Mayor of Newham welcomes King’s Speech.
I am pleased to see encouraging signals in today’s King’s speech, with both an increase in the numbers of affordable homes to be built, and the protection of rights of those who rent their homes at the very heart of our new government’s agenda for change.
The announcement of the Planning and Infrastructure bill is one of the government’s main measures to streamline and speed up planning and associated infrastructure needs, to get more housing built.
I can confirm Newham is well placed to work at the vanguard of this change due to our existing track record.
Newham is one of the fastest growing, youngest, and most diverse boroughs in the country. We have more 351,000 people living in Newham. We are the third fastest growing borough in London and our people need and deserve high quality, genuinely affordable housing, in attractive and vibrant neighbourhoods.
In Newham we are delivering one of the most ambitious house building and acquisition programmes anywhere in London. We have delivered more than 1,000 genuinely affordable homes in the past two years as part of our Building a Fairer Newham programme.
In the next few days, I will attend ‘topping out’ ceremonies both in East Ham and Manor Park. When they are completed together these two schemes, that Newham Council is part of, will deliver more than 1,056 affordable homes and a further 25 low cost shared ownership homes, with residents expected to move into the first 110 of these by the end of this year.
But building new homes alone isn’t the solution for Newham, as the sheer scale of the housing crisis affecting the whole of London means that we can’t build our way out of the crisis – the homes simply won’t be delivered fast enough. We know that local government, across the UK, has spent around £1bn, since 2018, on hotels to meet their temporary accommodation statutory obligations.
That is why I particularly hail the announcement of the Renters’ Rights Bill, which will finally introduce an end to “no fault” evictions, a measure which has been long promised but never delivered.
It will have an immediate and dramatic effect on the number of hard working families who are made homeless as it is this, alongside the rising cost of living, which has contributed to a 16% increase in homelessness in Newham in just the last year. This has, in turn, led to an unprecedented rise in the number of households in temporary accommodation in our borough.
In 2013/2014 Newham had just 2,877 households in this situation, a figure which has grown to 6,685 in the current year. This is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue, and one which Newham must work closely with others across both local and national government to solve.
