Richard Rogers: Use London’s high streets and town centres to create new housing

London’s housing crisis is becoming critical. We need at least 42,000 new homes a year, and are building barely half that.

Faced with a crisis of this magnitude, should we shrug our shoulders and build new towns in London’s green belt, turning our backs on 70 years of town planning, and on the policy that has built 98 per cent of London’s new development on brownfield?

We need to take urgent action on housing but we are not at that stage yet. Loosening the green belt prematurely would create the sprawling, car-based suburbs that add to climate change, eat up green land and most significantly divert investment from the brownfield land in the capital, which still has capacity for nearly 500,000 homes. We shouldn’t turn our back on these sites and the opportunities they offer.

The announcement of a London Land Commission in last week’s Budget is a welcome step towards ensuring that we can identify and develop the sites still available. But London’s capacity is not only to be found in large sites but in retrofitting existing districts and adapting existing buildings.

By working out from high streets and neighbourhood centres, we can repair tears in the urban fabric and make the best use of public transport, schools, shops and other amenities. If London’s 600 high streets and town centres took an additional 500 homes each, this would deliver more than seven years’ supply.

Town centres like Croydon, hollowed out by 1960s town planning, have huge untapped capacity. Why not build a new town in Croydon, with the new homes, shops, schools, public spaces and workplaces that form the essence of place?

Stratford shows what can be done. In less than 10 years, a complex derelict site was transformed to accommodate millions of visitors for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and then reborn as a beautiful new park for London. There are plans for more than 10,000 homes, as well as new schools, museums, studios and universities — a new town in the heart of east London.

So why are we not building faster, in the face of such overwhelming demand? Our housing market is dysfunctional. Over the past 20 years, elected local councils have lost power, allowing planning and building new homes to become the almost exclusive preserve of a small group of housebuilders. The system works pretty well for them. But they have no real incentive to accelerate supply, innovate or enhance quality.

London planners have done what they can, increasing the pipeline of units with permission from 100,000 to 200,000 in recent years. But building rates remain stubbornly low. Now local authorities need the tools to make development happen faster and better: enhanced compulsory purchase powers, the ability to tax uncompleted developments, and switching billions of pounds “from benefits to bricks”.

We don’t need to overflow into new towns on greenfield sites until we have made the most of brownfield. Intelligent design and planning can unlock a million development opportunities, and enable communities, public sector bodies and developers to build the homes we need and places that work. London’s urban renaissance does need new towns — but they must be new towns in the city.