LISTEN: Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith appeared to edge ahead at the LandAid London mayoral debate last night, as attendees said his policies looked more realistic. But property players were disappointed that no candidate showed a detailed understanding of the capital’s housing crisis.
Both Goldsmith and Labour’s Sadiq Khan have said that solving London’s housing crisis will be top of their agenda if elected to City Hall, but neither could give a timeframe for when they would increase building, while many of the pair’s policies were similar.
John Gooding, chief executive of Dolphin Living, said he was disappointed that none of the candidates speaking at the debate, which also featured Caroline Pidgeon for the Liberal Democrats, and Darren Johnson, standing in for Green Party candidate Sian Berry, had yet worked up a strategy for higher levels of delivery.
“I would have thought that perhaps they have had time enough to work up a slightly more defined strategy, but housing is complicated, and I suspect that maybe they underestimate the real difficulty of cranking up a development programme like that,” he said.
Savills’ head of housing, Robert Grundy, echoed these thoughts, saying: “Zac and Sadiq, they performed well. Common with many politicians though, there is a layer of naivety about real estate, and what is and isn’t possible.
“I think we were feeling that since we were in front of an industry audience it might have been better if we could have had some more specific comment from a real estate perspective.”
For M&G Real Estate chief executive Alex Jeffrey, Goldsmith shaded it, but there was a lot of commonality between what all the candidates were saying.
“They all agreed that we need to deliver 50,000 homes for London and we are a long away from that. There wasn’t really the acknowledgment from any of them that we are making progress,” he said.
Helical Bar executive director Gerald Kaye also thought that Goldsmith came out on top, and said that the future priorities would be continuing to sort out London’s transport infrastructure and the housing issue.
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