuilding market arising from the scheme. Authorities could consider monitoring the identity and scale of recipients to examine whether the potential distortion of disproportionately benefiting larger recipients is realised and if so, whether current or future scheme conditions and acceptance criteria could be modified to address this.
• Assessments should seek to quantify, where practicable, benefits linked to the policy objective alongside negative impacts to better explain why the benefits outweigh the negative impacts.

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