Low-cost homes

We applaud the news that Government planners have backed Mayor Livingstone's proposal to double the number of low-cost homes built in London each year.

Making a proportion of all new-built homes affordable is a vital measure if London's infrastructure, with its teachers, police, nurses, doctors and emergency services, is to be kept going.

Requiring builders to include 35 per cent of affordable homes in their new developments might be made to work (even 40 per cent if there were enough sweeteners in the deal), but 50 per cent is simply unrealistic.

As it is, the Housebuilders' Federation regards the proposals as a "land development tax", and private developers will continue to try to thwart it both by delaying low-cost developments, and by attempting to offload them to greenfield sites with the excuse that it is uneconomic to build them on brownfield land. Nevertheless the impulse behind the Mayor's scheme is praiseworthy.

At the moment, average London workers in their late twenties, earning about £27,000 a year, need a mortgage of more than eight times their salary to buy a home in the metropolis. According to a study last year, 60,000 people, many of them key workers, will be driven out of London during the next 10 years if no affordable housing is found for them.

Meanwhile the capital's population is expected to rise by 700,000 during the next 15 years. Under the new plans, 23,000 new low-cost homes would be built annually until 2016, of which 35 per cent would be council housing and 15 per cent private housing for key workers.

At the moment it is unclear how the Mayor plans to "tie in" this 15 per cent of housing for key workers, who may change jobs or choose to sell on their homes to the private sector. These homes will need to be linked to specific jobs. If these obstacles can be overcome, the Mayor will deserve congratulation for putting off the day when London prices itself out of its own infrastructure.