2014-03-29

April 2014 [in March]: "Draft for London Assembly: HOMES FOR LONDON: The London Housing Strategy"

Link to web site (and then PDF)

"London is booming. Our economy is growing. The result - more jobs, more prosperity, and more people - puts even greater pressure on infrastructure, and in particular housing. Since 2008 London’s population has increased by 600,000. By 2020 we will have nine million Londoners, by 2031 we are predicted to blast through the ten million barrier.

"My 2020 Vision set out the scale of the challenges we face in maintaining London’s position as the best big city in the world. Rising to our housing challenge is an economic as well as a social imperative.

"We need to help find every way possible for hard-working Londoners to access decent low-cost affordable housing at a time when for many it appears all that is on offer is ever more unaffordable. I published a draft housing strategy in November, setting out how I want London to rise to this challenge. It has had a tremendous response and every good idea has been included.

"While this housing strategy is not only about supply, it is clear that supply above all else is central to London’s housing needs. With increased supply come opportunities to address affordability, help for people to meet their aspirations, improved quality, renewal of post-war estates, and the ability to tackle entrenched issues like homelessness and overcrowding.

"Post-recession London is seeing a vast expansion of house-building. A record number of new homes were registered to be built in 2013, while construction orders for new housing rose to £5.3 billion. Affordable house-building is on track to deliver 100,000 homes by 2016, a record in the history of City Hall.

"Yet the challenge is enormous, because historically the number of homes being built was too low. For the last 30 years or more, housing delivery has all but flatlined at around half the level we now need. Housing in the capital has been a story of boom then bust, of economic cycles that follow their inexorable cycle paths, of governments of all political colours that rise and fall but simply don’t grip or change the fundamental story - we just do not build enough homes.

"This all leaves London facing an epic challenge: to double house-building and build 42,000 new homes a year, every year, for the next twenty years. That’s a level of house-building unseen in our great city since the 1930s and then only for a few short years. And of course, unlike in the 1930s, we do not have the option of simply building over miles of virgin countryside.

"London has some of the most exciting development opportunities in the world. From Battersea to the Royal Docks, from Croydon to Brent Cross. [Good grief.]

"As far as the eye can see, the cranes that speak of the scale of opportunity in the capital dot the landscape. In truth, we need more of them."