Funny question.
Newspapers have apparently reported that the Labour led Southwark Council Elephant&Castle regeneration deal is £26M worse than the draft Lib Dem deal that the change in political leadership stopped.
By my calculations Labour’s deal is £100M+ worse but lets for argument sake go with the newspapers reported £26M.
What could Southwark have bought with £26M. It could have joined the ranks of having an Olympic 50M long swimming pool with sports centre at the Elephant&Castle. A swimming pool there would be of national significance being in the inner London.
Or, perhaps a brand new secondary school.
Or, even every home in Southwark with loft, cavity amd solid wall insulation with draft proofing thrown in for good measure.
Sadly these things are now very unlikely to pass.
Apparently reported? Do you have a source link?
Perhaps you could explain your £100m+ calculation. If you, or even the press, is right, I’d be interested to know the Council’s rationale.
Southwark Council Officers calculate the value of each Social Housing habitable room at £80,000-£100,000 each. So a 1 bed flat would be worth £160,000->£200,000 and so on.
The agreement is for 25% social housing. The Southwark plan requires 35%. New developments are now proposing the new precendent of 25%. Ignoring the bigger affect of a lower precendent for now. At E&C Labour have agreed 50% of the 25% affordable housing will be social rented housing and other 50% of the 25% will be mixed tenure ie partly private.
Plans are for 4000 homes to be built. The Labour agreed plan results in 500 social rented homes and 500 mixed tenure partly private.
The draft Lib Dem plan would have seen 700 of each.
The current mix of 1,2,3,4,5 bed homes equates on average to 2 bed homes or 3 habitable rooms.
700-500 = 200 fewer on average 3 habitable roomed rented properties or £144,000,000 lost value to Southwark at the low end othe range used by officers.
The mixed tenure loss is roughly half of that.
So total loss roughly £216M to Southwark council/residents.
Now I happen to know Southwark council officers are thinking of reviewing the habitable room value – potentially halving them due to the economic situation – that would see the vlaue lost at around £108M to £120M.
This is before you lift the rocks on all the others changes Labour have negotiated away.
http://moderngov.southwarksites.com/mgConvert2Pdf.aspx?ID=3413&T=9
Could you explain how, then, if the Lib Dem plan had been followed the Council could have afforded to build a new secondary school, swimming pool etc?
It seems your figure is entirely theoretical.
Your problem is that there will be less social housing at the E&C? Is that right?
The draft deal Southwark Lib Dems had in place involved £50M payment + a proportion of the overage or profit to you and me + 35% social housing.
The £50M would have been used for a new leisure centre, etc.
New secondary school via Academies funding.
So my point was the Labour deal is poor value and I gave one example in the value of lost social housing.