Elements Europe’s Managing Director Simon Underwood was invited to join forces with a diverse Group of Stakeholders involved in delivering housing throughout London to take part in the Mayor’s public consultation for the new London Housing Strategy.

In recent decades, London has excelled at creating jobs and opportunities, yet has failed to meet the demand for new homes. Now a generation of Londoners cannot afford their rent and many are forced to live in overcrowded or unsuitable conditions. For many in this generation, home ownership is a distant dream.

The aim of the new Strategy is to address the housing shortage through an intensive use of London’s available land, focusing on more genuinely affordable housing and providing help now for people feeling the effects of the housing crisis – from private renters to rough sleepers.

This Strategy has five key areas:
• Building more homes for Londoners
• Delivering genuinely affordable homes
• High quality homes and inclusive neighbourhoods
• A fairer deal for private renters and leaseholders
• Tackling homelessness and helping rough sleepers

Deputy Mayor for Housing and Residential Development, James Murray, confirmed that one of the solutions could be the Mayor’s support to increase output by delivering safe, good quality and environmentally sustainable homes through Modern Methods of Construction.

Particularly pleasing to hear was the Deputy Mayors use of the words ‘precision engineering’ when it came to talk about offsite solutions.

A key priority of the strategy is to improve the skills, capacity and building methods of the industry and involves proposals to address the construction skills gap and increase the proportion of London’s homes built with precision manufactured components. Promoting this through the Affordable Homes Programme, the Mayor is calling for quicker, more cost effective and safer methods of building, which will be an essential part of tackling the housing crisis.

Simon Underwood suggested that companies like Elements Europe can play a key role in delivery of the Strategy.

“The Mayor now has the opportunity to make London the world’s leader in quality housing provision supported by offsite manufactured precision engineered housing, whilst creating a sustainable future by establishing a Construction Academy Scheme to ensure there are enough people with the construction skills that London needs.” Commented Simon Underwood, Managing Director at Elements Europe.

Please help us support making London’s housing strategy a reality by suggesting how we as an industry can help the deliver the strategy by responding to the draft strategy:
https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/housing-and-land/have-your-say-tackling-londons-housing-crisis