Town hall deputy leader grilled over decision to lease council land to developer for nearly 1,000 years

By Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter

A council’s deputy leader has defended plans to hand over a plot of land to a developer for 999 years as part of an agreement to build 320 homes.

Lambeth council-owned land in Brixton would be leased to a developer for almost a millennium upon its completion of homes on the site, under proposals agreed by the council’s cabinet in July.

Danial Adilypour, deputy leader of the Labour council, said officials were obliged to agree to such a long lease in order to qualify for grant funding for affordable homes.

He made the remarks at a scrutiny meeting after five of his Labour colleagues called-in the decision for further interrogation by councillors, over concern about the length of the lease and the lack of affordable housing included in the project.

Speaking on Thursday, councillor Adilypour said: “It’s important to stress that for us to be able to access an affordable housing grant to help fund the development of affordable homes as part of this development, one of the conditions that we have to meet is that the lease granted to the first owner of the flat is 990 years.

“We also add an additional nine years on top of this for the developer to design and build then sell the shared ownership units, hence we have no choice but a lease length of 999 if we want to draw down that affordable housing grant funding.”

Councillor Liz Atkins, one of the five Labour members who called-in the decision, said she was disappointed that a developer could be allowed to get away with making as few as 30 per cent of the homes affordable under the proposals.

She also questioned why the council was relying on an outside developer to bring forward the homes, rather than building them directly itself.

Cllr Adilypour responded that “soft market testing” carried out by the council had shown 50 per cent affordable housing wasn’t “achievable in the current climate,” without dropping other features of the development, including 50 assisted living homes for the elderly, disabled and people with mental health issues.

He added: “No developer is going to do this out of the goodness of their heart. They need to see a return on their development and the 15 to 20 per cent return we talk about in this report is very much the norm within the industry for a developer to be willing to take on the level of risk needed to develop a scheme of this scale to get the homes and benefits for our community.”

Councillor Atkins asked for the decision to be sent back to cabinet, but as she attended virtually she was unable to vote for this to happen. A majority of councillors attending the scrutiny meeting in person voted to not refer the decision back to cabinet.

Earlier stages of the council’s Somerleyton Road project have already been completed. Work to refurbish locally listed Carlton Mansions started in 2018, while Brixton House Theatre opened to the public in early 2022.

Pictured top: CGI of what Somerleyton Road could look like once the development is complete (Picture: Lambeth council)