The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has demanded urgent
action from the Housing Secretary as new figures show the Government is holding
up the delivery of new homes in London by leaving housebuilders in the dark
about impending new fire safety requirements.
Ministers first proposed rules requiring a second
staircase in new tall buildings in December last year in response to the
Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.
In a speech in July, the Housing Secretary, Michael
Gove, committed to this major change for new blocks over 18 metres tall - about
six storeys - and promised a transition period that would ensure “there is no
disruption to housing supply”.
However, new data from City Hall reveals there are
now 34,000 homes on major developments being held up due to a lack of clarity
from the Government on these new fire safety requirements. This figure only
includes the biggest developments (those that require Mayoral planning sign
off), meaning thousands more homes will also be affected on other smaller
developments across the capital. With construction costs rapidly rising and
developers already warning they could be forced to down tools [1], this delay
from the Government could cause some schemes to be abandoned altogether.
The Mayor has used his London Plan and funding
programmes to go further than the national building regulations with a push
towards greater building safety, for example requiring sprinklers, and a
complete ban on combustible cladding on all new homes.
Local authorities and housing developers currently have
no guidance on what the promised ‘transition period’ will cover, nor have they
been informed what technical requirements they will need to meet to satisfy new
rules – for example, whether the two staircases will need to be entirely
separate or whether they can be contained within the same building core.
This lack of clarity from the Government comes at an
already challenging time for housebuilding across the country. The Mayor wrote
to Michael Gove last month warning that housing experts are forecasting a major
drop in housebuilding driven by high interest rates and building cost
inflation, which could see housebuilding across England fall to the lowest
level since the Second World War. [2]
It could also put the capital’s housebuilding boom,
which has been growing ever since Sadiq became Mayor in 2016, at risk. In
recent years, City Hall has completed more homes of all types than at any time
since the 1930s, built more council homes than at any time since the 1970s, and
exceeded its ambitious target of building 116,000 new genuinely affordable
homes in the capital by the end of the last financial year.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “While I
strongly support the highest fire safety standards for new buildings, the
chaotic way these new rules are being put in place by the Government is now
holding up the delivery of thousands of homes across the capital.
“We’ve made huge progress in London since 2016 – building more
new council homes that at any time since the 1970s - but we still have a long
way to go to fix the housing crisis. We simply can’t afford this
confusion caused by the Government to slow down crucial housing delivery in our
city.
“Ministers must cut through this bureaucratic dither
and delay to urgently bring clarity on these new fire safety rules. This should
be done alongside the other steps we know are needed to help fix our housing
crisis, including investing the £4.9bn a year the capital needs to meet the
demand for new, high quality genuinely affordable homes.”
Stephanie Pollitt, Program Director for Housing at
BusinessLDN, said: “Building more residential developments at pace is
vital to combat London’s housing crisis. The Government must provide urgent
clarity on building regulations– including the requirements for second
staircases – to enable developers to build the homes that Londoners need.
Providing this certainty is critical to help the industry deliver high-quality
and well-designed homes that meet the highest safety standards.”
