More than 250,000 London households are overcrowded – but the Mayor doesn’t have a clear picture of where these families are – his new housing plan must measure overcrowding borough-by-borough says Sian Berry AM.
The Mayor’s own estimates indicate there are 730,00 ‘concealed’ families – ie families sharing with others but who need their own homes, a sharp rise from 400,000 families in 1996. [1]
Overcrowding is only measure in a national survey with a tiny sample for London. [2] This means the Mayor cannot track overcrowding at a local level or know which groups are most affected. Bringing in a new way to track overcrowding across London is one of the recommendations put forward in Sian Berry’s response to the Mayor’s draft Housing Strategy.
Sian is also calling for a Mayoral taskforce to address underoccupancy. Better matching people’s homes to their needs would go a long way to solving the housing deficit.
Homeowners over 65 have the most marked underoccupancy in London, according to the national survey, with 6 in 10 of this group living with surplus space and may wish to downsize.
Sian Berry says:
London has a growing population – we are in dire need of more family-sized homes for families.
While there’s no simple solution to our housing crisis there are things the Mayor could do with his new housing plan to help match the homes we already have in London to the people who need them.
This would help Londoners living in both overcrowded and under-occupied homes. The key to this is creating desirable homes for downsizers, such as the co-housing schemes that are massively oversubscribed.
The Mayor should put together a taskforce to explore how we help people to do this. I know the demand for downsizing is there – the organiser of an older women’s co-housing organisation told me she’d been inundated with hundreds of enquiries from people keen to move in or join her waiting list.
It’s essential to preserve choice and I don’t like the way current measures from the Mayor are all focused on social housing tenants.
Related documents
Sian Berry response to draft Housing Strategy
Notes to editors
[1] Data from Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA)
[2] Section 6.4. of the SHMA says: “Like the 2013 report, this SHMA uses three years of data from the government’s English Housing Survey (EHS) as its main source of data on household characteristics, incomes and housing costs in London.
The EHS is a national survey, interviewing a sample of around 13,000 households a year and weighting the results to be representative at the national level. The EHS covers a wide range of housing-related topics in detail, making it a key source of information on topics such as tenure, overcrowding and housing affordability, at national and regional levels.
However, a single year of EHS data contains less than two thousand cases from London, not enough to give reasonably precise estimates when disaggregated by tenure and household type.
The SHMA model therefore uses averages calculated from the three years 2012/13 to 2014/15, as data from 2015/16 was not yet available when the analysis was being carried out.”
[3] Older Women’s Cohousing (OWCH), gave evidence to the London Assembly Housing Committee
http://www.owch.org.uk/OWCH