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Affordable Housing

The hon. Lady misunderstands my point. I am referring to people who are not currently in social housing and are generally in lower paid jobs and who simply cannot afford private sector rents. There is a big gap between those with access to social housing in London and those who are able to afford private sector housing for rent. I wanted to address those people specifically. Imperial Wharf in my constituency has been cited as a model by many who are promoting the idea of imposing a blanket rule of 50 per cent. social housing for rent across London and the rest of the country. Imperial Wharf is the largest residential housing development in west London in the past 10 years or so, with 2,200 to 2,300 homes. It was the first large development, as far as I am aware, that had a 50 per cent. requirement imposed on it by the council through the developer, St. George. It was approved in 1999 and is now nearing completion. It is a good time to review the nature of the Imperial Wharf development. I think that the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone, has been to visit it, as have various Government Ministers. Imperial Wharf has been a terrible example of what can go wrong as a result of imposing an arbitrary 50 per cent rule. The prices of the 50 per cent. of houses in the private sector are incredibly high. It has been marketed as London’s biggest affordable housing development, but private sector homes have been on the market for between £500,000 and £1.25 million. That part of the development fails in terms of affordability. I have visited a large shared ownership development for key workers called Mallard House a few times. It was featured in the Evening Standard a couple of years ago as Britain’s most expensive shared ownership scheme; I cannot remember the exact prices but they were in excess of £300,000. The newspaper went door to door trying to find out who lived in this ““key worker”” housing unit. A total of three people in the 80 units could in any way be defined as key workers. The development simply has not been a success, because the shared ownership has been made far too expensive.