Thread by @rcolvile

Going on holiday but just time for one last thread on two reliably infuriating topics - misleading statistics and lack of housebuilding. Feat friend of the show @SadiqKhan, seen here nobly staring into a golden future (1/?)

This week, @RishiSunak and @SadiqKhan have been having a big row about housing targets. Rishi said Sadiq wasn't building enough, so he would 'step in'. Sadiq said he wasn't just building, but building lots and lots and lots, and would build even more if not for evil Tories.

@RishiSunak @SadiqKhan This surprised me, because in the policy world, there’s a pretty solid consensus that Sadiq has been Not Good on housing. In fact I’ve been sparring with his deputy mayor this week on this very issue.

https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1684131280315613184

Quick recap: yes, London has built more under Sadiq – but Boris took office at the start of a nationwide housing bust. Under Sadiq, London's share of housebuilding has fallen, despite his claim that govt has 'relied almost entirely on London's housing success' to meet targets

But at the end of my thread I also flagged something pretty weird. With his typical modesty, Sadiq claims to have trebled the number of AFFORDABLE houses being built in London (which he helps fund, vs wider housebuilding which he just allows to happen, or doesn't).

And the data seems to bear that out - just look at this blue line! (This via for the stats nerds) https://t.co/L6nH7tWa5Hlondon.gov.uk/programmes-str…

But this is the weird bit. Affordable housing starts/completions tend to jump around, as money comes in or doesn’t from central govt, and big projects start or finish. But under Boris, they end up roughly in the same place – 83,208 housing starts, 94,001 completions.

Under Sadiq, that doesn’t happen. Housing starts go up and up and up. But completions grows much more slowly – in fact the average number of affordable homes the Mayor has actually delivered is lower than under Boris. (8,419 pa from 2016/17 vs 11,750 before.)

So what is actually happening to all these housing starts? Why haven’t all these projects turned into actual homes?

It’s true that Sadiq changed the definition of affordable housing. And that building in London takes longer than elsewhere, because you’re generally doing bigger projects and there’s normally stuff there already, which needs to be torn down and sometimes detoxified.

But there are two other things going on – both of which make the figures flattering at best, and downright misleading at worst.

First, you’d think a ‘housing start’ would represent bricks being laid, foundations being dug, or at the very least planning permission being granted. London’s is here (it's similar to the national definition, if a bit more complicated).

What it boils down to, though, is that a start is counted when contracts are signed for demolition and construction, work starts on a site. But as far as I can see, that contract doesn’t have to specify how much work, or when the homes will actually be built.

In 2022-23, the ever-modest Mayor claimed to have ‘broken records for genuinely affordable homebuilding in the capital’. Work started, he said, on ‘over 25,000 genuinely affordable homes last year, a record’. This smashed his ‘hugely ambitious’ targets.
london.gov.uk/mayor-hails-re…

But where are these 25,658 homes? Well, a spreadsheet on this official website (search for 'bedroom breakdown') tells us where 19,067 of them are. (The other 6,500 are currently missing, but will presumably be added soon?) london.gov.uk/programmes-str…

This spreadsheet shows that an astonishing 14,094 affordable homes were approved in a single quarter – the final quarter, as it happened, before the deadline for the mayor’s target. And this is where it gets ugly.

The site set to deliver the most affordable housing starts – 589 – is the Cambridge Road Estate in Kingston upon Thames, as part of a 2,170-home project. But the project’s website says that ‘the regeneration is anticipated to take between 12 to 15 years, over five phases’.

At the moment, the project is still in Stage 1A, which involves the construction of just 44 new homes, 42 for council rent and 2 for shared ownership. Yet all 589 are booked in the Mayor’s stats for 2022/3. cambridgeroadestate.com

That may help account for the puzzling gap between starts and completions. But there’s another, bigger problem.

Cambridge Road, like many of the other big projects on the Mayor’s list, is an estate regeneration. That means that old housing is being knocked down, and replaced with new.

Estate regeneration is of course an extremely good thing. The residents get new and better houses – which is why so many of these projects get overwhelming support from the residents in local referendums – while we build extra housing on top.

But it seems fairly self-evident that if the Mayor of London is going around boasting about the new housing he is creating, you think he means, well, additional housing. Not replacement housing.

(Remember: these replacement homes are generally promised to the people whose houses are being knocked down, to get them to agree to it. So they do nothing for the incredibly lengthy waiting lists.)

Going through the list of projects, you see this same pattern repeatedly. Cambridge Road – 2,170 new homes, 832 demolitions. The Ledbury Estate in Southwark – 260 affordable housing starts claimed, but really 340 new homes, 244 demolitions and net gain of just 21 affordable units

High Road West in Haringey – 2,612 new homes, but the Love Lane Estate demolished. Ebury Bridge in Victoria. The Barnsbury Estate. Hayes Town Centre. Northwick Park. All involving demolitions. And all on timescales stretching over years.

I haven't had time to go through in detail, and may have got some figures slightly wrong (as I said, going on holiday).

But it does seem like the mayor hit his affordable target by grabbing at every scheme going, and giving it a bit of funding to claim it as a ‘housing start’, irrespective of when precisely the houses will be delivered, and how many of them will actually add to the housing stock.

Now, I’ve only carried out this exercise for London (as I said, going on holiday). It may be that other local authorities are doing the numbers in a similar way. But even if they are, the distortion is likely to be greater in London, because it has much more brownfield.

But it’s notable that the national government’s notorious 300,000 a year target for England uses ‘net additional dwellings’ as its metric – which accounts for construction and conversions, but also demolitions.

This is all incredibly frustrating - not least because the use of gross numbers rather than net misleads Londoners into thinking the housing crisis in their city is being addressed by record housebuilding. When judging by the actual completions data, that's not the case.

I’ll end the thread here, but at the very least, this exercise shows that we should treat any claims about affordable housing starts from the mayor’s office with not just a pinch but a bucket of salt.

And that it might be a good idea for the opposition in the GLA to demand a full audit of exactly how many genuinely new affordable homes are being built in London – and when Londoners can expect to actually get them. ENDS