A half-baked strategy

Now that Ken Livingstone has been re-elected mayor of London, I wonder when he plans to roll out his new affordable housing policy.

I was very surprised to read about this new policy in Livingstone’s election statement, distributed to all households in London a week before the election. It said: “We have introduced new planning rules so that developers now have to make half of all new houses affordable to first-time buyers.”

This is clearly good news for first-time buyers and the housebuilding industry will be delighted that it will no longer be required to provide social rented housing.

Presumably, the mayor is planning to make all these new first-time homes so affordable that even the thousands of people on council waiting lists can afford to buy them too.