London’s population is growing and the capital needs to build around 36,000 new homes a year just to keep pace with the number of new households. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition by NLA —London’s Centre for the Built Environment, which looks at how well the capital is keeping up with its targets, who is delivering new homes, the funding and policy context, exemplar projects, and new and imaginative ideas for designing and delivering new homes for London.

The housing problem for London is simple but the solutions are complex: 7.9 million people(3.3 million households) live in the capital now, and that number is expected to grow to 10 million by 2031, creating an additional 700,000 households. We need 36,000 homes a year to meet this demand... but we are currently only delivering around 20,000 homes per year. In a period when there is just less money to go round, when prices remain high, mortgages are hard to come by, the demand for rental is growing yet the industry is not geared to deliver it, something’s got to give.

On top of that there are 880,000 people in London on council housing waiting lists, 224,000 households currently live in over crowded accommodation and 35,000households are classed as homeless and in temporary accommodation, three-times the national average.51 per cent of homes in London are privately owned, but with the shortfall in housing provision, house prices remain high in the capital. The average age of a first-time house-buyer is now 32 – three years older than elsewhere in the UK. The average house price in London is now £364,000, 55 per cent above that of the average for England. As a result renting is growing. But we have a poorly regulated private rental sector where 39 percent of accommodation doesn’t meet DecentHomes Standards. There has been a 50 per cent increase in complaints against private landlords over the past four years, yet the average private rent in the capital for a two-bed home now stands at £1,360 per month, two and a halftimes the national average. There is a real need for more quality accommodation in the rental sector but few developers are providing it.

Published October 2012
36 Pages