In the post pandemic world, how is City Hall ensuring London’s homes are designed to meet the changing needs of Londoners?

Ensuring everyone in our city has a decent, safe place to call home remains a top priority for me and my team. The only way to achieve this is to continue to build the homes Londoners need. My London Plan continues to provide a robust framework for sustainable and inclusive development in our city. This framework enables us to ensure we can deliver new homes in London that are designed to meet the changing and diverse needs of Londoners.

The Draft Housing Design Standards London Plan Guidance (LPG) sets out a number of standards to improve the quality of homes being built across London. This includes encouraging new development to provide more space for home working and to provide high-quality communal outside space that is accessible to all residents, regardless of tenure. Consultation on the draft Guidance has now closed and a final version will be published later in the year.

In November 2021, I also published the Draft Delivering Quality Homes Handbook. This document details 50 actions that housing delivery organisations can take to achieve a good standard of quality management practices and delivery of good quality homes. These actions can be applied to all homes of all types and tenures, ensuring we are continuing to address the wide-ranging needs of all Londoners.

Thank you very much, Mr Mayor. Although consultation has officially closed, it was a privilege to chair my first Planning and Regeneration Committee yesterday, discussing exactly this. The team at the GLA were there present, taking on the feedback of the guests that we had. That was a really effective and dynamic way of doing more community outreach, as well as seeing live a manifestation of how the guidance has changed and improved. That sets best practice and high standards in London about how we continue to evolve our design standards.

One thing that I wanted to particularly hone in on and ask for some thoughts from you on is how this guidance works to encourage a more equal London through accessible and shared amenities and tackling poor doors.

Yes, some of us will have seen a couple of years ago homes being opened with swimming pools that only some people could use or playgrounds in recent years which only some residents can use, and we are trying to move away that. We want quality that is tenure-blind. Everyone should have good quality homes. We want non-residential amenities accessible to all living in a development. We want the public realm and community spaces accessible and available to everyone living in a development and that is the quid pro quo if you want permission to build what you want to build. What we do not want is this sort of poor doors segregation that has existed for too long by allowing a laissez-fair approach towards development. I tell you this. The residents in the nicer parts of a development welcome it as well because they do not want to be cut off from their community. They want to be part of vibrant London and that is why they choose to live in vibrant London. We are hoping this leads to better facilities, better homes, better communities and it has been well received.

Good. I am really pleased to hear that. Particularly post-pandemic or during the pandemic, the importance of our neighbours and our community was so important to people. We realised that actually your neighbour’s health is your health and having that interconnectivity as a lifeline. That cultural change, pushback on any kind of ‘poor doors’ that developers might want to put into developments, is essential. Building on that point in terms of how the pandemic changed people’s perception of their areas and their neighbourhoods, how does your Guidance help maintain, particularly when it comes to building on small sites, an area to retain its local character so that as London’s development continues, you can still have neighbourhoods feeling organically like home?

This is one of the areas where we have deliberately not had a command and control from the centre. Look, I do not know the particular neighbourhoods in Lewisham as well as you do or the Council does, or another part of the city. We are encouraging councils to make sure that they understand their communities and preserve the heritage that they know best. Of course, that is not anti-development. That is having development that is conducive to the environment. We have made sure that we devolve as much autonomy to communities as we can. You will have seen some of the Local Plans which recognise what a council knows about its community in relation to, for example, where a tall building goes. It should only go in a designated place that the Council has deemed appropriate for a tall building. Simply preserving the heritage of a park or a community facility is really, really important. Hopefully you will see over the course of the next two/three years, as the London Plan has bedded in, we have more Supplementary Planning Guidance (SPG) and additional Guidance, more developments that respect the heritage of an area but also are not scared to develop and progress.

Absolutely. When I think of the 2021 London Plan, for me the thing that I feel particularly proud of about it is that it encourages that design-led approach and that gives us the capacity to continue ensuring that we design the best city in the world. Thank you very much for your thoughts this afternoon.