Former Labour MP and cabinet minister Tessa Jowell has pledged to tackle London’s housing crisis with an ambitious new housebuilding body, as she launched her bid to become the capital’s next mayor.
The former Olympics minister said if elected she would create a “Homes for Londoners” body on her first day at City Hall, using public subsidies and city-owned land.
Speaking at a community centre in Brixton on Tuesday, Jowell said the capital was “at risk of being two cities”, with “wealthy foreign investors treating London property as a place to store money rather than a place to live”.
She said: “We’re building more luxury flats than ever but fewer than half the homes we need for Londoners. We have more billionaires than anywhere yet working in the very same buildings are hundreds of thousands not paid enough to live.”
Jowell said she would use her experience from bringing the 2012 Olympics to London to tackle the lack of affordable housing quickly.
Using unused land from Transport for London alone, 2,000 affordable homes could be built annually for the next 20 years, she said.
Jowell joins a wide field of candidates vying to be Labour’s London mayoral candidate in 2016, including MPs David Lammy, Dianne Abbott and Sadiq Khan and public transport campaigner Christian Wolmar.
She is backed by former Labour transport secretary Lord Adonis, who once was rumoured to be considering a run at the job, and by former Treasury minister Kitty Ussher.
She is by far the bookies’ favourite at 5/2, with Khan second at 4/1.
Former mayor Ken Livingstone is backing Khan’s candidacy, something Jowell said was “not surprising”. But more unexpected perhaps is the additional backing for Khan from Oona King, who was Livingstone’s rival for the Labour candidacy in 2012.
“I’ve heard people say London is a Labour city,” Jowell said on Tuesday. “Well, London hasn’t voted for a Labour mayor since 2004. There have been four mayoral elections – and Labour has won just one of them.
“The Labour party hasn’t won a major election since 2005 – 10 years ago. Well, I’m tired of losing and if we lose again in 2016 we will help precisely no one.
“We have to look outward to all of London. Ken won with Tory votes and Boris [Johnson] won with Labour votes – you can’t do it any other way. If we can’t win over Tory voters, we can’t win.”
Labour’s mayoral campaign must reach out to all voters and help counter the trend towards the capital becoming divided between rich and poor, Jowell said, pledging she would be the candidate for “One London”.
“One London is a London where everyone shares in our city’s success – young and old; low and middle income as well as the better off; where we are intolerant of poverty, of injustice, of hopelessness,” she said.
“One London, not the two we see so often today – where some of the most severe poverty in the country is on the doorstep of some of the richest places in the world.”
