Still struggling with the housing emergency: views from the Centre for London summit

Sir Sadiq Khan’s reduced affordable home requirements on major housing schemes are taking effect, with the quotas allowing access to City Hall’s “fast track” through the planning process now down from 35 per cent affordable to 20 per cent.

The shift is part of the package of emergency “build baby, build” measures designed to kick-start housebuilding in the capital which was confirmed by the government and City Hall in March. It’s already proved controversial with the boroughs and housing campaigners, and think tank Centre for London’s annual housing summit last week heard further criticism, this time from a senior figure with major housebuilder Barratt London.

The “quick fix” intervention wouldn’t “necessarily help” boost numbers, the company’s head of affordable housing, Syreeta Robinson-Gayle, told the session. With private demand softening, housing associations and councils, with enough support, could take up the slack, providing the “counter-cyclical” impetus needed to get schemes underway, she said, while reducing affordable percentages in itself “won’t get more building”.

What, then, was the solution to the capital’s housing crisis, underlined for attendees by the now familiar grim litany – record numbers of homeless families in temporary accommodation provided by the boroughs, record numbers sleeping rough, unprecedented numbers too on council home waiting lists and officially in poverty after housing costs?

“For many of us,” the centre’s research director Rob Anderson said, “we’ve spent our whole careers talking about this, but it just keeps getting worse, on every measure. Something isn’t working.” Ongoing centre research previewed at the session added another twist to the debate. That “something” said Anderson, was actually too much focus on new build targets, rather than on how those homes are allocated.

“The core of the problem is not that we don’t have enough homes to go round. It’s a crisis of distribution, resulting in a harshly unequal city”, he said. More private market homes were required, but questions of matching housing supply to housing need had to be addressed as well.

Floorspace statistics highlighted the mismatch, said Anderson: 30 per cent more space per person since 2002, but most of that accruing to “affluent owner-occupiers”, while private rented and social housing remained often overcrowded. Meanwhile, house prices had nearly doubled over that period, resulting in the private rented share of London’s homes rising from 14 per cent to 30 per cent, with the social housing share reducing from 30 per cent to 22 per cent.

The perhaps surprising fact that 22 per cent of homes in London had two or more spare bedrooms suggested part of the solution: more incentives to downsize, including reviewing Stamp Duty costs and providing the sort of homes “empty nesters” actually wanted to move to. Wider demand support measures could also be considered.

But the key point was succinctly put by Fiona Fletcher-Smith, the think tank’s outgoing chair and chief executive of major London housing association L&Q. “What we really need is a massive public building programme of social and affordable homes,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere near enough.”

Mayor Khan’s deputy for housing, Tom Copley, nevertheless remained optimistic, highlighting the £1.8 billion now available in City Hall’s new Developer Investment Fund, primarily for low-cost loans to boost social and affordable housebuilding, streamlined London Plan requirements on the way, and more mayoral intervention to push schemes through, including on Green Belt land. With the prospect of less consensus on the mix of solutions required though, next week’s borough elections could prove critical.

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