The original question and reply.Q: “It’s great that you’re building what you call homes and houses, but they’re not. They’re not the everyday homes and houses that everybody should have, with a little bit of garden and a little bit of space.“They’re all these huge flats, 14 storeys, 20 storeys, 26 storeys, which you want to build here, in places that don’t need those flats. We need homes, we need houses, we need to be able to meld the area to be the same and not have this odd [block of] flat[s] here and there.”A: Mr Khan said: “We now have as a requirement in relation to the London Plan [a mayoral policy document], that when it comes to homes being built, they need to build in amenity space.“We also require councils to carry out an assessment of the amount of family homes that are needed - that’s not just the one-bedroom and the two-bedroom, which you often see in the big [blocks of] flats, but also three bedrooms and four bedrooms as well.”He added that City Hall was supporting developers to build family-sized homes with decent outdoor space, but the government’s grant system did not provide sufficient incentives for developers to build homes rather than flats.“That’s why we need to work on the government to make sure the grant system works better,” he said, adding that his administration was building “record numbers of all-size homes”.
Julian Pavey ● 416d