City Hall housing targets incentivise small flats over family homes, Sadiq Khan warned

Developers are incentivised to build too many one and two-bedroom properties in London instead of the family-sized homes that the capital desperately needs, the Mayor of London has been told.

City Hall’s government-set target of building 88,000 homes every year has prompted Sir Sadiq Khan to prioritise speed over need, according to senior Conservative Assembly Member Andrew Boff.

In a new report, entitled ‘Uncrowded Houses’, he explains that the current focus on “units” over “bedrooms” has led to unnecessary high rise developments proliferating across the capital – and warned that more families could be forced to leave the capital if the Mayor doesn’t change his strategy.

“London’s population fell for the first time in decades last year, and families are leaving the capital en masse because they cannot afford the housing they need.

“Meanwhile, planning changes to enable developers to bulldoze green spaces, and circumvent local councils – elected by residents – to put up developments look set to throw up tens of thousands of unsuitable properties which will not solve the issue.

“We need to stop building these high rises and start building the family homes that Londoners really need.”

Earlier this year it emerged that just three per cent of all homes built through City Hall’s Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) between 2016 and 2025 had four or more bedrooms. The vast majority – 78 per cent – were either studios, or one or two-bedroom properties.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has been accused of prioritising speed over need PA An accompanying report from the London Assembly Housing Committee suggested that developers were not being given the appropriate grants to motivate them to build larger homes. The report recommends reform of the system to ensure a “variable grant model” which could allocate money per bedroom or person housed instead of per unit.

Other measures suggested include more effective management of existing stock, including incentivising people with extra bedrooms to downsize, and target acquisitions of larger homes for use by councils or the Mayor.

Building larger homes would not only relieve overcrowded families, but free up properties further down the chain, the report said.

“When a suitably large home becomes available, it often releases a chain of moves: a family exits temporary accommodation, another household moves into the vacated smaller property, and overall pressure across multiple segments of the housing stock is reduced,” Mr Boff’s report says.

“Conversely, the absence of larger homes creates a bottleneck that prevents movement and intensifies overcrowding.”

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His comments echo Anna Clarke, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at The Housing Forum, who told the Centre for London’s Housing Summit earlier this year: “We’re rather too obsessed with counting the number of units, which pushes the pressure to build small housing. We’ve got an awful lot of overcrowded households in London.”