In his valedictory speech to the House of Lords the Archbishop of Canterbury referenced the Church of England reports on housing. He went on to say that housing must be affordable, particularly social housing. Social housing is one of the areas which is very inelastic in terms of supply and demand. We need clear criteria for what “affordable” means. One of them should not be in proportion to the average cost in the area, which is the present test: 80% of average cost. …… 80% of average market cost puts us a very long way away from where we would like to be …….. Affordable housing needs to be related to income, not to average cost. It needs to be measured against real living wage in a particular area if it is going to be genuinely affordable.
That is especially interesting in the context of the discussion at the Stag Brewery Public Inquiry today about affordable housing and the need for community. A new theme was that Mortlake already had the highest density of affordable housing in the borough, with the implication that little or no more was needed. Richmond Council appears to be quite happy to have built an estate of higher value riverside properties, based on the argument that viability trumps all. You can understand why some councillors feel uncomfortable.
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Last paragraph … correct; the KCs are well paid, perhaps from ability to scratch around for half-truths (if that) and then go through a long-winded staged process of trying to build same up almost into truths.
So, in the case of Mortlake/Affordable I believe the KC in question was referring to the Ward of Mortlake and Barnes Common and perhaps it is the LB RoT Ward with the highest density of affordable (social?) housing in the Borough. But so what?! That’s almost entirely irrelevant … (a) the LBRoT Affordable Housing Starts Target of 500 by May 2026 is Borough-wide (b) the London Plan 50% Target is by definition London-wide and (c) the developer isn’t going to shift the development to another Ward.
Similarly, in July 2021 the London Mayor rejected Developer’s plan at the time, reasons including height of buildings and low percentage of affordable housing offered. One would think ‘that’s that’ then? But no, about an hour of cross examination was taken up yesterday trying to force a witness to confirm that three years ago when the witness in question wasn’t even working for the GLA ‘some senior GLA staff might have expressed no objection to the plans’. So what?! And then that ‘someone somewhere in the GLA’ thought the red-brick facings of the buildings were attractive … and the resulting nice ‘Townscape’ wasn’t a reason for rejection. Maybe not but so what ..?!!… plans were rejected and over 3 years ago!
What a waste of time and money!
Do we realise that LBRoT Council Tax Payers are stumping up for this sort of time-wasting nonsense? I’m sure the fact that those cross-examining are paid by the hour has no influence on the style of cross-examination being adopted.
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Correction to the last paragraph. Counsel are paid a brief fee which is likely to have been agreed before the hearing. The wasted hour yesterday was probably more to do with denigrating the witness so as to say that none of their evidence on affordable housing should be relied upon. And the testy exchange between Counsel at the end of the day was probably on the same lines. We shall see how it is put in closing summary.
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I think we need to separate affordable housing from social housing. The former would seem unaffordable to those who need a place to live, whereas social housing is provided for those in need. How many people are on waiting lists for social housing? Surely that should be a priority.
We may have a high density of social housing due to the original council housing built many years ago but I’m not aware of how much has been provided recently.
I was going to mention the Lennox and Alton estates but those are, of course, in Wandsworth.
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