If Boris Johnson housing policies are wrong, which would be right?

CGI of a new housing development on panel boards surrounding the construction site in London. Photograph: Alex Segre/REX Shutterstock

Many measures are proposed by enemies of Boris Johnson for alleviating London’s housing woes. Here’s a Top Ten of the more familiar.

1. Enabling more homes for social rent to be built by giving councils greater freedom to borrow.
2. Reducing the number of empty dwellings by imposing big council tax hikes on their owners.
3. Using compulsory purchase powers to lessen “land banking”.
   
4. Increasing government grants to housing associations.
   
5. Reforming developers’ use of “viability reports” designed to minimise the amount of affordable housing they supply.
6. Creating further New Towns outside the capital but within easy reach of it
7. Limiting foreign ownership of residential property.
8. Tightening the regulation of rent rises and tenant contracts in the private rented sector.
   
9. Bringing in a “speculators tax” to curb short-term property profiteering.
10. Permitting building to take place on some parts of London’s green belt.

With Boris Johnson’s mayoralty in its eighth and final year, there are two things to note about this hit parade.

1. Johnson is in favour of items 1, 2, 3 and 4, reckons he intervenes constructively over item 5 and has backed extending Crossrail to the Eurostar terminal in Ebsfleet, Kent, where the government wants a new Garden City built in line with item 6. He only baulks at items 7 to 10.
2. Johnson’s powers to make any of the Top Ten happen are either limited or non-existent and the same will be the case for whoever wins the mayoral election next May.

Where does this leave the array of non-Conservative politicians vying to succeed Johnson? Most would lobby the government over the majority of the Top Ten and might eventually get some joy with a few of them, perhaps as part of a further devolution of powers to the Greater London Authority (GLA) and London’s boroughs. But the next mayor should expect to begin his or her stint at City Hall with the same restricted levers, resources and areas of influence Johnson presently has at his command. What better use could be made of them? If Johnson’s housing policies are wrong, which alternative ones would be right?

Here’s a third list. This one sets out what Johnson has been doing with some of the main housing tools at his disposal and asks how his successor might use them differently and, crucially, to what possible effect.

1. Most of the public land inherited by the GLA from the old London Development Agency and elsewhere thanks to the 2011 Localism Act is now being built on. But there’s plenty more public sector land out there, including lots owned by Transport for London, which intends to exploit these assets in joint ventures with private developers for the benefit of the transport network. However, the first example, in Earls Court, does not bode well for affordable homes. Should the next mayor require TfL to take a different approach? Should he or she encourage it to extend its legal scope for working with others to develop its land, as the TfL Bill envisaged?
2. Boris Johnson consistently claims to have overseen the delivery of record numbers of “affordable” homes and says he is on track to hit 100,000 over his eight years as mayor. About a third of these have been supplied not by the mayor in a direct sense, but through planning deals made by boroughs with private developers. The mayor has formal powers to intervene in these deals, including by taking them out of a borough’s hands. Johnson has used these powers quite sparingly and notably to hurry the planning permission process along, such as when controversially pre-empting Islington and Camden councils over the Mount Pleasant development. To the same end, he has been generally receptive to developers’ arguments about the viability of housing schemes. Johnson’s housing team says the average “affordable” yield from these deals is 34%, and that that isn’t bad given the economic climate of recent years. Several of Johnson’s opponents think he should demand more from developers and support boroughs in doing so. But if he did, would that risk resulting in fewer affordable homes being delivered and less quickly?
3. Pretty much everyone agrees that bad landlords in the private rented sector are a bad thing. But critics of Johnson’s London rental standard say it is practically pointless because it’s voluntary and therefore means that only good landlords and letting agencies have been signing up for it. How, though, could the next mayor get more private landlords committed to a set of minimum standards and, most importantly, to abide by it? Ken Livingstone in 2012 proposed the GLA setting up its own not-for-profit lettings agency and the idea has surfaced again. Is the idea practical and what difference would it really make?
4. In sharp contrast to most of his political opponents, Johnson actively encourages and warmly welcomes foreign investment in housing on the grounds that it’s been vital to keeping housebuilding going through the recession. Opposition politicians claim that rolling out this welcome mat has resulted in higher price inflation, taller, uglier skyscrapers and encouraged the phenomenon of “poor doors”, whereby the paltry “affordable” element of homes on a new site is firmly segregated from the luxury flats and exclusive facilities. Should a future mayor declare opposition to these things and, if so, would the consequence be, as Johnson argues, fewer homes of every kind, affordable included?
   
5. Johnson says his allocation of housing funding to housing associations and boroughs “rewards hardworking Londoners for their contribution to the capital’s economy” and all the money at his disposal - £1.25b in total for 2015-2018 - is to fund either “flexible home ownership” (40%) or the “affordable rent” homes introduced by the coalition government (60%), which he wants to average 65% of local market rates. His clear priority is to help Londoners on low to middle incomes who will never qualify for social housing - the most “affordable” form there is - because they are not poor enough yet aren’t well-off enough to buy. The argument is often made that the word “affordable” is increasingly attached to housing products that large numbers of Londoner cannot, in fact, afford. Yet Johnson believes those in the London housing “squeezed middle” are those who most need his help, notably through the provision of shared-ownership homes that can give people a toehold on the housing ladder. “More priority needs to be focused on the working households that are the backbone of the economy but who cannot afford to meet their housing aspirations in the capital,” Johnson writes in his 2014 Housing Strategy (page 38). Could he be right?
   
6. Another priority for Johnson is what he calls “the renewal of post-war estates” (Housing Strategy, page 5) and he’s been working with the government on “a proposal for a major new estate regeneration fund” to help enable “a sustainable and long term approach to estate regeneration in London” (page 73). For some, the term “estate regeneration” is just a euphemism for “social cleansing.” Yet large scale estate renewal is regarded by significant non-Tory politicians in London as both desirable in itself, especially if it creates “mixed communities” in better quality homes, and a practical, cost-effective way to get many more homes built, because the land such estates are built on is owned by local authorities. Is estate regeneration always wrong and, if not, how should the next mayor help to ensure that it’s done right?
7. Finally, the mayor is committed to exploring new ways of increasing the supply of homes. Thanks to the devolution of some housing and regeneration functions, the present mayoralty now sees itself as a housing delivery body rather than one that simply sets housing strategy - it can get stuff built and have significant control over what sort of stuff. Johnson’s administration is seeking to innovate within this new framework. It has helped set up a Community Land Trust on the former St Clements hospital site in Mile End, created a Housing Bank to provide loans for “affordable rent to buy” homes, is seeking to attract “patient capital” to finance the building of purpose-built private rented homes and to acquire new sites for development. It has been setting up mayoral development corporations (another product of the 2011 Localism Act) to co-ordinate investment and planning on large sites with room for lots of homes, starting with the Olympic Park and its environs. A serious of housing zones have been designated by the mayor with the aim of helping boroughs and the private sector work together more effectively. The first meeting of the London Land Commission, created by George Osborne with the aim of compiling a comprehensive database of all surplus public land that might be used for housing in the capital, will take place on July 13. All of the these models and mechanisms will be inherited by the next mayor. Could they they better use of them? Could they come up with other, better ones?

Let’s leave it at lucky seven, but there is much more to think and argue about between now and next May. There is also plenty to protest about: the implications of welfare caps, the conversion of social rented homes to “affordable rent” and the government’s proposed extension of the Right to Buy to housing association homes, which even a senior representative of London big business has described to me as “bonkers”, come straight to mind. But it’s worth noting also that there’s a lot of common ground between the present mayor and his Labour, Lib Dem and Green critics about housing, if only that London needs much more of it and for as much of it as possible to be priced below the capital’s sky high market levels. Where they mostly disagree is over how to go about achieving this and what sorts of “affordable” homes are needed most.

That next mayor could very well be a Labour one, so these matters are highly relevant to the six people campaigning to become that party’s candidate for 2016. They will take part in a sold-out housing hustings this evening (Thursday) organised by the London Labour Housing Group (LLHG), which I will be chairing. At the Red Brick blog, LLHG’s Steve Hilditch has set out the housing policies offered so far by Diane Abbott, Tessa Jowell, Sadiq Khan, David Lammy, Gareth Thomas and Christian Wolmar. Lots, lots more on all this to come.