"They're very pragmatic," remarked a City Hall secret squirrel of the Boris Johnson regime, "and generally quite realistic." This description seems to fit the mayor's draft housing strategy which was launched this morning at New London Architecture, a display and networking space in Bloomsbury for people who care about the capital's buildings.
A 1:1500 scale model of central London was displayed to his right as Johnson set out his policy stall. Like sex, a place to live is one of life's basic needs but its provision lacks orgasmic qualities. The Blond did his best to turn us on.
"We're not hobbits," he said at one point, revving up proceedings that might otherwise have been all arid detail: he wants new dwellings to have larger rooms and be blessed with greater elegance too. But his core mission has to be to make it easier for London's people to get the right sorts of roofs over their heads.
There are huge problems to solve and tight limits on what he's able to do. A third of a million are on the boroughs' housing waiting lists, double the figure of ten years ago. Large numbers of properties are waiting to be bought while large numbers of middle-income householders are unable to afford them. The GLA's sprawling territory is pocked with empty homes and pitted with unused land. Meanwhile, builders are feeling the crunch. What's a mayor to do?
He's got £5 billion at his disposal, which he'll use to try to lubricate the market, as you would expect a Tory to. He'll seek to re-start stalled developments, buy up unwanted houses and dead land, and offer shared ownership deals to "any household earning at the basic rate of income tax." To some, this stress on ushering middle income folk on to the property ladder suggests he cares less about the neediest of all. He denied this, just as he had earlier on Today (listen again from 7.50) and as he made a point of doing in this clip filmed straight after the press had gone.
The point, he protests, is to "jump start investment in affordable housing across the board." But there's affordable and there's affordable and his insistence that his "working with the boroughs" will yield some 30,000 homes for social rent by 2011 out of an "affordable" total of 50,000 suggests a certain sensitivity to being tarred with "nasty party" attitudes. All in all, its a very Boris package: philosophically Conservative, concerned with aesthetics, eager to be thought helpful and nice.
I'm promised we'll be able to monitor his progress towards his targets on the GLA website. It's important that we do. Housing may not be hot stuff but it's one of the biggest issues on which his mayoralty will be judged.
More on this from Helene Mulholland.
