The overall strategy

INTRODUCTION

On the face of it London is booming. The nation’s economic engine has been growing at its fastest rate over the past 30 years. With cranes on the skyline and construction trucks on the roads, high-density, high-cost apartments have been built across 47 Opportunity Areas and 600 more towers are in the pipeline. 

But people on the ground know that something is wrong. We have not built the genuinely affordable homes needed by a population that has been encouraged to grow by over 40% since 1990. With the population now at 9.7 million, only one large new park has been created. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, including the loss of 300,000 council homes through Right to Buy and the council estate demolition programme. 60,000 families are in temporary accommodation including 70,000 children, with 300,000 households on the boroughs’ waiting lists. 

As the price of housing has risen to eye-watering levels, London has been hollowed out and no longer has a range of land uses for businesses and employment, nor a diversity of homes for all. Less expensive housing is forced outwards, requiring hours of travel time for workers. Vital services like libraries, doctors surgeries and youth centres are stripped down and community spaces disappear. There is less and less care for poorer Londoners.

Solutions in OUR MANIFESTO

PROPOSALS TO GOVERNMENT AND MAYOR

1. Stabilise growth: GDP growth is simplistic, amplifies inequalities and entails increasing carbon emissions. Measure a wider range of values (set out in this Manifesto) to pursue for human well-being such as health, biodiversity, care and community
2. Replace Council Tax with a more progressive property tax to generate revenues for councils, initially by adding more bands
3. Aggregate financial gains from development and land value at a metropolitan scale, sharing them among Opportunity Areas
4. Introduce Land Value Taxation in the longer term
5. Change property value tax, housing inheritance tax, capital gains tax, to discourage treatment of housing as a wealth generator
6. Damp down developer, shareholder, investor expectations to put land prices on a stable or downward trajectory
7. Lower the level of profit expected by developers
8. Large public land holdings should provide 100% not-for-profit housing 
9. Public investment in a new model of housing development which does not rely on developing high end housing
10. Long-term and secure tenancies to enable household well-being and stable communities