Sadiq Khan’s plan for London housing is detached from reality
Sadiq Khan’s draft London plan will not deliver the housing or infrastructure London badly needs, says Thomas Turrell
“Reality can be whatever I want it to be”.
The words spoken by Thanos as he claimed the reality stone in‘Avengers: Infinity War. This quote seems to have formed the foundation of Sadiq Khan’s approach to the London Plan.
The London Plan is a critically important document. It sets out how London will grow and adapt over the next decade. It sets out how London will rise to the challenge of new housing and creating the transport and economic hubs we need to continue to succeed as a major global city. It sets how London will deal with challenges like the recent extreme heat. It sets out how we will protect and enhance our beautiful natural, green and blue spaces. Getting it wrong risks London failing. Risks people getting left behind.
That is why I am so alarmed by how detached the Draft London Plan is from reality.
Redefining family homes
First and foremost, the London Plan is about housing: it is supposed to be delivering the homes we need. This is where is the plan fails most to reflect reality. The Draft Plan wants 88 per cent of new builds to be one or two bed flats. The Draft Plan asserts that there is a surplus of family homes in the private sector. The thrust is that 11.1 per cent of London homes are overcrowded, with as much of 19.4 per cent in social housing. Only three per cent of homes built through affordable housing programmes are four bedrooms or more. The Draft London Plan will make this worse.
In his last London Plan, Sadiq Khan tried to redefine a family home as a two-bedroom flat. The Conservatives defeated this attempt to rewrite history. So this time the Mayor just wants to avoid building them altogether. The London Plan must incentivise the building of the family housing we desperately need.
Another way the plan is detached from reality is around parking. Like with the last plan, Sadiq Khan thinks that stopping developers from installing parking bays will stop people from driving. All this does is move the parking onto nearby streets. This then blocks up streets causing tension in neighbourhoods and can block emergency services vehicles getting down the roads. The policy of trying to build out driving has failed. Instead of reflecting the reality, Sadiq Khan is doubling down on this in the new plan.
Then there is the Green Belt. This is the element of the plan where Sadiq Khan cannot decide. First, he said he would protect the Green Belt. He called it the lungs of London. Then he said it was inaccessible and poor quality, and he would build on those sites. Now he doesn’t like those sites and has created new “Broad Locations for Growth” in areas his own assessment recognised as high-quality Green Belt. His inconsistent approach means Londoners cannot trust a word he says on protecting our green spaces.
Sadiq Khan says he wants a brownfield first approach. Yet his draft London Plan fails to set out a single policy to make that happen. In Sadiq Khan’s reality, developers don’t want to build on the Green Belt. In reality, applications are already flooding in across outer London with every developer trying to get their sites labelled a “Grey Belt”. Sadiq Khan is trying to implement housing policy through the power of manifestation.
The London Plan is a legal binding document. The processes, targets, systems and measurements that this document establishes will bind London authorities for the next decade – at least, if not longer – and tie their hands on certain decisions. By the time it is remodelling your community, it will be too late to change it. It cannot be a work of fiction.
Perhaps mercifully, Sadiq Khan is not Thanos. He doesn’t wield the Reality Stone. His London Plan must reflect reality; not seek to rewrite it.
Thomas Turrell AM is Conservative London Assembly Member for Bexley & Bromley