This article is signed by CPRE London and first appeared on their website. CPRE London is a regional branch of the national charity Campaign to Protect Rural England. The branch works to promote London’s green spaces and liveability for Londoners. We believe: ‘To save the countryside you have to save the city’ – Harley Sherlock, architect and past CPRE London president.
Charity CPRE London has called for people to be put back at the centre of housing delivery, in response to the Mayor’s draft housing strategy.
CPRE London’s Campaign for a Liveable London is a two-year campaign seeking people-centered solutions to London’s housing crisis. The campaign has been consulting with community and practitioner groups, as well as policy makers and housing experts, to help define what we mean by ‘neighbourhood liveability‘ and we are conducting twelve surveys of housing developments across London to review liveability in practice. The early research findings point to three issues that CPRE London argues need to be strengthened in the Mayor’s draft London Housing strategy:
- Neighbourhood inclusion and wellbeing – stimulating community ownership through greater investment in community facilitators, community-led governance and participatory budgeting arrangements.
- Devolving local powers – joined-up planning and community assets, housing choice, unlocking previously developed and stalled sites, re-purposing suburbs, and land reporting.
- Finance and quality of affordable homes – stimulating alternative and longer-term investment models, factoring in on-going maintenance costs, and creating a housing ‘liveability league table’.
Cutting across all these issues is the need to put people back at the centre of the housing strategy. Addressing housing needs requires targeted commitment and investment, working with local people to understand their needs and the best ways to deliver it, in active partnership with Londoners.
As the draft London Housing strategy states we need to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and not simply focusing on a ‘numbers game’ of building more houses, this means focusing on the process of identifying who the new homes are for, where they are best placed and how they will best contribute to ‘neighbourhood liveability’over time.
A full copy of the response is available here: Make London Housing for Londoners