- Mayor urges Ministers to use Autumn statement to back
delivery of tens of thousands of new homes on underutilised
’brownfield’ land in the capital
- An injection of £470m would help unlock 76,000 new homes in
the capital, building on Sadiq’s record homebuilding delivery
- Recent analysis shows London has outbuilt the rest of the
country under Sadiq, amounting to an eight per cent rise in the
capital’s overall housing stock since 2016
The Mayor of London, has today called on ministers to
back the delivery of tens of thousands of new homes on
underutilised ‘brownfield’ land in the capital.
New City Hall analysis shows that an injection of £470m from the
Government in their upcoming Autumn Statement would help unlock
or accelerate 76,000 new homes on sites across the capital which
have previously been built on. This would help to alleviate the
capital’s housing crisis, which is now pushing more and more
Londoners into insecure or unaffordable housing.
The funding would build on the huge progress the Mayor has
already achieved through his ‘Homes for Londoners’ land fund,
which was also designed for this purpose. Originally allocated to
deliver 8,000 homes, it is now outperforming its target delivery
and is set to deliver 14,675 homes, with the majority of these
properties re-invested in expanding housing provision to further
aid homebuilding delivery.
Government support would allow the Mayor to make key
interventions to make developments viable such as developing
transport infrastructure and site preparation. Among the priority
areas for investment is east London, including the Royal Docks,
where City Hall investments are already supporting the building
of over 4000 new homes.
Delivering more high-quality, genuinely affordable homes has been
a top priority for Sadiq ever since he took office. Recent City
Hall analysis shows that London has increased its housing stock
by 8 per cent since 2016. If Ministers had managed to match
London’s growth in housing completions outside of the capital,
then this would have delivered an additional 300,000 homes in the
rest of England.
In addition, by working in partnership with councils and housing
associations, Sadiq has delivered higher genuinely affordable
homebuilding than at any point since City Hall records began and
higher council homebuilding than at any point since the 1970s.
However, with national forecasts indicating that homebuilding
across the country may fall to the lowest level since the Second
World War, the Mayor is calling on the Government to
step up and back new housebuilding to secure jobs, growth and
urgently needed new homes.
The Mayor of London, , said: “I’ve made
it a top priority to back the delivery of new homes and I’m proud
to have delivered record-breaking genuinely affordable
homebuilding, helping London’s boroughs to achieve the highest
level of council homebuilding since the 1970s.
“However, there is much more to be done as we pursue a fairer,
more prosperous city for all. The Government must act
now to enable the building of tens of thousands of homes in the
capital and I’m urging them to use the Autumn Statement to do
just this.”
The Mayor of Newham, Rokhsana Fiaz OBE, said:
“Building new affordable homes remains the number one priority
for Newham in the face of a growing housing crisis and 37,000
residents on our waiting list alone. We are also facing growing
cost pressures because too many people are being made homeless
and we are having to place them in expensive temporary
accommodation. We have been at the forefront of building social
rent homes our people can afford and having delivered 1,156 new
homes in the past 5 years, hundreds more in the pipeline, we are
eager to build more.
“Boroughs like Newham need to be supported to deliver desperately
needed and genuinely affordable homes. Ministers need to back the
call by Mayor to unleash London so we can
deliver more housing on brownfield sites. In Newham alone, we can
deliver an additional 565 homes our people can afford on the
brownfield sites we have already identified, and there’s another
64 new sites on our Brownfield Register we can build hundreds of
more homes our residents desperately need.”
“With the welcomed support from the GLA, and central government,
we have already been rising to the challenge of the housing
crisis in London. We all need to go much further so our vital
housebuilding targets can be reached. So brownfield development
needs to be given the green light in the Autumn statement.”
