First Small Builder Site for New Homes Approved in London

The first site in the Mayor of London’s small sites for small builders programme has been given the go-ahead in Barnet where 50% of the homes will be affordable. Barnet Council’s planning committee decision means that Beechwood Avenue will deliver 97 homes with work on the site expected to start by the end of this year. London’s home building sector is dominated by a small number of large developers that build the vast majority of homes across the capital while the number of small builders that deliver fewer than 100 homes has halved over the last 10 years.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said that he wants to make small plots of publicly owned land more accessible to London’s small and medium-sized builders, including community-led housing groups, through a simple bidding process with standardised legal contracts. Ten small TfL sites located across seven different boroughs were launched in February last year as part of the pilot These sites contribute towards the Mayor’s target for 50% of affordable housing across developments on public land.

There was significant interest in the pilot, with 134 bids received from 80 organisations ranging from developers and community-led housing organisations to registered providers and architect developers. Many of the bids proposed more units than TfL had forecast. Small Sites, Small Builders is a £13.4 million initiative of the London Economic Action Partnership and the Mayor of London. Last June, the Mayor announced an extra £3.8 million of funding for the programme, and further investment over the next four years. TfL will continue to bring forward and advertise small sites on a rolling basis, with boroughs and other public landholders encouraged to take part.

Since becoming Mayor, Khan has worked with his transport agency to accelerate the release of its available land for housing development. TfL has the team, sites and programme in place to provide a long term development pipeline, delivering an initial programme of 10,000 homes across 300 acres, with a target to start on the sites that will deliver these 10,000 homes by 2021.

TfL has already submitted planning applications for more than 4,200 homes and since May 2016, some 50% of its sites have been affordable. ‘It is great to see Beechwood Avenue get the green light, helping to deliver a range of much needed genuinely affordable homes in Barnet,’ said James Murray, deputy Mayor for housing and residential development said.

‘The fantastic response to the Mayor’s Small Sites, Small Builders programme has shown that using these plots of public land is an effective way to get new genuinely affordable homes built, and to reinvigorate our small and medium sized home builders after years of over-reliance on large developers,’ he added. Graeme Craig, director of commercial development at Transport for London, said it has a key role to play in unlocking our land to support the Mayor’s ambitions to create thousands of new homes for Londoners.

Some 35 of the 97 homes will be genuinely affordable. Due to the larger size of many of these 35 homes, this equates to 50% affordable across the scheme using Barnet’s habitable rooms methodology with 454 habitable rooms and 227 affordable. Out of these, 20 will be Shared Ownership, and 15 will be affordable homes for rent including those at social rent levels.

Author: propertywire.com