Six council housing schemes across the Royal Borough of Greenwich have been brought to a standstill after the contractor building them, Helix Construct, stopped trading and entered administration.
The borough says all six sites have been made secure and neighbouring residents have been told about the pause. Council officers are now assessing each scheme individually alongside the appointed administrators to establish its financial and structural position, though no date has been put on work restarting.
The collapse lands on the borough’s Greenwich Builds programme, the council’s flagship effort to build homes for people on its housing register. Launched in 2018 with an ambition of starting 750 homes within four years, the programme was expanded in 2022 to a target of 1,750 homes let at social rents. So far 1,041 homes have been completed, leaving 709 still to deliver.
Only one of the six frozen sites has been identified publicly: a three-storey, zero-carbon block of nine flats on Lemonwell Drive in Eltham, off Bexley Road. The approved mix comprises two one-bedroom flats, one wheelchair-adapted one-bedroom flat, three two-bedroom flats and three three-bedroom family homes, with cycle storage, south-facing balconies and access to a communal garden. The scheme was put through public consultation between December 2022 and January 2023 and was recorded as under construction before activity ceased.
The other five locations have not been disclosed. An earlier Greenwich Builds procurement round covered 43 social-rent homes across five borough sites, though it remains unclear whether that batch overlaps with the six schemes now on hold.
The legal sequence began on 10 September, when Helix Construct filed a notice of its intention to appoint administrators; the appointment followed on 17 September and was publicly confirmed on 22 September. What happens to the half-built sites next is undecided: the council has not said whether it will appoint a replacement contractor directly, put the remaining works through a fresh tender, or how the extra cost of the delay will be met. No revised completion dates have been issued.
The interruption is local rather than programme-wide — hundreds of homes remain under construction across the borough — but it adds pressure at a time when Greenwich is pushing hard on housing delivery, from the Charlton Riverside plans for more than 3,000 new homes to the contested 800-home scheme at Deptford Bridge.
When a main contractor enters administration, its contracts are effectively frozen while the administrators take control of the company’s affairs. For a council client that usually means the building contract is terminated or left to lapse, the site is secured and insured, and surveyors are sent in to record precisely how much work has been done and in what condition. Only then can the outstanding works be priced and put back to the market — a process that generally takes months rather than weeks and often costs more than the original deal, because a new builder must take on a part-finished job with all its unknowns.
Stalled sites do not simply wait quietly. Hoardings must be maintained, scaffolding inspected, and materials protected from weather and theft, while warranties on design and workmanship have to be untangled from the failed contractor. Councils typically weigh two routes back to site: a direct appointment, which is faster but harder to justify on value-for-money grounds, or an open re-tender, which tests the price but takes longer. Either way, the delay feeds through to the people the homes were intended for.
For households on Greenwich’s housing register, the pause affects no one already in a council home — the stalled schemes are building sites, not occupied blocks — but it slows the flow of new social-rent properties, including the wheelchair-adapted flat and three-bedroom family homes planned at Lemonwell Drive. Fresh supply matters: the GLA has been releasing grant funding for social-rent schemes such as 326 homes in Ilford, a reminder of how heavily councils lean on new building to ease waiting lists.
Residents living beside the six sites face a longer spell next to silent hoardings, with the landscaping, cycle facilities and communal improvements tied to the finished schemes also on hold. The council says it will publish updates on each scheme as the legal and practical picture becomes clearer.
