𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Last year, for the first time since the 1980s, the population of London shrank. Amid soaring rents and mortgages, and cramped housing, families are being forced out of our capital, and their children are being deprived the opportunity to grow up in the best city in the country.

This has all happened because our priorities are wrong – and Sadiq Khan is about to make it even worse.

The core of the problem is incentives. At the moment, we have a national housing target, which was introduced to alleviate housing shortages across the country – which causes rents and mortgages to rise in a simple supply-and-demand system.

In London, the target is now 88,000 homes per year that must be built somewhere. But notice how the target doesn’t specify what type of homes.

In practice, the housing target is not 88,000 homes, but rather 88,000 front doors – it doesn’t matter what size the property is, if it has a front door, it constitutes one home for the sake of targets.

The result is that developers are encouraged to build a sea of one and two-bedroom flats, stacked on top of one another in great high rises, blighting our skyline whilst only meeting the housing needs of a handful of Londoners.

At the moment, across our city, families are living in cramped and overcrowded houses as a result of a shortage of family homes – is it any wonder they move out?

If they could move into larger homes, they would free up properties for families smaller than theirs to move into, in an effect called “laddering” – a family needing five beds moves out of a cramped four-bed, freeing up a four-bed for a family currently cramped into a three-bed, and so on and so on.

Building a six-bed family home in London could meet the housing needs of as many as 36 people – building a one-bed just solves the needs of one person.

Not only are these massive high rises a blight, but they actively mismanage the allocation of housing in London, making it harder for families to get the space they need.

But Sadiq Khan saves the worst for last. It’s no secret that London has a housing crisis, and his solution is to push to build houses on your local parks and green spaces.

His new draft London Plan earmarks as many as 56,000 “homes” (one to two-bed flats) to be built on greenbelt land across London.

Suddenly your local park could be bulldozed over to make way for Sadiq Towers, a 25-storey high rise filled with small flats that are no good to local families. You’ve lost your park, and families are left in cramped conditions because the system actively incentivises against helping them.

I don’t think this is right, which is why I’ve written my new report, Uncrowded Housing, about exactly what has to change.

If homes must be built, they should be family homes for the families in London who are at risk of being driven out of the city they love and live in.

And if homes must be built, they must not be built on a single park or green space in our capital. Once these spaces are gone, they are gone for good; they will not return as easily as they have been destroyed.

Sadiq Khan’s tower block crusade must not be allowed to proceed any further. I hope you’ll support my campaign for a housing target that prioritises bedrooms over front doors, to deliver to London the housing it needs, rather than the housing that developers find most financially advantageous to produce. We must act before we lose any more green spaces to unnecessary and inefficient high rises.