Mayor slams capital planning

London mayor Ken Livingstone has attacked the planning system and defended his housing policy.

Speaking at the British Property Federation’s Labour conference fringe meeting last week, the mayor said London’s housing problems were more to do with poor planning decades earlier.

“We’re too badly planned,” he said. “The highest density housing in London is Kensington and Chelsea, where people pay millions of pounds to live there because it’s so well designed.”

Livingstone offered assurances that green-belt areas would not be touched in the capital, while areas within the city remained under-populated and underdeveloped.

[Contract Journal, 4 October 2006, p 4]