Mayor’s housing proposals

While welcoming many of the Mayor’s proposals, the Assembly's Planning and Housing Committee has put forward recommendations for his revised housing strategy.

Enhanced housing and planning powers, and control over new budgets and land assets, give the Mayor a unique opportunity to deliver more affordable homes, and the Committee urges him to make the most of it.

The Committee supports the Mayor’s proposals to address overcrowded housing – which reflect the Committee’s own work on overcrowding - and his plans to ensure new housing developments contain a good housing mix to reduce concentrations of particular tenures.

The Mayor has now responded to our recommendations.

The Committee called on the Mayor to:

• Publish more details of the size, type of tenure and location of the 13,635 new affordable homes he intends to deliver over the next four years.
• Report his progress on delivering homes in terms of how many people were taken out of housing need, instead of just how many units were built.
• Reassess how he might deliver a greater number of family sized homes through the affordable rent model than the 36 per cent he has committed to. Also see the Committee’s detailed report on the implications of the affordable rent model.
• Elaborate on his proposals to deliver larger homes while keeping rents low.
• Look at offering land assets he has control over – including the Greater London Authority’s landholdings – at a discount, or using incentives to make building larger homes more financially viable for developers.
• Open the meetings and agenda papers of the London Housing Board to Assembly scrutiny to provide more accountability and transparency in relation to his decisions.

The Committee’s response also makes a number of suggestions around keeping tight control over contracts with housing providers; promoting Community Land Trusts; improving energy efficiency and design standards; enhancing mobility and choice; bringing empty homes back into use; making allocations policies more flexible; reducing the amount of people housed in temporary accommodation; and tackling rough sleeping.

Read the Committee’s full response to the Mayor’s initial proposals for the revision of his housing strategy: