The London Housing Strategy, drafted by the Mayor of London and formally adopted by the Greater London Authority (GLA) in May 2018, seeks to take a number of different approaches to improve and increase the amount of housing available for residents in London, aiming to deliver 52,000 new homes a year.

Megan Life, Senior Programme Manager for Building Safety at the GLA, explained London’s difficulties at our recent London Property Club event: “Over the past 20 years the number of jobs has gone up by 45%, and the number of people by 27%. But housing numbers have only increased by 18%.” 

The “sharp end” of this crisis, has also meant an increase in rough sleeping in the capital, according to Life.

Genuine affordability is baked into the plans, and Life explained the house types that were particularly targeted in the plans: “There are 3 products that the Mayor talks about. London Shared Ownership and London Living Rents when the rents are pegged at a ⅓ of incomes in local areas. And London Affordable Rent where rents are set at benchmark social rent levels.” [emaillocker id=”71749″]

Fire safety has become an increasing focus of the GLA, particularly following the Grenfell Fire tragedy, Life explained: “We’ve gone further than Government recommendations and introduced new fire safety rules on GLA owned land, making sure they have sprinklers and they are no combustible material.”

One such development delivering new homes in the capital is in Battersea, where a project centered around the power station is looking to deliver 4,300 new homes, 1,250,000 sq ft of office space and 18 acres of public space.

Battersea Power Station is a true London icon, it is a Grade II* listed Art Deco decommissioned power station which was built in two phases between 1929-1955. It is now seeing a revival as the centerpiece of a £9bn regeneration project headed by Malyasian-owned Battersea Power Station Development Company (BPSDC).

It has been nicknamed the “Cathedral of Power” both for its immense size, being one of the largest brick buildings in the world and a reference to its unique “Cathedral-style” of brickwork. 

The project has recently received a boost from the announcement that Apple will be moving their London headquarters into 500,000 sq ft office in the station’s former boiler room

A number of attempts to regenerate the station have been attempted since its decommissioning in 1983, including proposals for a theme park, Chelsea FC’s stadium and a public park.

Gordon Adams, Head of Planning at BPSDC explained how they had learnt from these failures: “One of the reasons these projects failed is because they looked at the scheme in isolation. We did a full opportunity area study, looking at the potential of the whole area.”

Virginia Blackman, National Head of Site Assembly and Compulsory Purchase at property services firm Avison Young, highlighted the importance of Help to Buy in driving housing delivery: “Help to buy, has helped a number of large sites we have worked on to be built.”

She highlighted cooperation with the GLA on working on solutions to bring more residential near industrial sites: “There’s real issue within the outer ring, where we are buying up industrial land, which is in lots of cases, tertiary or so called dirty industrial and there a lots of jobs we need to retain but people also need places to live.”

London’s housing market is fundamentally not delivering for Londoners as things stand, but the bold proposals within the Mayor’s plans, if successfully implemented, do tackle many aspects of the crisis. [/emaillocker]