TfL’s property development drive must benefit Londoners

The announcement by Transport for London (TfL) that it is set to formalise joint ventures with large luxury housing developers, handing over development of up to 50 prime sites in London all overseen by a small group of non-executive ‘experts’ raises a number of major concerns, and this is just phase one. Other sites, including Harrow-on-the-Hill station in my constituency, are also being lined up for similar schemes. My constituency, like other parts of London does not need luxury housing, it needs community housing which Harrow residents on average incomes can afford to buy or rent. It underlines both the need for significant reform of TfL, and how broken the London housing market is.

In the short term Transport for London need to explain in more detail their plans for the housing they intend to allow to be built on the sites they’ve identified. What are their plans for the mix of housing, will there be any let at social rent levels and will any be for sale at genuinely affordable rates. In turn, will the developers be allowed to market these properties outside of the UK and indeed outside of London. One further concern is whether Transport for London will use its clout to ensure high standards of employment practice by the contractor companies with which it works. Will they, for example, ensure that zero hour contracts are avoided? In their panel of non-executive experts will there be any with social or community housing experience? And who will these ‘experts’ be answerable to?

While the ambition of raising additional revenue to supplement fares income and government funding is admirable, it is far from clear how TfL’s plans will fit in with the need to tackle London’s housing crisis and the particular shortage of genuinely affordable property for sale to local people, and for renting at social rent levels.

The first TfL joint venture at Earls Court does not give grounds for optimism, with not one affordable home out of the 1300 planned for the site. It is difficult to see how TfL’s future plans fit in even with the current Mayor’s weak housing strategy.

A different more imaginative Mayor interested in social housing and willing to make TfL more accountable would have come up with very different proposals. Some of these sites could have been allocated to a Mayoral Housing Company and used to build affordable housing for sale or rent; while still enabling a return to future TfL budgets. Transport for London’s land is a hugely important resource for building homes for social rent or genuinely affordable homes for sale, and the use of this land needs to be part of a joined-up response to London’s housing crisis. The current Mayor should have made this clear to TfL’s property management team when their property strategy was being drawn up.

This decision also underlines why TfL’s customers need to be given greater power over the direction of what is London’s least accountable quango. Many of those who travel on the tube and buses will need or know someone who needs better, more affordable housing. If management had to answer to these customers more regularly, perhaps different choices of developer with different aims for the type of housing built might have been chosen. Maybe ordinary commuters wouldn’t have been quite so keen to give away control over such key public assets to a few big companies without much stronger guarantees about the quality and mix of housing on those sites. Maybe even some co-op housing of the quality found down at the Oxo Tower on the South Bank could have been envisaged.

TfL needs to allow London’s tube, rail, bus and car commuters to ‘join’ their decision making process, and be given real say and real power. Mutualising TfL to open up decision-making and make its management much more accountable to London residents is a key reform the next Mayor could deliver.

I suspect a reformed TfL would be much less likely to give away its top assets and a little more likely to want the wider needs of ordinary Londoners, particularly their housing, to be given more priority when big decisions on their land sales were being planned.