Sadiq Khan: Affordable new homes target for London met

London Mayor Sadiq Khan says he has met his own housebuilding target for affordable new homes in the capital.

He said 63,817 affordable homes were completed between 2015-16 and 2022-23 and that 116,000 affordable homes were started during that time.

He said: "This is the start of the housebuilding revolution we need."

Conservative London Assembly chair Andrew Boff said the mayor should focus less on "homes on a spreadsheet as a possible plan some time in the future".

He added: "He's being very, very slow on actually completing the homes he says he's started."

Mr Khan has met his target by including figures from the last year of previous mayor Boris Johnson's term in office in 2015-16 when construction of 7,189 affordable homes got under way.

Mr Johnson was replaced as mayor in May 2016. His office says more than 25,000 affordable homes were started during the last financial year.

The current mayor says the figures represent the best completion rate on homes of all types at any time since the 1930s.

The cost of building a home under the Affordable Homes Programme in London has increased from £41,551 to £114,285 per house, City Hall Hall said last year.

A spokesperson for the Social Housing Action Campaign (SHAC) told the BBC: "The GLA has focused solely on building new estates and does not take account of the deteriorating condition of much existing social housing stock, nor the need to refurbish rather than demolish and rebuild.

"This approach is bad for communities and bad for the environment, and we are also very concerned about the escalating number of complaints about poorly constructed new-builds that develop structural problems within a couple of years.

"We know from papers leaked to SHAC that the GLA has rejected bids from housing associations where it considered that schemes had too many homes for the lowest 'social rent' tenancies."

But spokesman for Mr Khan said this was "simply wrong" and that "under the 2016-23 Affordable Homes Programme more homes were started at social rent levels than any other tenure type".

"Sadiq has ditched the previous mayor's definition of 80% market rent being 'affordable' and instead focussed his programme on social rent, London Living Rent and shared ownership homes," the spokesman added.

"The 116,000 homes started under the 2016-23 programme cover a wide range of schemes, including estate regeneration programmes to provide much needed high-quality homes on London's social housing estates, brand new communities and acquisitions to bring existing homes into social use."

Maureen Corcoran, a housing expert who is on the advisory board for the Housing Ombudsman, praised the mayor for meeting the target but said context was important.

She said: "We're in a different time from the 1970s and we've got a lot more housing need.

"In the 1970s, an ordinary London teacher, bus driver or social worker could afford to buy a home in most boroughs in London.

"That's not the case now and many more people need to and are renting but their renting choices, as Sadiq said, are very limited and largely in the private sector, which is hugely expensive."

Mr Khan said: "Until supply meets demand, there are still going to be record numbers of people in the rent-in-the-private sector in London at the moment.

"The current system is not working. That's why we need a combination of more investment from the government to build more genuinely affordable homes, but also a change when it comes to reforming renters' rights so they've got more protection."

Susana Mendonca, BBC Radio London political reporter

At a building site in Newham on Monday afternoon, Sadiq Khan said reaching this target was the start of "a revolution" in affordable housing.

Critics will ask why he's taken this long to get to this point and highlight that while London has reached the target of starting more than 116,000 affordable homes, only around half of those homes have actually been completed - and you can't live in a half-built home.

Mr Khan's retort to me when I asked him about that was that all the homes would be completed soon and the actual target set by government was for 116,000 starts, not completions - a challenge which he has surpassed, he said, despite the impact of issues like Covid and Brexit.

He also claimed he could have started building more affordable homes if the government had given him more money.

About 7,000 of the homes counted in the 116,000 target were actually started in the year before Mr Khan became mayor. How so? It is not an attempt by City Hall to fudge the figures - the government did include the year 2015-16 in London's 116,000 affordable starts target.

But the real question isn't whether Sadiq Khan has reached a target set by the government - it's whether that target actually meets London's housing need.

And the answer to that, by City Hall's own admission, is that it doesn't. In 2017, City Hall said London needed to build 66,000 homes a year and about 40,000 of those needed to be affordable in order to meet London's growing need

On average Mr Khan has started around 15,000 affordable homes a year but only about 8,000 on average have been completed each year.

A Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities spokesperson said: "Building more affordable homes across the country is a priority, which is why we have invested £11.5bn over five years in the Affordable Homes Programme.

"The latest data shows 240,000 homes have been started since 2015, delivering homes for rent and sale right across the country, including 123,300 outside London."

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