This article originally appeared on Conservative Home.
Having spent seven years watching Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, do very little, it’s so refreshing to see the West Midlands Mayor Andy Street take to our television screens to demonstrate what a proactive Mayor can achieve. Andy Street, during a recent round of media appearances, reminded media doom-mongers that we are in fact already building homes, 232,000 last year across England, which is nearly twice what Labour was building in 2010, three years after they had crashed the British economy. However, it is clear that we must build far, far more and far more quickly.
Street reminded us that in the West Midlands, they have met their housing targets. He could have added ‘unlike in London’. Sadiq Khan, despite frantically rushing to meet his affordable housing target of 116,000 starts, is well behind in terms of homes that have actually been built. This is despite his receiving £4.82bn in government funding for this purpose. Khan has completed a pathetic 58,936 houses in seven whole years. A mediocre average of 8,419 homes per annum. By way of comparison, when Boris Johnson was Mayor he completed 94,001 homes in 8 years, an average of 11,750 per year. Last year Sadiq Khan effectively admitted he had failed on housing by commissioning Lord Kerslake to author an excellent report on the failure of the Greater London Authority to get on and build. The current Mayor’s failure comes despite the cross-Party consensus at the 2016 Mayor/London Assembly Election from both Khan and Zac Goldsmith that London faced a housing crisis and a “sense of urgency” was needed.
Andy Street has pursued a brownfield-first policy, with the only exception being around the new High Speed 2 Solihull Rail Station. In this country, there is no public desire or political mandate to build on the green belt. Even Sadiq Khan understands the public rightly won’t despoil our countryside, Labour Leader Keir Starmer is wrong to rip up this political consensus. But how do we “put rocket boosters” on building?
The Government needs to provide carrots and sticks to those in the public sector who are land banking. Sadiq Khan alone controls land the size of 16 Hyde Parks, which is equivalent in size to the London Borough of Camden. Many local authorities and NHS bodies control vast estates. Yes, it isn’t always easy to build out such land but the bureaucratic approach of such landowners is slowing down house building to a glacial pace. Just 923 homes were started in six years on land owned by the Mayor’s London Legacy Development Corporation, in and around the Olympic Park, out of a target of 5,774.
The public sector needs to be encouraged to sell the land or develop their land in partnership so we can get building at scale. Smaller sites are being ignored rather than disposed of so that smaller builders can build them out without the suffocating costly overhead of a large public sector bureaucracy.
Another blockage to overcome is under resourced or, in some people’s view, post-Covid working from home inertia from Council planning departments. It is worth asking if London really needs 33 separate Borough Planning Departments. Other Council services are now delivered at a bi-borough or even tri-borough level. For a modest initial investment, the Government or London’s do-nothing Mayor could improve the planning logjam.
One of the great positives of selecting our Conservative London Mayoral candidate – the winner will be announced on July 19th – is the plethora of bold, innovative ideas that the various contenders are suggesting. Whilst even those Londoners who may end up voting for Sadiq Khan next year increasingly recognise that Khan is failing London in a myriad of ways. Not least among these is in building the homes Londoners need. This creates an opportunity for the Conservative Party, which has been on the backfoot in our capital city, to show that we have the answers and we will deliver. Whoever Conservative members select as our candidate they must communicate to Londoners a positive message for how they will build beautiful family homes in sufficient numbers.
This article originally appeared on Conservative Home.