Lord Bailey of Paddington is a London Assembly member and a former Conservative candidate for Mayor of London 2021
Near enough everybody on all sides of the political divide agree that we have a severe housing shortage in London.
The average rent in the capital is now £2,114 a month. Over 65,000 households are in temporary accommodation through their local authority, and 11,993 people slept rough in our city last year. Buying is an impossible and distant dream for many.
We all know the problem. Much less clear is what we actually do about it.
The new Labour government have set ambitious plans on housebuilding and reforming the planning system. How that will work in practice, how that will differ from the previous government and whether it works, remains to be seen. For the sake of everyone in our city who needs a home, I hope it does.
Given that the country’s housing problems are clearly exacerbated in the capital, improving delivery in London must be integral to the new government’s plans. A blog post published by the housing department acknowledged that “recent [housing] delivery in London has fallen well short of what is needed” and that the department would work with the Mayor and the Greater London Authority (GLA) to “turn this around”.
This is an early encouraging sign that new Housing Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner recognises the scale of the problem. Unfortunately, I do not believe there is any prospect that leaving the Mayor of London to continue with the same approach to housebuilding will improve delivery.
The release of the latest affordable housing statistics put this point into sharp focus. Through the 2021-26 Affordable Housing Program, funded by £4 billion from the previous government, Sadiq Khan needs to deliver in the region of 25,000 homes in the next two years to meet his own targets – the equivalent of approximately 3000 affordable homes a quarter.
In the last three months, however, the Mayor of London started just 150 of these affordable homes and only completed 71 – across the whole of the capital. Anybody can look at these figures and recognise we have a problem here.
The Mayor will point to his other housing programmes and homes completed by the outside market, but the stark reality is that London is far, far behind on its overall figures – by any measure. Even taking into account London’s recently reduced annual housing target, the Mayor was still over 14,000 behind in the last three years.
It is difficult to imagine that this figure is going to drastically improve in the coming year either, even with nearly £9 billion of funding for housebuilding from the previous government.
It’s no surprise at all that the Mayor wishes to defend his record in response to our concerns, and he is well within his rights to do so. Downplaying the problem and insisting we are on track, however, when all of the evidence suggests otherwise, is not the way ahead.
By raising the alarm here, my aim is not to make housing and home ownership a political football. This is far too important an issue for so many Londoners to do that.
When I wrote to our new Housing Secretary urging her to give the Mayor and the GLA dedicated help and support in a form of special measures, it wasn’t a cheap shot on my part – it is genuinely the only way I can see that these homes are going to get built.
For the sake of every Londoner who needs a home of their own – whether that’s buying, renting privately or through social housing, I hope the government is having meaningful conversations with the Mayor about what they can do to help.
Having been passionate about housing the entire time I have been in London politics, I want to use my role as a London Assembly Member and a Member of the House of Lords to further this however I can.
Whilst doing so, I hope we can put political differences aside to have honest conversations – both with the new government and the Mayor – about the true scale of the problem in the capital, and what we can do to help.
Given the sheer number of Londoners who need a home of their own, failing to do so is simply not an option.
