Mayor rethinks affordable housing goal

The mayor was elected a year ago this week on a promise to deliver the new homes by 2011. But the subsequent recession and housing market crash have made the ambitious target even more difficult to achieve.

City Hall has released a paper outlining the mayor’s plans to revise the London Plan, the capital’s main planning document.

It states: ‘The target will be reviewed in light of current resources.’

The paper also outlines Mr Johnson’s intention to use the London Plan to impose new minimum space standards and design standards on all new developments that contain affordable homes.

The proposals stop short of imposing these standards on house builders, to halt the trend for building increasingly cramped homes in the private sector.

But it does say that ‘as a general principle, the new plan will extend these [standards] across all sectors, unless there is compelling reason to depart from them on the basis of distinct housing needs’.

The standards will be included in a forthcoming housing design guide from the mayor, which will also include eco-homes standards.

The document also confirms the mayor’s intention to ‘reduce the number of affordable housing policies in the [London] plan, including removing the London wide affordable housing target of 50 per cent’.

A spokesperson for the mayor said: ‘The target referred to in the London Plan is the setting of the new target for the delivery of affordable housing between 2011-14 when we will know what resources central  government are allocating to the London Homes and Communities Agency for that period.’

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