Did we really need Savills to tell us this? Curious that one of the biggest names in land acquisition and disposal for the well heeled, should be seeking to expose the stranglehold those self same people and organisations have on building land and housing delivery in this country.
London must surely be a lost cause when it comes to trying to keep the ordinary working class people, who actually keep the city running, living close to where they work.
Some might argue that many hundreds of thousands of such people do indeed still live and work inside the M25. However, how many of these workers live in what might be considered decent, affordable, family housing, let alone have any hope of owning it?
Gentrification, is the rather innocuous term used to describe the wholesale culling of ordinary people from the most desirable postcodes. Much of the workforce required to keep London prospering, is now forced to the outskirts and into the ratty and increasingly decrepit and rundown areas of Outer London. Would the massively expensive Crossrail project have been required if this hadn’t happened?
Planning permissions granted for new homes are being concentrated in the wrong areas, where there is less need for housing, according to new research by Savills.
It found that there is a lack of 90,000 planning consents for homes in the least affordable and most in-demand areas of the country.
Only 20pc of planning consents in 2016 were in the most unaffordable places, where the lowest priced homes are at least 11.4 times income. However, 40pc of the country’s total need for new homes is in these markets, while there is a surplus of consents in the most affordable locations.
Research found that in areas where the house price to earnings ratio is over 11.4, which includes London and much of the South East, there is a shortfall of 73,000 planning consents for homes.
Since the National Planning Policy Framework was launched four years ago, with the…
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Roger Gambba-Jones 