LREF 2016: London’s new deputy mayor for housing, James Murray, pledged to provide “clarity” and “certainty” for the industry as panel members fired questions on priorities for the new mayoralty.
Speaking at a panel on priorities for the new mayoralty, he said the 50% affordable housing target would be achieved through a combination of planning and investment (including in public land) over a long period of time.
“We need to hit the ground running in terms of getting investment into housing, in terms of bringing forward land, and in terms of getting the right planning system, to give people certainty and clarity about our ambitions about how we’re going to build more homes,” he added.
The mayor was looking at improving clarity on viability assessments, improving the mapping of public sector land and implementing a different planning approach to built to rent, he said.
JLL’s head of research Jon Neale said the new mayor should focus on how to provide varied affordable housing tenures, get over the “obsession” with overseas investors, and provide flexibility to deal with London’s complex problems.
Grosvenor Britain & Ireland’s Craig McWilliam called on the mayoralty to create a “compelling vision for growth that extends opportunities to all of London’s occupants and residents.”
He suggested this should start in the West End, where there is an established trade-off between growth and amenity, but where there were many districts that could support more development with public sector funding.
Exemplar Properties’ Dan Van Gelder praised mayor of London Sadiq Khan for seeking to understand the “myths and reality of real estate” rather than attempting to achieve quick publicity gains. He said he had met with the mayor to explain the loss of offices to residential in Westminster over the last cycle and he appeared to “really want to understand what London needed”.
However, he said the mayor needed to maintain Boris Johnson’s track record of standing up to local authorities and combating “nimbyism”.
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