Planning to reach the government’s 880,000 new homes target for London would be merely “an intellectual exercise” without the money to back up any delivery, Sir Sadiq Khan’s planning deputy Jules Pipe (pictured) told the London Assembly planning and regeneration committee yesterday.
“At the end of the day,” Pipe said, “to get anywhere near 500,000 new homes over 10 years, let alone 880,000, significant amounts of investment need to be made on infrastructure, whether that is affordable housing or transport.”
The deputy mayor’s last-minute plea came as City Hall officials continued to brief that the capital could lose out badly when the Chancellor announces her long-awaited spending review decisions tomorrow.
The current model for delivering affordable homes – “just building market homes and tithing a certain percentage” – would not achieve the government target, Pipe said. “The market cannot absorb more than 35,000 or 40,000 a year. The balance would have to be rented tenure of some sort, and there would need to be enormous amounts of public subsidy.”
Pipe nevertheless backed the government ambition, while cautioning the committee not to get “hung up” on the timescale. “There will come a time when we will have to have built 880,000 homes,” he said. “If we say we won’t be building anywhere near that for the time being, just ignoring the question, that would be sticking our head in the sand.”
The deputy mayor, whose role includes overseeing the London Plan, City Hall’s long-term blueprint for development across the capital, also defended Mayor Khan’s conversion to the possibility of building on parts of the Green Belt, set out in his “Towards a new London Plan” document now out for consultation ahead the process of agreeing a new plan to run from 2027.
The government had set a “simple question”, he said, asking City Hall to identify land within the city boundaries to accommodate 880,000 homes. “With the best will in the world I don’t see how 880,000 homes can be accommodated within London’s current built form,” he added.
That would mean no more “three-bed semis with parking outside for three cars”, he said. “We have to recognise that the most sustainable kind of city is a dense and compact city, and if we do have to reluctantly release part of the Green Belt it needs to be sweated.” That would accommodate the “optimum” number of people while minimising the amount of Green Belt land released, Pipe explained. Decisions on the overall home sizes and tenures required would be determined through an updated strategic housing market assessment, he said.
A City Hall review of sites across the 18 boroughs containing Green Belt land was now “well underway”, the committee heard. It’s a lengthy process though, with officials allocating overall and specific Green Belt housebuilding targets to the boroughs in the new London Plan and the boroughs then incorporating those targets into their own Local Plans. Final decisions on sites, Pipe said, would be taken “much further down the line”.
Khan also remained committed to his “brownfield first” policy, Pipe said, as committee members questioned whether the policy shift could encourage developers to focus on Green Belt sites which might be cheaper and easier to develop. “We would need to have procedures in the Plan that would ensure that brownfield sites were coming forward before Green Belt land,” he said.
Pipe was optimistic that progress would be made at least some of the 300,000 homes in the capital with planning permission but currently unbuilt. Of these, 180,000 were included in phased schemes and would be coming forward in due course. For the remaining 120,000 though, the problem could be “summarised in one word – viability We need to intervene in the market to make these schemes viable. We continue to make that case to government.”
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