Other speakers included Colin Wilson, head of regeneration of the Old Kent Road at the local authority on plans for the area including provision for distribution companies, where demand has gone ‘through the roof’ as online sales have risen. ‘We think you can have both things’, said Wilson. ‘Really great residential environments and commercial uses for which there is a growing demand in London’. 

Finally, Cllr Leo Pollak spoke about delivering new council housing and the ‘creative’ approaches the council had adopted to build its pipeline and help tackle the housing crisis within a ‘fundamentally broken housing economy’. This includes ‘expanding and enriching’ the borough’s estates, and looking at seven new ‘noble, heroic’ ‘frontiers’ such as building new housing estates, over roads, over water on residential moorings, on roofscapes – the UK’s biggest programme with over 50 sites, four already under construction – and working with faith groups over their assets and forming partnerships. ‘The key thing is that it’s all about locking arms with different faith groups and saying: ‘what is the moral response to a housing crisis of the scale that we have?’, said Pollak, and particularly in the kind of ecumenical kind of Christian meetings that we have. What would Jesus do in the midst of a housing crisis? You can only imagine what follows that’.

Watch the video recording here.