The man in charge of tackling the housing crisis admits: I had to use the bank of mum and dad

Housing challenge: James Murray
Nigel Howard
Pippa Crerar25 August 2016

Of all the people in Sadiq Khan’s new team at City Hall, James Murray is under the most pressure to deliver. As deputy mayor for housing, the fresh-faced former Islington councillor has got the task of tackling the housing crisis on his watch. Expectations are high.

Mr Khan declared the mayoral race “a referendum on housing” and vowed that building thousands more affordable homes was his priority.

But the softly spoken Londoner does not seem fazed by the scale of the task ahead. “We’re going to work flat out every day. If you have a daunting prospect it’s not my style to sit back and do nothing, it’s my style to get on with it.”

Since starting in the role almost four months ago, Mr Murray has become deft at expectation management. “It’s clearly going to take time to turn things round. We need to be honest with Londoners and say we’re not going to fix the housing crisis overnight.”

He has already ruffled feathers by saying Mr Khan’s plan for 50 per cent of all new homes to be affordable was always just a “long-term strategic target”. But he denies he is back-pedalling on the Mayor’s commitments. “Having that target as a long-term goal means we’re very clear about the direction we’re headed in. We’re ambitious and practical about how we’re going to move towards that,” he said.

He admits that the uncertainty caused by Brexit is one of his biggest challenges. “We’ve started and will continue to give the industry as much certainty as possible.”

Mr Murray, 33, has first-hand experience of how hard it is to get onto the property ladder, admitting that he was only able to buy his two-bedroom flat in Islington in 2008 with help from “the bank of mum and dad”. “You can see year by year it getting much, much harder for people. Even people on very good incomes now are feeling it getting further and further out of reach.”

Previously he rented. “It has got so much worse. When I see people just a few years younger than me trying to rent now it’s so much harder.”

His answer to soaring house prices — up by more than 12 per cent in the year to June — is to build more homes, though he admits that alone will not be enough. “We need to make sure we’re building the right sort of homes.”

He is focusing on a range of tenures, from social housing to shared ownership, primarily to support first-time buyers, while working up the Mayor’s plans for a London Living Rent, capped at a third of average local incomes, though it is unclear how this would work without government support.

Like his boss, Mr Murray shies away from committing to a numerical target. Mr Khan regularly claimed he would be best placed to deliver the 50,000 homes a year the capital needs, but stopped just short of promising to do so.

When he appointed Mr Murray as deputy mayor, many developers across London were twitchy. During his time running housing at Islington he pioneered policies which were seen as aggressive towards developers. But Mr Murray has spent the past few months trying to put their minds at ease. He blushes when described as the Mayor’s “bright young star” but agrees the appointment of the well-respected Jules Pipe as deputy mayor for planning has helped.

“What has been really important to me is to make really clear in public and through my actions that we want to work with everyone in London who has a stake in building homes for Londoners,” he said.

Yet he did not rule out a London-wide version of his policy of fines for empty properties, simply saying: “We need to make sure that any action we take is done in a way which recognises… pressures on industry.”

Mr Murray insisted the Mayor would live up to his promise never to build on the green belt, focusing on brownfield sites instead.

He has already ordered Transport for London to line up sites, some of which may be sold at less than market value, and is lobbying government for control of other public land.

Despite his gentle demeanour Mr Murray is clearly unafraid to play hardball with the more reluctant boroughs, notably Conservative-run Bromley, to build more homes.

“We do need to be clear that we do expect everyone to play their part,” he said.

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