London Mayor Sadiq Khan wants to see Croydon as the location of 5,600 new, high-density homes on “Greenfield”, or Green Belt, land. This will be in addition to 15,944 homes on Croydon brownfield sites. All to be achieved by 2037.
Little boxes on the hillside: the draft London Plan calls for almost 6,000 high-density homes on Croydon Green Belt
That’s according to the latest draft London Plan, which was released this week with less fanfare than the announcement that Mayor Khan is to be made a peer in Keir Starmer’s resignation honours.
Under the draft London Plan, swathes of land from New Addington to the Addington Hills, from Lloyd Park and Park Hill and on to Haling Grove, could be transformed to residential estates in a way not seen in Croydon since the 1960s.
Last year, Mayor Khan said that it was not practical to think that all London’s housing need could be met from brownfield sites.
In his latest draft London Plan, which is out to consultation until October 15, Mayor Khan has selected nine outer London Boroughs where Green Belt and green spaces need, in his view, to be released for high-density housing. Croydon is the only borough south of the Thames included in Khan’s list.
The changes locally will need Croydon Council’s co-operation in adjusting its own Local Plan. This will take a long time, probably all the way to 2037, as Croydon’s Local Plan is only coming to the end of its most recent revision.
Hard hat: London Mayor Sadiq Khan has set tough house-building targets for the next decade
The need for the London Mayor to work with the city’s boroughs was underlined by Croydon Mayor Jason Perry when, in his role as the member for planning for the London Councils organisation – the cross-party association of all the capital’s local councils – he made a statement emphasising that the London Plan needed to be “grounded in the realities of local delivery”.
The draft London Plan identifies New Addington as the anchor for housing intensification, along with development loosely associated with all the stops along the tram line to East Croydon and Addiscombe, and also South Croydon Station.
The identification of development near tram stops and rail stations is in line with consultation earlier this year on the National Planning Policy Framework, allowing for building on sites within 15 minutes’ walk – about one mile – of public transport facilities.
Likely sites for greenfield housing are thus green land running through and around New Addington, Featherbed Lane, Gravel Hill, Addington Hills, Coombe Wood, Croham Hurst, Park Hill, Lloyd Park, Shirley Park, Addiscombe Recreation Ground, Ashburton Park and Haling Grove. The draft London Plan has a table of potential areas for development, which you can find by clicking here.
These proposals are likely to be resisted by Mayor Perry.
This week Nick Bowes, of public relations firm London Communications Agency (they handle, among others, the PR for the Westfield developers in Croydon) said that London’s boroughs will be “crucial” in delivering Lord Khan’s London Plan, but that the May local elections have created a notably different set of circumstances for the Labour-controlled City Hall.
Detailed plan: there’s a full list of greenfield sites in Croydon in the draft London Plan
“Potential policy flashpoints which might have been dealt with behind closed doors when 21 of the 32 boroughs were in Labour’s hands look likely instead to explode into the open,” Bowes predicts.
“Building on Green Belt, New Towns, borough housing targets, changes to affordable housing thresholds, suburban densification, tall buildings… the list goes on. Might we see alliances of LibDem, Green and Conservative councils, united by their opposition to aspects of planning policy, to fight the Labour Mayor and Labour government?”
And Bowes, himself a former City Hall policy-maker, added a reality rider: “While a worthy blueprint for the London of the future, the fact is that, for housebuilders in particular, there are much greater forces at play which are making it all but impossible to get shovels in the ground.
“At least in the short term, the draft London Plan won’t help with this.”
The figures in the London Plan are, after all, a long way away from the reality of a home building industry that is crushed by high interest rates, high material costs and a lack of skilled labour. The draft London Plan seeks 558,000 new homes in London over 10 years, but annual build to March 2026 was only 10,870 – not even one-fifth of the required rate.
Such a pitiful rate at a time of acute housing need may even encourage Lord Khan to seek a ministerial role in the Lords, rather than face the electorate again in 2028.
- Andrew Pelling is a former MP and Croydon councillor, who was the borough’s first London Assembly Member in 2000
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