Mayor of London says nothing is off the table to tackle London’s housing crisis

Sadiq Khan speaks on changing his rules on affordable housing, saying nothing is off the table to tackle London’s housing crisis

Transcript

00:00Londoners have been priced out at sea for too long. We've got to increase the

00:03supply of housing in London to meet the demand. We've been talking to not just

00:08developers and councils and housing providers but also the government about

00:12the perfect storm facing the housing sector, not just in London but across the

00:16country. Roughly speaking 94% of new homes in London are flats but also we

00:23know we have more than double the amount of high-rise buildings that the rest of the country put together.

00:27We've had a big challenge with the understandable requirements of tall

00:31buildings. Building safety is a big concern for us. Building safety regulator

00:36has put conditions on new homes and that's affected viability of some of

00:40these schemes. So I'm speaking to the government about after listening to

00:44developers and others is it possible in these exceptional circumstances to try

00:50and turbocharge house building in London. So those conversations are ongoing and

00:54hopefully over the course of the next few weeks able to come to an agreement with

00:58the government about what we can do to kick-start house building in London. The

01:01great thing about the Department for Communities and Local Government is they're

01:05willing to talk about everything. So what I've said to the government is let's

01:08have a frank conversation about what we can do and go into those

01:12conversations with an attitude of nothing's on the table. I recognise that

01:16across the country housing starts have fallen off the cliff. My issue is London, not the rest of the country, so in

01:24London, what I want to do is get a spoken agreement with the government. That

01:28could mean, you know, freeing up regulation, changing rules in relation to

01:33planning to try and kick-start house building in London and it's really important we do that.