Evening Standard comment: A new plan to solve the capital’s housing crunch

 
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The Chancellor’s Budget move to give London’s Mayor more development powers for housing is an important concession.

Despite making promises on affordable housing in 2008, Boris Johnson has been hamstrung by City Hall’s limited powers. These were expanded in 2012, but major housing projects remain stuck in the pipeline.

With the city’s population growing by around 100,000 a year, housing has emerged as perhaps the biggest single challenge facing the capital. The new powers could speed up development on more than 50 riverside wharves currently governed by Whitehall regulations, allowing City Hall to negotiate for new developments.

At the same time, the Chancellor is promising a £97 million downpayment for a new station at Brent Cross, a major redevelopment area highlighted in his National Infrastructure Plan with last December’s Autumn Statement. It could help start construction of 7,500 homes. Another £7 million will go to the Croydon growth zone, aiming to create 4,000 homes. A further £1 million will fund the new London Land Commission to help create a “Domesday Book” of surplus public-sector land and brownfield sites for redevelopment.

These are welcome initiatives. Much attention has been focused on the impact on housing stock of foreign buyers but in truth that impact remains relatively limited and mostly at the top of the market.

The only way out of the housing crisis is to increase housebuilding radically: just 18,700 new homes were completed last year; City observers believe we need to build at least 50,000 a year. Building on unused wharves could be part of the solution.

Whipps Cross in crisis

Today’s Care Quality Commission report on Whipps Cross hospital in Leytonstone is about as damning an indictment as could be imagined.

The hospital, part of Barts Health since 2013, is rated inadequate and unsafe, with a string of shocking failings including the death of two unborn babies and a new mother and a child soon after birth, among 208 serious incidents last year.

Some patients were left without pain relief or food and water for more than 10 hours. Barts’ three most senior executives — its chairman, chief executive and chief nurse — have all announced their resignations prior to the report’s release and a “hit squad” has been ordered into the hospital.

The report raises hard questions about the viability of such large NHS trusts: Barts is the nation’s largest. Formed from the merger of six east London hospitals, it resulted in senior managers being distant from front-line staff — and not listening to them.

The trust has the highest deficit in England at £93 million, leading management to slash 220 posts and downgrade hundreds of nurses. Combined with a culture of bullying, the result has been low morale, high vacancy rates and poor care.

This should be a lesson of the danger of deep NHS cuts — but also of the risks involved when hospital mergers lead to vast, unwieldy bureaucracies. If Barts Health Trust is now broken up, that could well lead to better care for patients.

Lifeboat at the ready

It is little known that the Tower RNLI lifeboat station, by Waterloo Bridge, saves more lives than any other station in the British Isles: last year the lifeboat was launched 543 times and saved 16 lives. Yet few Londoners are aware it even exists.

Perhaps this will change after last’s night rescue by an RNLI lifeboat crew of three men at risk of drowning in the icy Thames. It was an episode that showed real heroism — but for a lifeboat crew it was business as usual.

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