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Affordable housing at the Olympic Village will be more spacious than the homes for private sale on the site, developers have revealed.

The affordable housing must meet Thames Gateway space standards set by the Homes and Communities Agency in order to receive grant funding. These standards are roughly 10 per cent bigger than the much-lauded Parker Morris space standards used for social housing in the 1960s. The private sale units do not have to meet the same standards.

Geoff Pearce, group director of development and asset management at East Thames Group, a partner in joint venture company Triathlon Homes, which will manage the affordable housing on the site, said the private sale units were in separate blocks from the affordable housing to allow the landlord to manage entire blocks. However, the private and affordable buildings will be arranged around a shared courtyard.

He said: ‘Within the blocks Triathlon Homes is buying there is a mix of shared ownership, social rented, intermediate rents and shared equity.
‘We are buying about half of the housing, so in most areas we have half of the blocks around each courtyard. The section 106 agreements with Newham [Council] has an agreement for tenure integration.’

He added that putting most of the affordable housing into blocks controlled by Triathlon Homes made it easier for the landlord to keep service charges affordable.

The £1 billion scheme is made up of 2,818 homes, including 1,380 affordable properties.

Triathlon Homes will buy the affordable housing for £268 million using equity, HCA grants and bank funding