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London braced for the ‘Boris effect’

Is London Mayor Boris Johnson’s housing manifesto going to help or hinder Londoners…?

Mr Johnson's main pledges are to help more Londoners afford their own homes, design developments with crime reduction in mind, protect green spaces and historic views. His Housing Manifesto contains several detailed policy pledges:

• Release GLA-owned land and £130 million from the Regional Housing Pot to launch a new 'First Steps Housing Scheme', which will be open to first-time buyers frozen out of Government schemes.
  
  
• Work with the boroughs to build 50,000 more affordable homes by 2011.
  
  
• Invest £60 million from the Regional Housing Pot to start renovating the capital's 84,205 empty properties to help low-income Londoners off waiting lists.
  
  
• Incentivise the boroughs to release dormant housing to those stuck in bed and breakfast accommodation, by returning the Mayor's precept to them.
  
  
• Work with local councils to deliver more family-sized homes.
  
  
• Increase shared ownership schemes for low-income families by a third.
  
  
• Protect private tenants from unscrupulous landlords by publishing an online 'Fair Rents Guide'.
  
  
• Explore the possibility of a tenant deposit scheme with a guaranteed arbitration period of one month.
  
  
• Amend the London Plan to attach more importance to designing out crime without compromising the aesthetic quality of developments.
  
  
• Reinstate planning rules that protect the views of St Paul's Cathedral and the Palace of Westminster and reinforce protection around new viewing corridors.
  
  
• Toughen up the London Plan to prevent development on domestic gardens and use planning agreements to protect small shops
  
  
• Protect the green belt by using the Mayor's powers to refuse applications to build on it.

Liam Bailey, Knight Frank Head of Residential Research, commented: “The main policy areas being articulated surround the objective to improve affordability. There is a problem here, in that targeting one group over another in terms of access to housing or the receipt of subsidy does little more than shift the affordability problem around the population. Pouring subsidy into the system without raising development volumes will actually harm other groups by raising the cost of housing generally.

“The more positive policy proposals - in terms of everyone's ability to access more "affordable" accommodation therefore are those surrounding attempts to raise development volumes. There has been some success over the past decade with an increase in housing completions, from 12,000 units per annum to more than 20,000.

Decline in development?

Mr Bailey continued: “The reality is that some of this improvement has been achieved through the development of the easier brownfield sites - those requiring the least remediation - and also due to the boom in higher density schemes which have raised development volumes. The use of more "difficult" land and the push for more mixed communities, with more family units, will be likely to lead to a decline in development densities and volumes.

“The ambition of Boris to raise the volume of housing completions in order to ease London's housing crisis is about to hit the market reality that over the next few years overall development volumes will be far lower than national and local government would ideally like due to market conditions.

“The number of year on year new build sales have been at least 25% lower so far in 2008, if purchasers continue to find difficulties in accessing mortgage finance, sale numbers will remain low and developers will not be encouraged to bring land forward for development.”