Eric Pickles: Tear down estates to boost poor inner-city homes

Plans to create hundreds of thousands of homes in inner London were unveiled today by the Government.

A Big Bang approach will see old estates torn down and more families housed in new apartment blocks, making the heart of the capital more densely populated than it has been for decades.

“Past experience tells us that mere tinkering won’t work. We need to be more ambitious,” Communities Secretary Eric Pickles told the Evening Standard. Mr Pickles was today setting out for the first time how £150 million set aside in this year’s Budget may be used to speed up the regeneration of some of London’s most neglected estates. He envisages low-rise blocks that meet modern environmental standards being built on the sites of run-down areas like the notorious Aylesbury estate in south London.

The number of people living in the inner zone of the capital could be increased by up to 850,000, according to an analysis carried out for the Government by estate agent Savills.

It found that although record numbers are expected to live in London by 2021, most of these currently flock to the suburbs, while the inner boroughs are forecast to contain 1.7 million fewer people than in 1939 when London’s population last hit a peak.

Recreating just half of the lost capacity would supply the whole of London’s projected housing needs for the next 17 years.

“Completely rebuilding traditional streetscapes can provide more housing and commercial space using the same amount of land,” said Mr Pickles. That could mean blocks of homes standing five or six storeys high mixed with traditional terraced streets.

“The result will be more homes that are highly valued by residents,” he went on. “This approach can also increase the value of land in a way that is not possible with the incremental building-by-building regeneration that has been favoured in the past.”

Final decisions will not be taken until a full report is published by Savills this summer. But Mr Pickles said he was keen to stop any more 1960s-style tower blocks, which he dismissed as “concrete carbunkles”.

Mr Pickles was today visiting Rainham, Kent, to promote affordable homes from new “offsite” construction techniques, billed as a modern successor to post-war pre-fabricated housing. He hailed as “superb” 51 houses and flats being built at a rate of one-a-day for affordable rents, adding: “It’s not the cheap and nasty pre-fab of past decades.”