The Reader: The Mayor is on track over affordable homes

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Housing struggle: Sadiq Khan
Redferns
30 May 2019
WEST END FINAL

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in your article [“Doubt over Khan target”, May 28], you correctly identified that half of all new homes given planning permission in London do not get built. But your article missed a key conclusion of the report on which it was based: that, under Mayor Sadiq Khan, the level of affordable homes in permissions approved is up to its highest level yet. It has risen to 36 per cent — compared to the low of 13 per cent it fell to under the previous Mayor.

Mr Khan has always put affordable housing ahead of luxury flats. Building 66,000 homes a year is not a Greater London Authority target but the total number of homes needed to be built each year to keep up with London’s growth. The GLA does not have the power or resources to build this many homes. However, the Mayor recently announced that he passed last year’s target, building 14,544 affordable homes, a record since City Hall took control of housing investment in London.
James Murray
Deputy Mayor for housing and residential development

EDITOR'S REPLY

Dear James

It is indeed welcome that the proportion of homes being built in London that can be designated “affordable” has risen since Sadiq Khan came to office.

However, while affordable housing is taking a much larger “slice” of new housing, there are worrying signs that the overall cake is not growing at anywhere near the pace London needs. Developers deliver around three-quarters of the new homes in London and many are finding the capital a less attractive place to build, hence the alarming shortfall highlighted in our report.

The Mayor wants councils to return to large-scale housebuilding for the first time since the Eighties to take up the slack. But it is not a short-term fix. It will be years before town halls have the capacity and expertise to roll out major new homes programmes on the scale needed to bite into the housing shortfall that the Mayor has correctly identified as London’s biggest challenge.

Jonathan Prynn, Consumer Affairs Editor

No-deal Tories betray their party

IT is not unusual for a politician to put his own party’s interests above those of his country. It is very unusual for a politician to disregard the interests of their own party.

The same individuals who undermined John Major’s government did not take long to begin undermining the new Cameron Conservative government. They and their cronies have once again made the party unelectable.

This civil war has dragged on for decades. Individuals who were elected as Conservative MPs have systematically sought to weaken a government they were specifically elected to support.

Now they claim, despite the Brexit parties losing out on the popular vote, that it was a vote for a no-deal Brexit. Looking at the vote, it very profoundly was not. They are intent on getting their own way no matter what the consequences are.

Their mind blowing incompetence and bungling shows this. Yet still they cling on to their dream, even as it turns into a nightmare.
Andrew Milroy

Met must uphold the law, Shami

SHADOW attorney general Shami Chakrabarti has criticised the Metropolitan Police over its response to the blocking of key roads by climate-change protesters before Easter — not for the failure to act more promptly but over the belated decision to bring charges.

Does she think we all have the right to obstruct any highways we choose whenever we want to express a grievance or grudge and have nothing better to do? Or does she believe those who have her political sympathies have more legal rights than others? She needs to clarify her position. Otherwise some of us must hope the shadow never takes on real substance.
Andy Thompson

Tory leader debate is a TV turn-off

Can they be serious (“Party leader debate set to be televised”, May 23]? A TV debate between the finalists in a Tory leadership contest in which only the party’s 100,000 or so paid-up members, who have no democratic mandate, will decide who becomes prime minister and what direction Brexit takes while the rest of us have no say?

Perhaps the Conservatives believe we will applaud their unprecedented and undemocratic way of choosing a new prime minister and potentially transforming government policy.
Dorian Gerhold

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