North Lanarkshire Council has doubled its house-building target – 1,000 new council houses will be built by 2020 at a cost of £150 million. The council will invest a further £1.8 million a year to double the number of new homes from 500 to 1,000.
This investment was announced as part of our housing revenue budget for 2012/13, which also sees an extra £2.3 million of growth money spent on improving the housing stock. The additional funding will increase the resources available for next year's capital programme to almost £40 million.
Council tenants will also benefit from a rent increase of just 1.5%. Last year the council agreed a two-year deal to keep rent increases to 1.5%, which this year means an average weekly increase of just 80 pence. The average weekly rent in 2012/13 will be £53.99.
The investment package was agreed by the Housing and Social Work Services Committee as part of its 2012/13 Housing Revenue Account budget. This budget will be finalised next month when the council approves its multi-million pound revenue budget for the year ahead.
Convener Councillor Barry McCulloch, said: "This is an outstanding housing budget for the council and its tenants. Over the five-year period from 2010 to 2015, we will invest £210 million to improve the quality of our existing stock of over 36,500 houses through our mainstream capital programme.”
