Earlier this week the London Housing Commission published their ‘Final Report’ entitled ‘Building a new deal for London’
For those of you that don’t know, the London Housing Commission was set up in July 2015. It is comprised of experts from the worlds of housebuilding, government and academia and is part of the IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research). The Commissions objective was to review the causes of London’s housing crisis and to set out a clear programme for how the next Mayor, the 33 London boroughs and central government should tackle it.
This is no small task and given the challenge, the report runs to 132 pages, makes more than 200 recommendations and if you are suffering from information overload on the housing crisis, it is the best way to get to grips with all of the identified causes, problems and (some) of the solutions in one place.
The report concludes that there is no single root cause of London’s housing malaise and exposes a great many barriers to building affordable, decent homes in sufficient numbers – from land to planning, investment to skills, to finance, subsidy to regulation. Some of the key planning recommendations include:
- Doubling the supply of new homes to London to 50,000 per year by 2020, and to maintain this for at least the following five years.
- To exempt London from the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
- To establish a London Planning Inspection Team to monitor the performance of local authority planning teams.
- To set up a specialist London Planning Inspectorate.
- To allow the London Housing Committee to set planning fees for London.
- To review and build on the Green Belt.
- To allow the boroughs to levy tax on developments that fail to meet agreed building targets.
- Speeding up the release of public land, with City Hall and boroughs to directly commission homes.
- Not to call in schemes where ‘a level’ of affordable housing has been agreed.
The problem is massive and the Commission’s report is helpful in comprehensively identifying many of the challenges and solutions in one place, The only key area omitted seems to be construction materials and whether it is possible to manufacture the number of bricks and other consumables required to build what we need. The planning recommendations are clear, many having been previously proposed by other commentators including Iceni.
The challenge of course is making it happen with many of the options, particularly the review of the Green Belt, being politically contentious and it will be interesting to see to what extent the Commission’s findings are endorsed or not by the candidates for Mayor and indeed the Treasury. What is crystal clear is that the problem won’t even begin to be fixed unless everyone can agree and work together.
Please contact Kieron Hodgson, or your usual Iceni contact if you have any questions relating to this.