Government pledges £200m for new houses in London

The Prime Minister has criticised the London Mayor over the number of homes being built in the Capital.

Speaking to us at a housing development site in Hayes, Rishi Sunak said;

"I'm really pleased the government is on track to deliver it's manifesto commitment of a million new homes over this parliament, that's great news, but I don't want to stop there because I want everyone to be able to fulfil that dream of owning their own home, but it's important that we build homes in the right places and don't concrete over the countryside.

The Government is announcing £200 million more for London to do brownfield development, we're also investing more in the planning system to speed it up and bust through the backlog and we're making it easier for people to expand homes outwards, upwards or convert other properties into housing, so taken together it's a really concerted effort to go beyond our million homes target which we are on track to deliver.

You look at what is going on in London where Sadiq Khan is building around half of the homes that he himself says he needs to build and if you look at home ownership for the last year that we have figures for it, we had the the largest number of people owning their own home for 20 years give or take, those are the facts.

I'm very confident in our record and I said we are on track to deliver a million homes over this parliament, that's a big number, but we need to do more, we've got to do more. The Labour party's approach is just to concrete over the countryside."

In response Mr Khan described the criticism as "desperate nonsense" and said his tenure as mayor has seen the most homes built since the 1930s.

Mr Khan in May hailed his record on housing delivery, as he pointed to progress in surpassing the target of starting 116,000 affordable homes in London between 2015 and 2023.

A spokesperson for the Mayor of London said: "These disappointing and disingenuous claims appear to show a fundamental lack of understanding of housebuilding in London.

"The mayor delivered record numbers of affordable homes over the last six years, consistently exceeding Government targets despite the impact of the pandemic and Brexit. This has included starting more council homes than at any time since the 1970s.

"The mayor's London Plan was approved by the Government in 2021 and the ministers should know that the housing figures included within it are reliant on sufficient Government investment being made in infrastructure, particularly transport."

The Government said it would look at the prioritisation of sites chosen for housebuilding in London, with the aim of putting more focus on central sites close to Tube stations.

Michael Gove will work with the Labour mayor to accelerate residential development on inner city brownfield sites, the Government said, with the Housing Secretary reserving the right to directly intervene if progress has not been made by the autumn.

First for all the latest news from across the UK every hour on Hits Radio on DAB, at hitsradio.co.uk and on the Hits Radio app.