House building in east London must increase admit MPs

05 December 2007

The Government has admitted that house building in east London, part of the Thames Gateway, ‘must increase significantly’ if the strategy to turn around the regeneration area is to be successful.

The admission came as the Government announced £144M in funding for local transport projects in the Thames Gateway, stretching 40 miles along the Thames Estuary, from Canary Wharf to Southend in Essex, and Sittingbourne in Kent.

This included £59M for the London section. Since 2004/05, in not one year have house-building targets set in the London plan – requiring the construction of 91,000, or around 7,500 per annum – been built.

Last year, only slightly above 3,000 were completed. A review has now been ordered to produce a strategy for accelerating completions, which will identify obstacles to increasing house building – which could include the need for investment in transport and other infrastructure.

London mayor, Ken Livingstone, publishing his own Thames Gateway prospectus, claimed that the ‘unprecedented’ public investment was ‘a firm foundation for spreading London’s success eastwards’. The £59M in funding for local transport for the three years up to 2010/11 would allow the delivery of ‘a fast, frequent and reliable transit service for the Barking Riverside area’, where 11,000 homes are proposed for London’s largest housing development.

But there were no new commitments on spending on flood defences in the Thames Gateway Delivery Plan, besides £50M planned spending on the maintenance of existing defences. The document stated that research carried out for the Environment Agency to consider what defences would be needed over the next 100 years ‘suggests that existing defences are effective’.

Defences were designed ‘to higher standards than we thought’. Final proposals would, however, be produced by the end of next year, and, following consultation, submitted to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in 2009/10.

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