Titled ‘A City for All Londoners’, the report highlighted the Mayor’s plans to tackle the issue of housing as just eight per cent of Londoners are currently satisfied with the situation in the city.
The report included his plans to establish a London Living Rent aimed at middle earners. It will be at at no more than one third of the local average household income and is designed to assist of those on median incomes to save for a deposit.
It also included the Mayor’s plans to deliver more shared ownership properties, whereby people part buy and part rent their property until they can purchase the whole property outright.
The Mayor said he has started working closely with the NHS to find a solution to build affordable housing where possible.
Khan said: “The NHS is one of the largest owners of land and buildings in London, and I have begun to work closely with [them] on plans to unlock their surplus sites for housing and to enable the release of capital for reinvestment in their services.”
Khan added one of the issues is that the market is currently dominated by a small number of large developers. He said he wanted more support given to smaller house builders and new development models, including build-to-rent, and planned to design new policies to assist in this.
He also said the development of Crossrail and Crossrail 2 offered the potential to build more affordable housing in higher densities of the city as transport links to and from London will be strengthened in the coming years.
The Mayor, however, remained realistic about scale of the problem in London. He said: “We will not fix the housing crisis overnight but I have set out in this chapter what I will do to make a difference.
“Building enough housing is an important part of economic development – and, as I have demonstrated here, economic development will also help us to build more homes.”
