Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has announced that City Hall will be actively exploring the release of parts of London’s green belt for development.
It’s envisaged to develop green belt close to transport links in particular.
Indeed, Khan targeted working closely with the UK government on housing and transport infrastructure, including the metro-isation of London’s rail lines and extensions to the Bakerloo line and Docklands Light Railway.
Khan said: “A generation of Londoners now simply can’t afford to rent, let alone buy a home. We have young professionals stuck living in their childhood bedrooms for years on end; Londoners having to endure cold, damp accommodation that isn’t fit for human habitation; couples reluctantly moving out of the capital to start a family; and London primary schools closing because young families have been priced out of the area. At the sharpest end of this crisis, Londoners are being forced to sleep rough on the streets and over 90,000 children are officially homeless.
“It breaks my heart. The damage the housing crisis is causing is pervasive and profound. We simply cannot let it continue. At stake is the fundamental promise of our city – the promise that if you work hard in London, London will work for you. It goes to the very heart of why I got into politics in the first place: to preserve the ‘London promise’ for future generations and to ensure that all Londoners, whatever their background, get the opportunities they need to reach their potential.”
To meet demand, London needs 88,000 new homes a year over the next decade: close to a million homes.
The capital has never built this number of homes before, and only ever built at anything close to this rate when there was a housing boom across the country in the 1930s.
The Mayor argued that only building on ‘brownfield’ (previously developed land) will never be enough to meet the scale of the challenge.
London’s green belt can often be low quality, poorly maintained and inaccessible to Londoners. Given the extent of the housing crisis and the nature of much of London’s green belt, Khan is arguing that the status quo is “wrong, out-of-date and simply unsustainable”.
Releasing some areas of green belt for development could unlock hundreds of thousands of new homes for Londoners, including social homes.
The Mayor has launched a consultation to help shape the next London Plan, which sets out the vision for how the capital will develop over the next 20 to 25 years.
Khan added: “We clearly face an extraordinary challenge. As Mayor, I’m determined to give it everything we’ve got – with a radical step-change in our approach. We’ll be working with councils and others to secure as many new homes as we can on brownfield sites, both large and small, but we have to be honest with Londoners that this alone will not be enough to meet our needs.
“That’s why I’m announcing that City Hall’s new position will be to actively explore the release of parts of London’s green belt for development.”
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