Overcrowding has been a significant issue in London for many years. According to figures by the 4in10 campaign, around 120,000 households live in overcrowded conditions in social housing alone, including 70,000 children.
Overcrowding can have a serious impact on health and wellbeing, especially for children. It can spread diseases more quickly, lead to sleep disturbance and cause additional stress.
Two years ago I led a major review on behalf of the London Assembly, called Crowded Houses, which found that over 200,000 of London's families were living in overcrowded homes across all tenures, and that this had increased by a third in 10 years. Following this, mayor Boris Johnson set up the London overcrowding board with a particular focus on severe overcrowding, which means those homes that have at least two rooms fewer than they need.
This was the first time a serious effort was made to tackle overcrowding in London and has made some good progress to date. But ultimately the key to tackling overcrowding is in improving our housing supply – making sure we build more family homes and providing more opportunities for under occupiers to downsize. We also need to make sure that the new homes we do build will not make the problem worse, for example by building too many one bedroom flats.
Ideally, every single new affordable home would be family-sized. But realistically this is very unlikely to happen, so we have to look at how we can free up family homes in other ways. One way we could do this is through the planning system.
For all significant new housing developments in London, when developers apply for planning permission, they should be required to demonstrate how the new homes they want to build will help address overcrowding in London. We could call this the overcrowding test.
An overcrowding test will enable local planning authorities to assess whether a particular scheme will make a contribution to dealing with overcrowding, or whether it will make it worse. For example, including a large proportion of family-sized homes would be one way to meet this test. But if that is not possible, the developer should at least have to show how some of the smaller homes will help people in larger homes to downsize.
We already know of at least one example where this approach can work. This week, in a London Assembly meeting on overcrowding, we heard about the Dickens Yard development in Ealing, where 70 new flats have been specifically reserved for people who were downsizing from under-occupied family homes. We know this can be done and if it happened everywhere it could make a significant impact on tackling overcrowding.
Tackling overcrowding would make a huge difference to many thousands of lives in London. Introducing an overcrowding test could help achieve this.