Mayor’s affordable homes plan revealed

31/10/2008 | By Crispin Dowler

Every council in London has received ‘indicative targets’ from City Hall saying how many affordable homes the mayor believes they can provide over the next three years.

The move is the first step towards replacing previous mayor Ken Livingstone’s citywide target that 50 per cent of all new homes be affordable.

The boroughs now have a chance to negotiate the targets, before final numbers are agreed in early 2009.

The Greater London Authority has not released its figures, but Inside Housing has seen documents revealing what it has proposed.

They show that, if the boroughs agree, more than half of the mayor’s 50,000 target will be delivered by just eight of the capital’s 33 boroughs - Newham, Tower Hamlets, Barnet, Greenwich, Southwark, Barking & Dagenham, Islington and Brent.

More than a quarter of the homes would come from just three of those boroughs - Newham, with 5,754, Tower Hamlets, with 5,164, and Barnet, with 3,369.

Meanwhile the eight local authorities with the lowest goals would between them deliver just 9 per cent of the target. Richmond, the City of London, Bexley, Kensington & Chelsea, Hillingdon, Merton, Kingston, and Enfield would collectively be responsible for providing just 4,627 affordable homes.

Richard Blakeway, the mayor’s director of housing, said the proposed targets were not soft on any boroughs, and that in every case they were higher than the targets councils had been set through local area agreements. ‘The fact is we are pushing harder than the current agreements with the government, but at the same time we are proposing a reasonable share of the affordable housing [for each borough],’ he said. ‘That is based on their capacity to deliver, it is based on what they have delivered in recent years, the programme they have in the pipeline, and based on their need.’

One borough that would suffer under the proposed regime is Brent, which currently has a target of 1,374 affordable homes by 2011 - 50 per cent of all the new housing it is committed to delivering.

But the council has been given an ‘indicative’ target from City Hall of 1,836. A Brent spokesperson said: ‘The target is challenging and we are considering its achievability given the current economic climate.’