Tory Mayor is going to miss affordable housing targets
Imagine my shock: the Tory Mayor of London has started preparing the ground for an admission that he isn't going to meet the far from challenging target for affordable housing that Ken Livingstone left him.
Yesterday a panel of housing experts called before the London Assembly all forecast that building 50,000 affordable homes by 2011 - which may sound a lot but works out at just 520 per borough per year - isn't achievable.
My response is: of course it is; it just isn't achievable by continuing with the policy of tacking affordable homes onto much larger private developments as an afterthought. Building a handful of affordable homes in return for being allowed massive overdevelopment is only a relatively recent phenomenon born of the Thatcher Government's ban on councils building homes. Prior to that, councils and housing associations were able to - and did - build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes.
In fairness, the experts that gave evidence to the London Assembly came closer than I have ever seen in admitting this: they said that because of the housing downturn £4 billion earmarked for new housebuilding should be targeted on affordable rented homes. Of course it should.
The Mayor's Housing advisor, Richard Blakeway, came up with this piece of bluster that even Boris would be proud of:
"We are asking the Housing and Communities agency to develop innovative models for delivery in the capital to meet new circumstances."
Anyone who can translate that into plain English please send me your answers on a postcard. It's utter tosh: we don't need "innovative models for delivery" - we need Councils like Wandsworth to stop sitting on millions and millions built up from the right-to-buy sales they've pursued so damagingly and start building new affordable homes. They could start tomorrow if they wanted.
But they don't and won't, and we now have a Tory Mayor who lacks the interest or ability to force them too. Look out folks: Wandsworth's catastropic housing policy is about to be applied across the whole capital.
Yesterday a panel of housing experts called before the London Assembly all forecast that building 50,000 affordable homes by 2011 - which may sound a lot but works out at just 520 per borough per year - isn't achievable.
My response is: of course it is; it just isn't achievable by continuing with the policy of tacking affordable homes onto much larger private developments as an afterthought. Building a handful of affordable homes in return for being allowed massive overdevelopment is only a relatively recent phenomenon born of the Thatcher Government's ban on councils building homes. Prior to that, councils and housing associations were able to - and did - build hundreds of thousands of affordable homes.
In fairness, the experts that gave evidence to the London Assembly came closer than I have ever seen in admitting this: they said that because of the housing downturn £4 billion earmarked for new housebuilding should be targeted on affordable rented homes. Of course it should.
The Mayor's Housing advisor, Richard Blakeway, came up with this piece of bluster that even Boris would be proud of:
"We are asking the Housing and Communities agency to develop innovative models for delivery in the capital to meet new circumstances."
Anyone who can translate that into plain English please send me your answers on a postcard. It's utter tosh: we don't need "innovative models for delivery" - we need Councils like Wandsworth to stop sitting on millions and millions built up from the right-to-buy sales they've pursued so damagingly and start building new affordable homes. They could start tomorrow if they wanted.
But they don't and won't, and we now have a Tory Mayor who lacks the interest or ability to force them too. Look out folks: Wandsworth's catastropic housing policy is about to be applied across the whole capital.
Labels: housing, Mayor of London
posted by Stuart King at
18:05
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