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Housing minister claims London mayor’s focus on social housing is ‘really misguided’
Housebuilding is moving at a “glacial pace” in London because of mayor Sadiq Khan’s “really misguided attempt to build social rented housing”, the housing and planning minister has said.
Speaking at a session on how to fix the housing crisis at the Conservative Party Conference, Rachel Maclean said the mayor of London was “failing his voters” and there was going to have to be “some quite serious interventions” in the capital.
She said: “We can go much further, we can break down some of the barriers, we can use the power of government, frankly the cheque book of government, to get more houses built in these areas which desperately need them.”
Ms Maclean added that cities have a “huge role to play”.
“I don’t believe that cities can meet all the housing need, but they can certainly meet a hell of a lot more than they currently are doing.
“If London was actually delivering what it should be delivering, frankly we would go 99% of the way to fixing the housing crisis because that’s where affordability pressures are the highest.
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“And this is not an opportunity for me to have a go at Sadiq Khan – of course it is – but actually he is failing his voters on this because he’s got this misguided attempt to build social rented housing, which means he’s just not building any housing at all.
“It’s a glacial pace of development, he’s doing it all wrong,” she said.
When asked by Inside Housing why trying to build social homes is “misguided”, Ms Maclean said there is “nothing wrong with building social housing”.
“I didn’t say that, to be clear. If you focus on building only social housing, rather than building housing overall, you will not get a desired outcome.
“The best way to get more social and affordable homes is just to build more houses overall,” she said, adding “because you are allowing developers to come in with Section 106 and CIL [Community Infrastructure Levy] contributions.”
She added: “By the way, Sadiq Khan has had billions of pounds worth of government money to build these houses, but the truth is he hasn’t delivered what needs to be delivered compared to the scale of need in London, where the affordability crisis is the most acute.”
Mr Khan has set a long-term target of 50% affordable homes on all new developments in London.
In May, he announced that he had surpassed a central government-set target to build 116,000 affordable homes by 2023.
He said the average percentage of affordable homes on developments he has approved doubled from 22% in 2016 to 41% in 2022.
Panellist Ben Everitt, MP for Milton Keynes North, said: “I think social housing is such an incredibly important part of the mix.
“Genuinely, it’s so necessary because of the affordability gap we’ve got across the country.”
He added that it must be recognised that there is a “whole ecosystem” that works together of different types of tenure – “and we need to make sure that renters are included in that as well”.
At a later session on social housing, Ms Maclean said that social housing “provides stability for people to build a life, to actually harness the opportunities that they have in front of them”.
“And of course it is the number one thing that’s actually helping people to stabilise lives and alleviate poverty and deprivation or any of the other issues that people may experience through no fault of their own, just being born into a situation that’s extremely difficult for them,” she said.
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