MIPIM 2016: The GLA’s executive director for housing and land has questioned whether the housing and planning bill will help London deliver on its 50,000 homes-a-year target.
Speaking at a panel discussion exploring how the bill will affect London, David Lunts said: “What is going to happen to the sub-rental market in the push for home ownership?”
He said there was a borough-level view that there is a strong rental market in the capital but measures such as the push for starter homes and the SDLT tax hike for some buy-to-let investors was likely to threaten the market.
He also said there was a lot of uncertainty about how various measures, including starter homes and permission in principle, would work in practice.
Robert Davis, deputy leader of Westminster City Council, said the government needed a London-wide approach to measures such as right to buy.
He said it made sense to sell social homes in Grosvenor, which could bring in £80m each, and use that money to build 20 times more flats in Bromley, rather than replacing those homes in Westminster.
“The issue that government is failing to look at is that it needs to look across London to where it can deliver social, intermediary homes,” he said.
Mount Anvil chief executive Killian Hurley said the bill was going “a few steps in the right direction” but was “simply not radical enough”.
“We need a radical solution”, he said. “The average planner working in a borough in London is playing 1/10th of our planning consultants.
“David Cameron talks a lot about generation buy, before that we had generation rent; what we need is generation availability.”
He added: “We would like to see Londonism not localism. We too often see localism. We should get the proactive boroughs together and let them drive this.”
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