A group of almost 3,000 London properties, currently being built as part of Sadiq Khan’s Affordable Homes Programme, are not expected to be finished until 2032.
Mr Khan’s deputy mayor for housing, Tom Copley, said that while the “vast majority” of the 116,000 homes being built as part of the programme will be finished by 2029, some projects will take longer.
In May, Mr Khan announced that he had met the target set by the Government of work starting on 116,000 new affordable homes across the capital by March 2023, using funding distributed by City Hall.
But he came under fire from City Hall Conservatives, with his former mayoral opponent Shaun Bailey telling BBC Radio London: “He hasn’t delivered 116,000 homes, he’s started 116,000 homes, which is no good to Londoners, because you can’t live in a start - you need a completion.”
City Hall said at the time that the Government’s target was for starts specifically, and that 63,817 affordable homes had been completed.
“Homebuilding usually takes several years from 'start' to completion and this varies from scheme to scheme, which is why ‘starts’ are the Government’s recognised metric for measuring homebuilding,” the Mayor’s team said.
But at a meeting of the London Assembly’s housing committee on Tuesday, deputy mayor for housing Tom Copley was asked by Conservative member Tony Devenish for his current estimate of when all of the affordable homes will be completed.
“The vast majority will be complete by 2029,” said Mr Copley.
He added: “2,700 beyond that will [be] complete by 2032, I think.
Mr Devenish said 2029 “seems quite late actually” as a general timeframe for when most will be complete.
Mr Copley replied: “There was no longstop deadline for completions and what that meant was we were able to support long-term, multi-phase estate regeneration schemes, where you have to give partners certainty upfront, so that’s why.”
Earlier in the meeting, the deputy mayor had expanded on that point, saying: “Partners are not going to take the risk on those schemes if they can only secure funding for the first one or two phases, and then may or may not get funding for subsequent phases, so those schemes simply wouldn’t come forward, and we wouldn’t get the benefit of these new and better homes…
“Because of London’s built environment, there is quite a considerable amount of estate regeneration that requires funding.”
