London's affordable housing goals

It was the mayor’s first step towards making good on two key manifesto pledges:

1. That London would have 50,000 new affordable homes in the next three years
2. That Mr Johnson would scrap his predecessor Ken Livingstone’s controversial 50 per cent target, which decreed that half of all homes built in the capital should be affordable

The mayor wants to replace that citywide decree with binding numerical targets negotiated individually with each borough.

The councils will now have a chance to negotiate with the mayor if they do not think his proposed targets are fair, before final numbers are agreed early next year.

The Greater London Authority has not released its ‘indicative targets’, saying it does not want to drag the boroughs into a public debate.

But Inside Housing can reveal what the numbers are, and how City Hall came up with them (see table). 

The first step was to divide the promised 50,000 figure between the city’s 33 boroughs. This was done in proportion to their share of London’s total capacity for new housing – taken from capacity studies done before Mr Johnson came to power.

For all but four boroughs this calculation gave the ‘indicative target’ they received from the GLA.

But four boroughs that managed to deliver more affordable homes over the past three years than their share of the 50,000 – Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham, Ealing, and the City of London – were asked to match that delivery until 2011.

Sutton was the only borough with an affordable housing target, set through the Local Area Agreement process, that was higher than its calculated share of the 50,000.

That higher figure – 660 rather than 566 – was used as the borough’s interim target for 2008-11, although neither were as high as the 980 affordable homes Sutton managed to deliver over the last three years.

See the table to the right for a full break down of the targets

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