London needs to build 66,000 new homes every year to meet its growing need and put right years of under investment in housing but to do so more Government funding is needed for affordable houses, it is claimed.
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is calling on the Government to commit to profoundly boosting the funding and powers available to London in the forthcoming Budget on 22 November in order to meet this need. He says that as a first step there must be a return of Government funding for affordable housing to the level it was at in 2009/2010.
A new analysis of the figures unveiled by Khan shows that overall Government funding for affordable homes in London is still less than half if was seven years ago and it needs to rise fivefold to £2.7 billion a year to be effective.
The new figures, calculated by City Hall through their Strategic Housing Market Assessment, also suggest that 65% of these new homes would need to be affordable if they are to meet Londoners’ needs. With the private sector alone unable to build this many new affordable homes, it serves as a stark warning that the capital’s housing crisis will spiral even further out of control without a profound new programme of government investment and action.
The Mayor’s draft London Plan, due to be published next month, will include strong new measures and set ambitious targets for every London borough to move towards this goal. It is roughly double the current rate of home building and goes alongside the Mayor’s strategic target for half of new homes to be genuinely affordable housing.
Khan points out that boosting home building to this level will require the devolution of new powers to London such as those over public land and allowing councils to borrow to invest in homes, and a massive increase in government funding for home building and infrastructure.
Last November Khan secured a £3.15 billion deal with the Government to start building 90,000 genuinely affordable homes by 2021, around £0.5 billion a year. Recent announcements by the Prime Minister could see this rise to around £0.7 billion but this is still well short of previous Government spending that reached £1.75 billion in 2009/2010 before being cut by the new Government.
