Tue 6 May 2008
Mayor Johnson faces tough challenge on housing
Boris Johnson last week became the most powerful Conservative politician in the country after pulling off an overwhelming victory in the contest to become Mayor of London. One of his main proposals was to help more Londoners afford their own homes.However, this was the easy part of drafting a housing strategy – implementation will be an “awful lot harder”, says Liam Bailey, head of Residential Research at Knight Frank.
Johnson’s housing manifesto contains several detailed policy pledges, including the construction of 50,000 more affordable homes by 2011, the launch of a 'First Steps Housing Scheme', and the investment of £60 million from the regional housing pot to start renovating the capital's 84,205 vacant homes to help low-income Londoners.
Bailey comments: “Most of the pledges put forward in Boris' successful campaign reflect a desire to build more housing, while protecting specific areas of London from over development, create more local involvement in the decision making process and improve affordability and access to housing across the population.
“The main policy areas being articulated surround the objective to improve affordability. There is a problem here, in that targeting one group over another in terms of access to housing or the receipt of subsidy does little more than shift the affordability problem around the population. Pouring subsidy into the system without raising development volumes will actually harm other groups by raising the cost of housing generally.”
Former Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, successfully increased the volume of new homes constructed annually in the capital, partly by allowing development on the easier brownfield sites, which required minimal remediation work, and an increase in higher density schemes. However, “the use of more difficult land and the push for more mixed communities, with more family units, will be likely to lead to a decline in development densities and volumes,” says Bailey.
“The ambition of Boris to raise the volume of housing completions in order to ease London's housing crisis is about to hit the market reality that over the next few years overall development volumes will be far lower than national and local government would ideally like due to market conditions,” he adds. “The number of year on year new build sales have been at least 25 per cent lower so far in 2008, if purchasers continue to find difficulties in accessing mortgage finance, sale numbers will remain low and developers will not be encouraged to bring land forward for development.”
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