This week, Sadiq Khan announced the new house building targets which will shape his upcoming London Plan. The headline figure of a target for 65,000 homes a year is a vast increase on the existing plan, a target which has yet to be reached, or even got close to.
Look behind the numbers and you’ll find a mayor looking increasingly at the outer boroughs to achieve housing delivery, where land values are lower and brownfield land is more readily available.
In short, the inner London boroughs as a whole have seen their targets hardly move, remaining almost exactly the same as when Boris was in charge. However, at the same time, the targets for the outer London boroughs have more than doubled.
A GLA statement said: “London needs to build 66,000 new homes every year to meet its growing need and put right years of underinvestment.
“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. This is roughly double the current rate of homebuilding, and goes alongside the mayor’s strategic target for half of new homes to be genuinely affordable housing.”
The stark difference between the new focus on outer London can be seen in the map below.
Boroughs such as Hillingdon, Bexley and Merton are set to see their targets rise by 178%, 179% and 223% respectively.
At the same time, Hackney and Kensington and Chelsea will see their targets fall by 17% and 33% respectively, while the biggest fall is in Islington, where the GLA’s deputy mayor for housing, James Murray, was previously head of the council’s housing and development team.
In Islington, the 2017 target is 39% less than the previous target.
Incidentally, Islington’s new target of 755, down from 1,264, is also far lower than its recent rate of delivery, which has averaged a total of 1,460 homes completing a year, across the five years from 2012 to 2016. That means the borough will be expected to deliver 47% less than what it has already been achieving. Some may argue that Lambeth and Hackney have also been let off the hook with their 2017 targets, down on their five-year delivery rate by 5% and 15% respectively.
Some boroughs may be wondering how they will even get near their new targets, especially when looking at their recent five-year completion rate. Fourteen boroughs will have to more than double their output, while Barking and Dagenham, Enfield and Redbridge will have to increase their delivery by 291%, 296% and 331% respectively.
The Department for Communities and Local Government also recently released figures, using a new methodology to account for an area’s “objectively assessed housing need”. For the first time, this takes into account the ratio between house prices and local incomes. Again, Islington comes out bottom of the class between the 33 boroughs. Its London Plan target is 70% less than what national government believes is needed for the borough.
In pure numbers, the GLA believes Islington should be delivering 775 homes a year, whereas the DCLG believe the figure should be more like 2,583 homes.
At the other end of the spectrum, Hillingdon is expected to deliver 160% more than the DCLG’s estimate of housing need, at 1,553 homes a year, instead of just 595.
Khan and his team at the GLA should be commended for their ambitious targets, with the difference between them and the GLA’s account of “need” just 1,065 homes out. That compares with Boris Johnson’s target of 42,000, even though the actual need was believed to be between 49,000 and 62,000 homes a year. The 42,000 target was in effect an admittance that there simply wasn’t the land available to reach those higher numbers, due to policy constraints such as green belt.
Khan will look to town centres in outer boroughs, where transport accessibility is good and where densities can be increased. The removal of the density matrix should hopefully give developers a better chance to be bold. They will have to be to get anywhere near the targets, especially in a slowing market.
The draft London Plan due to be published on 29 November is a consultation, with a long gestation until it is finalised.
Whether or not those outer London boroughs, which are typically more Conservative, both politically and in outlook, are up for the task remains to be seen.
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