So Sadiq Khan, where are all those new homes you promised?

Sadiq Khan audit day one: Mayor faces backlash as building work has started on just 1,097 affordable homes despite target of 14,000 for the year
Big challenge: Sadiq Khan with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at Westminster’s Churchill Gardens Estate after the launch of a social housing review
Getty Images

Sadiq Khan today faces fresh criticism over the “pitiful” pace of his efforts to tackle the housing crisis after it emerged that no new affordable homes were completed in more than half of London’s boroughs during the spring.

The latest official GLA figures show that just 743 new homes classed as affordable were ready for families to move into across the capital between April and June, the first quarter of the financial year.

In 18 of the capital’s 33 local authority areas including Greenwich, Ealing, Hackney and Wandsworth no affordable homes were completed. Although the numbers are expected to ramp up as the year progresses, the data has heightened concern about the progress that has been made in solving London’s most acute social challenge 28 months after Mr Khan swept into City Hall. His target is for work to start on at least 14,000 affordable homes this year followed by at least 17,000 next year with 116,000 in total by 2022. In the first quarter of this year there were just 1,097 starts.

Tory London Assembly member Andrew Boff, who sits on its housing committee, described the total so far as “pitifully low” and nowhere near the numbers needed to make major inroads into the housing shortage.

Mr Boff, who is seeking the Conservative nomination for the next mayoral race, said: “It is quite incredible, the fallback is always to blame Boris, blame the Government, it is always someone else’s fault. He has failed London visibly and he needs to explain to Londoners how he is going to hit his targets.” The latest attack comes amid growing government impatience with the Labour Mayor, who has been allocated almost £5 billion in taxpayer funding for subsidised affordable housing since he defeated Zac Goldsmith in May 2016.

Just 1,097 homes have started from a target of 14,000 for the year (ES Local Feed )
ES Local Feed

In July, Communities Secretary James Brokenshire wrote to the Mayor warning that he will use his legal powers to intervene in the London Plan “unless we see a step change in housing delivery across London”. The Plan has set a raised target of 65,000 new homes a year, although ministers believe up to 100,000 are needed annually.

Housing was ranked as Mr Khan’s top priority during his election campaign when his manifesto said it was “the single biggest barrier to prosperity, growth and fairness facing Londoners today”. If anything, it has become an even more pressing issue since last year’s Grenfell Tower disaster.

But while house prices have stopped soaring since the former Tooting MP won the keys to City Hall there has, as yet, been little respite for “the young families and individuals on average incomes” priced off the ladder whom he singled out as needing help.

Latest figures from the Land Registry show that the average price of a home in London in June was £476,752. On average, house prices are 13 times more than the wages of prospective first-time buyers in London.

Similarly, although rents in the capital have not been rising for nearly two years, they are not falling significantly either and still eat up an average of £1,879 per month, according to the latest Landbay Rental Index. Part of the problem is that London has become a far less attractive place for private developers and house builders — which deliver around 80 per cent of the new homes constructed in London each year — to do business.

"Outside London we can get plans approved in 13 weeks that would take a year to get through in the capital"

House-building chief

Bosses cite falling prices, skills shortages, planning delays, political uncertainty, and onerous City Hall demands for at least 35 per cent of the housing to be affordable as reasons why they now prefer to build in the provinces.

Worryingly latest results from London’s biggest home builder, Berkeley, revealed that, apart from joint ventures, it only bought one new development site in the capital last year, a pattern mirrored by many other major developers.

In its statement to shareholders, Berkeley said: “It is telling that some funders and builders are choosing to exit the market when faced with the degree of risk and regulation that now confronts development in the capital.”

Other major housebuilders, including Barratt and Crest Nicholson, have also reined in their exposure to central London. Figures from leading industry analysts Molior show that the number of new homes started by major house-builders in London during the first half of Mr Khan’s four-year term has dropped below levels achieved under Boris Johnson.

Work on 53,846 new homes began between the end of the second quarter of 2016 and the same period this year. That was down eight per cent on the 58,472 that got under way during the previous two-year period when City Hall was run by the Conservatives. A number of the biggest housing schemes scheduled to deliver thousands of new homes remain bogged down in planning, political or funding rows. They include the developments at Earl’s Court, Silvertown in Docklands and Meridian Water in Enfield.

Last month, the new Momentum-dominated council in Haringey threw out plans for 6,400 homes worth up to £2 billion. There are also doubts whether Transport for London can deliver the 10,000 new homes — including 50 per cent affordable — it is scheduled to start work on by 2021.

One house-building boss told the Standard: “Outside London we can get plans approved in 13 weeks that would take a year to get through in the capital. The London numbers will stay stuck around the 20,000 mark. The chances of getting to 65,000 in the foreseeable future are absolute zero.”

But Mr Khan’s top housing adviser, deputy mayor James Murray, said that City Hall now regards the proportion of affordable housing being built as a more telling yardstick of progress than the crude total of new homes, including “a lot more” expensive apartments.

He said: “From our point of view the key numbers we’re focused on is making sure a greater proportion of the new homes that are given planning permission are affordable, as well as the number of starts of affordable homes in our programme, which are the ones we have more control over.”

The change of emphasis allows the City Hall regime to trumpet one success since Mr Khan came to power: an increase in the proportion of affordable homes in new planning applications rising from 13 per cent in the last year of the Johnson regime to 34 per cent now. Mr Khan has said he wants councils to build more homes after almost 30 years out of the game, but this is not an easy fix either.

One housing association boss told the Standard it can take up to five years to recruit the experts needed to develop a major house-building programme, assemble sites, achieve consent and start building; 10 years before significant numbers of homes are delivered.

As with rising crime, City Hall has found it tempting to point the finger of blame at Downing Street and the Treasury for any shortfalls. According to Mr Murray: “The Government have still really failed to step up the degree they need to fix the housing crisis. To give you an example, the amount of money we get for affordable housing investment is around £700 million a year. If we analyse what we need to build, the affordable housing we need, it would be about £2.7 billion, so that’s an indication of the scale of where we’re at — about a quarter of what we need.”

He also urged ministers to grant City Hall and local government beefed-up compulsory purchase powers to make it easier to assemble the large sites needed to make serious inroads into the targets.

In the meantime housing ministers come and go with dizzying speed and the next mayoral election looms on the post-Brexit horizon. According to housing expert Neal Hudson of consultancy Residential Analysts: “This is not going to be fixed at a national level or a London level in time for the next election. You are looking at a 20-year period of adjustment.”

Even the latest minutes of Mr Khan’s Homes for Londoners Board, which he chairs, admit that “delivering the Mayor’s housing programme is challenging and achieving the target by 2022 is not without risk.” A sober but probably realistic assessment.

But not good news for a 30-year-old Londoner still locked out of the market but hoping that Mr Khan will, as he promised in his manifesto, “tackle the housing crisis” in his time at City Hall. A spokeswoman for the Mayor said: “Today’s figures show he is on track to start 116,000 affordable homes by 2022. Over a thousand homes have been started in the first quarter of this year — and while figures typically accelerate over the course of the financial year, this year’s total is already six times higher than at the same point last year, showing we are on track to hit this year’s target of 14,000 genuinely affordable homes.

“Crucially, over a third of the new homes have been based on social rent levels. That means more homes based on social rent levels got under way in the last three months than in the entire final year of the previous mayor’s term.”

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