London mayor’s hollow promises
I don’t mind being corrected if someone has done their homework, but Steve O’Connell (Inside Housing, 12 March) clearly hasn’t! The claim by the London Assembly Conservative group housing spokesperson that all 50,000 affordable homes will be new is downright wrong.
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Mr O’Connell should know that the London mayor has already conceded that the target will include regenera-ted dwellings, unsold private homes and anything which receives a grant.
And how many new affordable homes has the mayor initiated? When asked, the mayor said: ‘The further information that you have requested pertaining to this data is not collected.’
As for the 20,000 new homes the mayor claims to have delivered so far, his office has said ‘even small housing developments typically take 12 to 18 months’. So, in the absence of the mayor providing us with the statistics to prove otherwise, we can safely assume the majority of the 20,000 affordable homes delivered so far can be credited to his predecessor who achieved 10,394 (net) affordable homes in his final year in office.
It’s true that Ken Livingstone promised 13,500 (gross) affordable homes annually in his draft housing strategy (September 2007). However, this target was not for his second term as Mr O’Connell claims, but for his third to meet the three-year 50,000 (gross) target for affordable homes. This target has been taken over by Boris Johnson, but dropped to 40,000. The mayor’s manifesto promised to ‘build 50,000 new affordable homes’. For all his allies might try to spin it, this is just another promise he won’t keep.
Nicky Gavron, former deputy mayor of London