London mayor faces housing challenge

Newly elected London mayor Boris Johnson may face a stiff challenge implementing his housing policy under present market conditions, according to Knight Frank.

While elements of his manifesto have been applauded by the estate agent, a stern "market reality" test is likely to determine the Conservative mayor's success in this area.

"In fairness to Boris we are sure that he is aware that drafting election pledges is the easy part of creating a housing strategy, implementation will be an awful lot harder," said Liam Bailey, head of residential research at Knight Frank.

"The ambition of Boris to raise the volume of housing completions in order to ease London's housing crisis is about to hit the market reality that over the next few years overall development volumes will be far lower than national and local government would ideally like due to market conditions," he added.

During the campaign to oust incumbent Ken Livingstone, Mr Johnson outlined several key tenets of his housing policy.

Key to his proposals are plans to 50,000 more affordable homes by 2011, deliver more family-sized homes and protect private tenants from unscrupulous landlords by publishing an online Fair Rents Guide.

Mr Johnson has also expressed a desire to invest £60 million from the Regional Housing Pot to start renovating the capital's 84,205 empty properties – a move designed to help low-income Londoners off waiting lists.

Land will also be released by the Greater London Authority (GLA), matched by £130 million from the Regional Housing Pot to launch a new 'First Steps Housing Scheme', which will be open to first-time buyers frozen out of government schemes.

While acknowledging new-build housing has increased form 12,000 properties per annum to around 20,000 over the previous decade, future developments are likely to be more difficult.

"The reality is that some of this improvement has been achieved through the development of the easier brownfield sites - those requiring the least remediation - and also due to the boom in higher density schemes which have raised development volumes," said Mr Bailey.

"The use of more 'difficult' land and the push for more mixed communities, with more family units, will be likely to lead to a decline in development densities and volumes."

Indeed new-build properties have fallen by 25 per cent in 2008 to date.

Chris O'Toole