A better housed London

We commit to:

1. Make available to the Mayor of London personal testimony, community case studies and all the information they need to prevent ever-rising rents and house-prices from creating “Kosovo-style social cleansing” within London’s housing market.
2. Organise local residents across the city to find creative solutions to the challenges of over-crowding and poor conditions, so that the places in which we live can remain as vibrant and mixed communities, with productive and accountable relationships between landlords, residents and neighbours.
3. Ensure that the excitement and energy of this summer’s Olympic Games is carried through into the legacy and that the local community are at the heart of all regeneration efforts for that part of east London.
4. Approach landowners across the city (churches; voluntary organisations; philanthropic landowners; Local Authorities and Health Trusts) to donate land to the Citizens Community Land Trust to support our aim of providing permanently affordable family housing, to buy and to rent, for families with incomes between £15,000 and £30,000 per annum.

We ask you to:

1. Agree that London is a special case for housing and therefore pledge to define with us, and in conjunction with local authorities, what a London ‘Affordable Rent’ definition might be. This definition should be based on the income of Londoners, not on the current market rates and will be published annually through the GLA.
2. Work with us to help create a city-wide London Living Homes Standard, so as to ensure that all landlords – public or private – are registered with either the Greater London Authority or their borough, and that issues around damp, repairs, overcrowding, security of tenure and space standards can be overcome through a proper relationship between landlords, residents and their local communities.
3. Use your new powers, as head of the new Mayoral Development Corporation, to create a network of Community Land Trusts across the city, by identifying and making available at least one site in north, south, east and west London over the next four years, and one site on each of the five Olympic Legacy Park neighbourhoods, starting with a public commitment that at least 100 of the first 800 houses built at Chobham Manor will be Community Land Trust homes.