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London Green Belt review is long overdue

Dave Hill

Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Morden, made a small but important media splash earlier this month with her campaign to get at least a million homes built on London’s Green Belt land. Not all of that land, not even very much of it, – just some bits around some the city’s stations that aren’t, in fact, terribly green.

It is rare for a senior mainstream politician to take this public stance – the last one I recall doing so was David Lammy. The reason for that is not mysterious. Even the mildest proposal for Green Belt reform risks a sustained battering from conservative media and conservationists alike, many of them armed with loaded warnings about dark urban forces “concreting over” England’s green and promised land.

Against such a backdrop, Sadiq Khan’s rigid refusal to countenance any change to current Green Belt demarcations during the 2016 mayoral election campaign was a rational pre-emptive defence against the low insinuations – not to mention shameless misrepresentations – of Zac Goldsmith’s dire campaign. But that doesn’t mean he or anyone else who claims to want to sharply increase the capital’s housing supply should now be cowed out of contemplating the modernisation of a measure that might have seemed virtuous in 1955 but is now both partly misnamed and largely incompatible with London’s need for what the Mayor calls “good growth”.

McDonagh’s initiative is a response to a consultation on the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), to which City Hall’s evolving London Plan and the core planning documents of London’s local authorities must all broadly conform. There’s been a House of Commons early day motion seeking a “presumption in favour of housebuilding” on “scattered plots” of Metropolitan Green Belt land within Greater London lying within 45 minutes’ travel time from Zone 1 and less than a 10 minute walk to a train station.

Stopping development on these plots, the motion argued, does not even do important things the Green Belt is meant to do, such as restricting urban sprawl. And McDonagh has been gathering photos of Green Belt land that contain garages, derelict buildings and scrub – vistas far removed from the rolling hills through which the public may freely roam that the term Green Belt can conjour up.

Indeed, as a 2015 report from London First illustrated, less than a quarter of Green Belt land within London is accessible to all or given special environmental protection. Most of it, 59 per cent, is used for intensive farming and a further seven per cent is given over to golf. The year before that, LSE professor Paul Cheshire calculated that 1.6m homes at average densities could be fitted into London’s 32,500 hectares of Green Belt land – way more than enough to meet current and projected future demand.

Professor Cheshire is among an extremely varied list of signatories to McDonagh’s submission to the NPPF framework. Others include On London contributor Karen Buck MP, On London supporter Lord Andrew Adonis, their fellow parliamentarians Viscount Ridley (Conservative), Neil Coyle MP (Labour), Nick Boles MP (Conservative) as well as Lammy, heads of organisations ranging from the London Society to London Yimby to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, a string of housing associations, journalist Paul Wellman and placemaking advocate Lucy Ferman.

Liberating un-green Green Belt will be one thing, deciding how best to do so and what ought to be built on the land might expose a few tensions in so diverse a group. But the case for a review looks overwhelming and the conduct of one, long overdue.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Chuka Umunna, Conservatives, David Lammy, Green Belt, housing, Karen Buck, Labour, Nick Boles, Siobhain McDonagh

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 43: the remains of the first Somerset House

Victor Keegan

Somerset House – nowadays a vibrant creative centre – was constructed in the 1770s on the site of an earlier Tudor palace built by the rapacious – it’s not too strong a word – Edward Seymour, the eldest brother of Jane Seymour and the first Duke of Somerset. Remnants of his palace, one of a number of aristocrats’ mansions that lined the banks of the Thames, can still be found on the site, as indeed can earlier Saxon remains. 

Somerset bludgeoned his way to becoming Lord Protector of the nine-year-old Edward VI after the death of his father Henry VIII and set about constructing a palace big enough for his image of himself. 

It was built on robbery. He pillaged local inns, churches and other places without compensation to build his grandiose home. He stole stone from the charnel house of Saint Paul’s and parts of the Priory of Saint John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell. According to the writer Thomas Pennant, he was only stopped from stealing stone from the monastery of Westminster Abbey by being bribed with 14 manors. When he tried to demolish the nearby St Margaret’s Church it provoked a riot by locals and he backed off. 

Later, providence came to the rescue: Protector Somerset was executed on Tower Hill before his palace was completed, an event that was lamented, according to Pennant, but only because his overthrow was brought about by “a man more wicked, more ambitious and detested than himself”. Those were the days. 

Somerset House then became an occasional residence for royalty, including Elizabeth I, before being pulled down in 1775. It was replaced by the current Palladian design, which until recently housed government services, giving it some claim to be the first dedicated office block ever built.

Fascinatingly, there are still traces of the original building to be found if you know where to look – or if you get onto a conducted tour. The most dramatic lie under a glass floor, appropriately in the archaeology department of King’s College (see photo above). They include a Tudor wall on the left and chalky medieval remains next to a bed of stones beneath which was uncovered a rubbish tip dating to the time the Saxons established the trading port of Lundenwic along the Strand.

At the eastern end of the building yard, where King’s students park their bikes, is a late 17th century wall – the only free standing remnant of the old palace (photo above). On the other side is the entrance to what for years has been known as the Roman Bath, partly because it was mentioned by Dickens and other authors. However, King’s professor Michael Trapp has established that, although it has been used as a cold bath for periods, it was in fact a much taller structure which fed water into spectacular fountain in the Somerset House gardens.

Find previous episodes of Vic Keegan’s Lost London here and find Vic’s book of London poems here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, King's College, Somerset House, St Paul's cathedral, The Strand, Tower Hill

Who will London’s Conservatives choose as their next mayoral candidate?

Dave Hill

Conservative Home has broken news that the campaign to become the party’s candidate for the next London Mayor election, due in 2020, will take place over the summer, followed by a selection vote in September. That means the Tory hopeful will be in place considerably earlier than for the 2016 race, which resulted in Zac Goldsmith being chosen and then falling to a heavy defeat after a disastrous and disreputable campaign. Conservative Home approves of the new arrangements:

It makes good campaigning sense to select a mayoral candidate now (or even before). Having that candidate in place will offer the grassroots, the media and the voters a clear focal point for the campaign to unseat Sadiq Khan in 2020, and the longer run-up means the selection contest doesn’t have to simply be based on each candidate’s pre-existing profile. Whoever wins the nomination, they will have time to develop their platform and to communicate their message about their plans for the mayoralty.

Who might the Tory candidate turn out to be and what might he or she decide to offer Londoners? Neither question has an obvious answer. Various names have been floated in the media, including Putney MP and former cabinet minister Justine Greening, former London Assembly Member member James Cleverly (now MP for Braintree and an energetic party deputy chairman), current AM Shaun Bailey, London MEP Syed Kamall (who sought the nomination last time) and even former chancellor turned Evening Standard editor George Osborne.

I’ve no idea which of these might fancy the job. But of those listed, Greening and Cleverly strike me at first glance as the most likely to improve their party’s standing in London, even if they don’t win City Hall. Both are experienced politicians and capable campaigners with good London credentials who would catch the eye of voters simply by not outwardly conforming to the stereotype of typical Tories.

Appearances might not be everything, but a change of appearance after 2016 and a contrast in tone with the subliminally anti-London attitudes of Theresa May’s government – assuming it still exists in 2020 – surely would not hurt the cause. Greening (though not Cleverly) is a Remainer, which of itself aligns her with most Londoners and cuts a clear contrast with her party nationally, which could also be an electoral asset in this town.

Another name that has come up, not in the media (until now) but in well-connected conversation, is that of Amber Rudd, who recently resigned as home secretary over the Windrush scandal. The cause of her demise hardly serves as a recommendation in such a profoundly multi-ethnic city, and Rudd isn’t even a London MP. But I gather that at least one current Conservative AM would like her to stand. It feels unlikely, but we shall see.

Then there’s the small matter of policy. On London hopes to publish some Conservative views on that quite soon. In the meantime, readers can consider the attempt of Tory AM Tony Devenish to, in his words, “nudge the debate back to the consumer-led politics of Margaret Thatcher”. Could such an approach help stem the succession of Tory reverses in London?

The fact that the Conservatives did less poorly than some predicted in the borough elections and a recent fall in approval ratings for Mayor Khan – albeit to a still pretty commanding 52 per cent who think he’s doing well compared with 30 per cent who don’t – have reportedly cheered London’s Tories up a bit. They face an uphill struggle in Labour-dominated London, but even a return to respectability over the next couple of years would be something of a victory.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Amber Rudd, Brexit, Conservatives, Evening Standard, George Osborne, James Cleverly, Justine Greening, Labour, Putney, Sadiq Khan, Shaun Bailey, Syed Kamall, Zac Goldsmith

How can London and the UK’s other cities help each other and the country more?

Dave Hill

The tireless Centre for London is in search of new thinking about London’s often frosty relationship with the rest of the UK through a research project headed by On London contributor Jack Brown. It will examine how that relationship has changed in recent years and explore ways in which the capital can work more closely with the country’s other cities, including by doing more to spread prosperity elsewhere.

This fraught issue might be seen as a mobilising undercurrent of the referendum vote to leave the European Union – an irony, perhaps, given the dependence of the rest of the UK on London as a generator of employment beyond its own region and as an exporter of taxes, but also a sentiment that cannot be glibly dismissed.

Andrew Adonis has argued strongly that Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool and others will not become better off if London is done down and that the best way to help other cities to thrive is to connect them to each other and to London more efficiently. How, though, can more residents of those cities be persuaded that he has a point?

It will not be an easy task, as a 2014 report for another think tank, Centre for Cities, showed. It listed three main implications arising from a survey of people living in 16 UK cities outside London: one, a need for UK cities, including London, to work together better “to make the most of their relationships and capitalise on each of their strengths”; two, a need for individual cities to demand more from central government, consistent with their distinctive needs; three, a need for “local leaders to engage more with the public in order to explain how national policies translate locally”.

Since the time of that report, “metro mayors” have been elected, national government’s “austerity” programme has continued and the uncertainties of the Brexit process have begun. The UK needs its cities to pull together in the shared national interest. If you think you can contribute to Centre For London’s research, contact Jack Brown via here.

Categories: News
Tags: Andrew Adonis, Centre For Cities, Centre For London, Devolution, Jack Brown

Hackney Marshes – football’s ‘greatest shrine’

Dave Hill

One of my sons bought me a copy of London Fields by Charlie Connelly. It is, to quote its subtitle, a journey through football’s metroland, undertaken during the 1998-99 season, covering teams as diverse and unsung as Mitcham United and Harrow Borough, with bits of Tottenham and Arsenal thrown in. And, of course, Connelly paid to a visit to Hackney Marshes, which is a short jog from where I live and where watching sons of mine perform school football team heroics has provided some of the more intense experiences of my 33 years as a parent. As the 2017/18 season draws to a close, it seems fitting to quote a couple of passages from Connelly’s enjoyable book.

The vast area of grassland that makes up the Marshes became a centre for recreation in the early eighteenth century. A 1791 bull-baiting contest there once attracted 3,000 people. London country Council bought the 350-acre site in 1893 to provide facilities for sport and leisure, and now over 120 football pitches cover the grassland throughout the winter…

Today, however, a hot Sunday morning, the Marshes are nowhere near full. Most of the Sunday leagues haven’t started yet, so a few pre-season friendlies are dotted around the vast expanse. Team mates sit on each other’s shoulders fastening goalnets to crossbars, whilst model aeroplanes buzz around the sky. A couple of people walk dogs around the perimeter. In the distance, Canary Wharf gradually becomes visible as the sun burns through the morning haze. in one goalmouth a man takes pot shots at his eight-year-old son, who has no chance of stopping them. A couple girlfriends stand chatting, the sun glinting from their sunglasses, the breeze gentle shifting their cotton blouses. It’s still high summer, but the Sunday football season is almost upon us again…

Walking across Hackney Marshes on a Sunday evening, as the sun sinks behind the trees, the ghosts of thousands of old footballers roam the fields. For here there have been more matches, more goals, more tackles, more sendings-off, more fights, more twisted ankles, more victories, more defeats, more spectacular strikes that will live long in the memories of those who scored them – and which become more spectacular with each telling – than any other patch of ground in the country. Every rule change, fad, kit style and tactic has made an appearance here since before the laws of the game were codified. When people talk of football shrines, discussions immediately focus on Wembley, Old Trafford, the Nou Camp or the San Siro. For me, however, this country’s greatest shrine can be found just off the A102 on the way to Leyton.

And just to underline how long Hackney Marshes football has been a part of London life, enjoy this 1953 clip from British Pathé.

You can buy Charlie Connelly’s London Fields here.

Categories: Culture
Tags: football, Hackney

How can London learn to love regeneration and embrace the idea of ‘good growth’?

Dave Hill

Next month, On London and the London Society are holding a debate about regeneration and how “good growth” can be achieved in a city which urgently needs to build more as its population rises towards 10 million, yet faces significant resistance to doing the sorts of things required to make that happen. There is a knotty problem here – a paradox, a conundrum, a dilemma. More housing in particular is urgently desired, but regeneration tensions seem to be heightening in many parts of the capital. How can they best be resolved?

The debate panel will comprise Colin Wilson, formerly of the GLA who is now in charge of Southwark’s regeneration plans for Old Kent Road; Waltham Forest Council leader Clare Coghill (interviewed here); Lisa Taylor, chief executive of Future of London (more about her here); and Tim Gledstone of architects Squire and Partners. I will be chairing. And I hope that by the end of the evening, a clearer picture will have emerged of the way forward.

There are some lessons to be learned from the recent past. One example, which I’ve been covering for nine years, is the very large and very stalled Earls Court redevelopment project. Every since the then Conservative administration of Hammersmith & Fulham began pushing the scheme, in partnership with Transport for London and Boris Johnson, it has seemed to me a bad idea: not enough additional affordable housing; a bad attitude to housing estate residents; too few benefits to London compared with the losses, notably of the Earls Court exhibition centre.

Capital and Counties (Capco), the Earls Court project developer, has recently slashed its valuation of the scheme to £1bn and revealed plans to separate it from the rest of its business. The Berkeley Group is reported to have been talking to Capco about buying it, which would usher in a whole new chapter of the saga. Should Berkeley become the new owners, an opportunity to find a creative solutions to the scheme’s many problems might be created and Sadiq Khan, a champion of “good growth”, should sit down with Berkeley boss Tony Pidgley without delay. The local government grapevine says that Pidgley has long been keen to spend more time with him.

Another cautionary regeneration tale concerns a housing scheme alone – the West Hendon estate regeneration in Barnet. This has run into problems for a number of reasons and Adam Langleben, who represented the area as a Labour councillor before losing his seat on 3 May, has written a valuable article about what he has learned about securing and retaining support for estate regenerations from his attempts to stick up for West Hendon residents. He writes:

The West Hendon Estate in my mind remains the most outrageous of regeneration projects nationally. Barnet Council wilfully decided to dispose of a council estate without really getting any meaningful social or long term economic benefit from the disposal. It was so Shirley Porter-esqe you really wouldn’t have believed it was possible in the year 2014.

Adam comes up with six steps for restoring confidence in housing regeneration schemes, describing them as “pragmatic but radical”: Read the whole thing here.

If you want a seat at the On London/London Society good growth debate, don’t waste any time. Most of the tickets have already been sold and there is now a good chance of a full house. Book your tickets via here.

Categories: Analysis, Uncategorised
Tags: Adam Langleben, Barnet, Berkeley Group, Capco, Clare Coghill, Colin Wilson, Conservatives, Earl's Court, Future of London, Hammersmith & Fulham, Hendon, housing, Labour, Lisa Taylor, Old Kent Road, regeneration, Sadiq Khan, Southwark, Squire & Partners, The London Society, Tim Gledstone, Tony Pidgley, Waltham Forest, West Hendon

Will London’s cycling gender gap close because of ‘superhighways’?

Dave Hill

A recent observation that London’s dedicated cycling lanes – its “cycle superhighways” – and other cycling infrastructure are dominated by men and have therefore failed to “normalise” cycling in London produced sustained Twitter derision of a familiar kind. With this in mind, it’s worth returning to the findings of surveys of the amount of cycling taking place in London, which types of people are doing it and whether the demographic picture is changing.

One source is the annual Travel in London survey, conducted by Transport for London (TfL). The results of this go into TfL’s vast annual Travel in London reports. The latest of these, produced at the end of last year, reports that cycling continues to account for only 2% of entire “trips” and individual “journey stages” in London, as it has since 2005 (see pages 28 and 29). However, it also reports an 8.8% increase in the use of bicycles for some parts of excursions around London in 2016 compared with the previous year (page 56) – a significant rise, albeit from a very low level. TfL says that, as you would expect, cycling by women accounts for part of that rise.

So, the amount of cycling done by women in London has undoubtedly been increasing. But so has that of men. What is the balance of cycling propensity between the sexes and has that been changing of late, as superhighways and other cycling infrastructure have been installed?

Market research company Future Thinking has been producing regular intelligence on the subject for TfL based on representative samples of Londoners. Its most recent Attitudes to Cycling report, published last November, provides insights into the gender mix of London’s cyclist population over time. The tables below show the percentages of men and women from the Londoners interviewed – over 1,000 in each case – who’ve defined themselves as regular cyclists (purple), occasional cyclists (green) or non-cyclists (pink) since 2011.

Evidently, the percentage of women who cycle has remained consistently lower than that of men. The different levels themselves have remained pretty consistent too and therefore so have the percentages of male and female Londoners who cycle compared with each other. This has continued to be the case during the last three years since the autumn of 2015, during which the new infrastructure has been coming into use. The split for the most recent survey was 63% male, 37% female (second column of graph below).

The November 2017 report also explores the respective use of male and female cyclists of different forms of the new infrastructure. There’s a section devoted to “current and intended use of cycle superhighways”, which pulls together survey figures produced in September 2016 and March 2017 as well as for November 2017. These show the percentages of men and of women who said they had used one of the superhighways and the percentages who said they intended to use one during the coming year. Well over 1,000 Londoners gave replies for this part of each of the three surveys.

The graphs representing these figures are, unlike those above, too small in the report for me to reproduce satisfactorily here. But for cyclist men, the percentages in the three surveys who said they had used a superhighway were, respectively, 20%, 21% and 23%. For women they were 12%, 8% and 12%. The averages of those two sets of three figures – 21.3% for men and 10.7% for women – suggest than men have been twice as likely as women to use London’s cycle superhighways so far. That is a larger difference than between the comparative levels of male and female cyclists in London in general.

The answers to the question about intending to use superhighways in the near future produced a smaller gender gap, however. In the cases of both men and women, the percentages went up over the course of a year or so: for men, from 32% in September 2016, to 31% in March 2017, to 34% in the most recent November 2017 survey; for women, from 17% to 18% to 22% respectively. Here, the average difference between male and female respondents over the period was smaller: 32.3% for men compared with 19% for women.

The latter therefore looks fairly encouraging in terms of women having a larger presence among cycle superhighway users in the future than they appear to do currently. So do responses to another survey question, which asked about cycle superhighway use in the month prior to being asked about it. Again, answers to the same question when asked in September 2016 and March 2017 are also included in the report. The figures for men were 56%, 54% and 62%. The figures for women were 40%, 63% – higher in this case than that for men – and 59%.

Except for the September 2016 figures, then, the gap between men and women pretty much disappears for these answers. That said, Future Thinking cautions that the “base” for this part of the surveys – the number of people who responded to the question – was low (the highest number of respondents was 262). Also, the data can’t tell us anything about whether the respondents, male or female, enjoyed their cycle superhighway experiences.

What is it reasonable to conclude from all these data? Clearly, the 2:1 ratio of men to women who said they have used a cycle superhighway presents a challenge to the proposition of some cycling activists that women in particular would be attracted to segregated lanes in the belief that they provide greater safety. Were that so, we might expect a far higher percentage of women using them and a higher percentage doing so than that of women cyclists in London in general compared with men, rather than a lower one.

On the other hand, the findings that women have characterised themselves as being relatively more likely to use superhighways in the near future than they have used them so far, along with those low base figures on use during the month before being asked about it, might signify that the balance between men and women who use cycle superhighways will eventually become more even. Nonetheless, if “normalised” means as many women as men using its cycle superhighways, or something close to it, London still has quite a way to go.

The November 2017 Attitudes to Cycling report is not currently available online. TfL are looking into why that is. 

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: cycling, Future Thinking, Transport for London

Sadiq Khan’s affordable homes investment: some detail and context

Dave Hill

Last week, City Hall announced that Sadiq Khan will “kickstart” a “major council homebuilding comeback” in London by investing £1.67bn in boroughs’ own housebuilding programmes and in so doing “help get 10,000 new council homes underway over the next four years”.

This followed news last month that during the 2017/18 financial year, work began on over 12,500 new “affordable” housing association homes in London, which the Mayor has helped pay for from a separate fund of £3.15bn.

Where has this money been coming from? How is it shared out? What exactly do the terms “council home” and “affordable home” mean in this context? What difference will Khan’s initiatives make to new “affordable” housing provision in London and to housing supply in London as a whole?

The answer to the first question is straightforward. Both the £1.67bn and the £3.15bn have been put at Khan’s disposal by national government. The latter, larger, sum was dispensed under the auspices of the then housing minister (and also then London MP) Gavin Barwell, in 2016. The former, smaller sum, came London’s way in the government’s spring statement in March this year. That’s £4.82bn altogether to go towards starting the construction of 116,000 “affordable” homes of various kinds by April 2022.

So after the national government hands cash for affordable homebuilding down to London’s regional government – the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the Mayor – what happens to it next? Basically, the Mayor dishes portions of it out to organisations responsible for building such housing in London under his Affordable Homes Programme 2016-21.

In the case of the first, larger sum, the capital’s housing associations have been the main beneficiaries. They were invited to bid for chunks of the £3.15bn to help them fund the construction of primarily the three types of affordable home that meet Khan’s definition of being “genuinely affordable” in London where, of course, housing costs are very high. About half of that money has been allocated so far,

The three “genuinely affordable” types are: London Shared Ownership homes; Khan’s signature London Living Rent homes, which are ultimately another sort of low cost home ownership scheme (a “rent-to-buy” product); and London Affordable Rent homes, which are low cost rented homes, though not as low cost as what we might now need to call traditional social rented homes. The three types are formally defined here.

The arrangements for the £1.67bn are different. It will fund a particular part of the Affordable Homes Programme called Building Council Homes for Londoners, whose main beneficiaries will be – clue in the title – London’s borough councils. Khan’s announcement about the 12,500 “affordable” starts in 2017/18 highlighted those to be let at “social rent levels”, though less than a quarter of them were actually of that type. However, Building Council Homes for Londoners is designed to focus on what City Hall’s press release called “new homes based on social rent levels” rather than Shared Ownership, London Living Rent or the higher levels of Affordable Rent.

Definitions of affordable housing are notoriously slippery. So, addressing the third of our four questions above, let’s look at exactly what “council home”, “affordable” home and also “based on social rent levels” seem to mean in this context.

Khan isn’t going to funding a “council homebuilding comeback” in the sense of reviving the type of large scale council house for rent construction projects seen in the 1960s and 1970s – during which over 20,000 council homes a year were built – with automatic tenures and rent levels to match. That is not within his power. What he has done – well, the relevant GLA officers have – is negotiate a greater amount of flexibility with the government over the terms on which the £1.67bn can be dispensed than applied with the £3.15bn.

There seem to be two key elements to this. One is that Khan will be able to contribute a higher proportion of the cost of constructing each new home than was possible with the £3.15bn. This will enable councils to set more lower rents – that is lower end Affordable Rents – for the resulting rented homes than would otherwise have been the case. The Mayor has set caps on Affordable Rent levels, “based on” the lower traditional social rent levels – basically, very similar to them. The caps are listed in a table on page 12 of the Building Council Homes for Londoners funding prospectus.

The other key element is that it will be up to councils to decide whether the tenants of their new homes for rent have London Affordable Rent or traditional social rent tenancies (see paragraph 31), which are more secure, as Shelter’s John Bibby explained here.

In summary, then, the homes Khan will fund with the £1.67bn will be “council homes” in the sense that councils will own them, “affordable” in that their London Affordable Rent levels will be no higher than the caps he has set, which are very close to (“based on”) traditional social rent levels. Confusingly, the government defines Affordable Rent as a form of social housing, in that it can be accessed only by people on councils’ housing waiting lists. But some of the council homes Khan is to fund might also be defined as being for social rent under the traditional definition if that is the type of contract tenants are offered.

Two other caveats: one, some of the council homes to be funded will be of Khan’s other “genuinely affordable” types – those low cost home ownership (or “intermediate” affordable) products, London Shared Ownership and London Living Rent (see paragraph 32); and, two, not all the money will go to council – just as councils have been getting a bit of the £3.15bn, so housing associations will get a bit of the £1.67bn, though they won’t be first in the queue.

Finally, what difference will the £3.15bn and the £1.67bn make? Well, some difference and of a good kind. It is calculated by the GLA that 116,000 or more “genuinely affordable” homes will have been started with the help of the £4.82bn total “through to 2022”. That’s four years away. The Mayor says 65,000 new homes altogether, of every tenure type, to be built in London every year to meet overall demand. He has a long-term target of 50 per cent of all new homes being “genuinely affordable”. You do the maths.

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: affordable housing, council housing, Gavin Barwell, housing, housing associations, Sadiq Khan, social housing