Solicitors and PFI builders 'qualify as key workers'

Nobody can describe what a key worker looks like, but people tend to recognise them when they see them. Or rather, when they hear their job title: teachers, nurses and police officers spring to mind first.

But one housing association is now bidding to extend the definition of key workers to include "solicitors acting principally for housing associations", actors and private finance initiative contractors.

London-based Threshold Key Homes has marketed shared-ownership properties in a development in Battersea, south-west London, as suitable for a wider range of "key workers" than is usual.

Threshold – which specialises in low-cost homeownership, and is a subsidiary of Threshold Housing and Support – is looking for applicants to fill its 166 flats at Berkeley Homes' prestigious Chelsea Bridge Wharf development in Wandsworth.

Roughly 112 of these flats are expected to be available to conventional key workers – nurses, teachers and firefighters among them – for shared ownership at 40%, or less, of their £200,000 open market value.

However, the remaining 54 flats are being offered for sale at 90% of market value. These have been pitched at a more liberally defined group of key workers – a category that includes "workers at private-sector companies that principally provide public services", according to marketing material.

The scheme, parts of which are due for completion in October, has been developed without public grant. Threshold predicts that at least 25% of the development will be affordable housing, although that figure is understood to be subject to increase.

Michael Connor, Threshold's key homes manager, said that the financing of the scheme depended on some flats being sold at a higher price. "The more expensive flats will help pay for those sold at 40% of their market value," said Connor. "Because the more expensive flats are beyond the reach of most traditional key workers, we are having to cast our net wider than usual."

However, a spokesperson for the GLA, said the scheme ignored the demand for intermediate housing in London and did not include the best mix of tenures.

"People would have to be earning around £50,000 a year before they could afford the more expensive flats," she said.

In its draft London Plan, launched in June last year, the GLA defined affordable housing as comprising both social and intermediate housing, with people earning between £15,000 and £35,000 identified as those most in need of intermediate housing.

A spokesperson for Wandsworth council said it had not been involved in deciding who would be eligible to live at the scheme.