77% Failure Rate!
You know, we said it, but didn’t expect the mayor to confirm it in such a clear and blatant manner. We have reported upon the mayor’s failure to meet the housing targets that she set herself. Here we have it, albeit with the spin we would expect, in her own words.
It takes some hubris to take a total failure to achieve your target and then spin it as success. But as we say, that’s politics for you.
Here’s the Pledge
The key word is right at the start of the sentence. “BUILD”. Not “plan”, not “approve”, not “start”, but “BUILD”.
And BUILD 1000 new council homes.
Here’s what she is saying after a dose of reality has set in.
The “Mayor’s commitment” has changed, from “BUILD” to “start building”.
The arithmetic is a bit suspect also. In the report below in the December 2021 issue of the Newham Mag it seems that 229 homes are under construction and 441 that either have or will have planning permission by the end of March 2022. This somehow equals 1000.
670 DOES NOT EQUAL 1000.
Indeed, 670 does not actually equal 670.
229 homes have actually been started, we don’t know how many will have been completed, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume all 229 are complete by the end of March 2022. The Mayor has missed her target by 77%!
There is one more subtle adjustment on the wording that readers may have missed. In the Mayor’s Pledge, it was to build COUNCIL Homes. This is an important factor for Labour’s lefty activists. Council homes are let at roughly 60% of the market rate. This is no small matter if you are on a low or fixed income. Generally, these are referred to as ‘social rents’. In the text of the magazine article, ‘social rents’ have become “affordable rents”. Affordable rents are an unloved Tory invention which operate at roughly 80% of the local market rent, (with a view to moving over time towards parity with the market rent). Eighty percent is better than 100% but significantly more expensive than council, or ‘social’ rents.
Build 1000 new council homes. FAIL
Rent at social rents. FAIL
Get developers to build 50% of new housing as council homes for rent at social rent. We don’t have the full set of figures but extrapolating from the figures we do have, this again is a FAIL.
In what universe is such a failure rate, “the most ambitious” housing programme in London? This is a gross failure and she doesn’t even have the guts to admit it. Better to spin it and hope that no-one notices. Well, we noticed.