Will affordable housing be the casualty as London tackles its building emergency?
Sadiq Khan has known for a while that he has a problem with housebuilding in London.But last week a consultancy published figures about the scale of the problem, which prompted full-scale alarm in City Hall and Whitehall.The analysis from Molior showed that new housebuilding in the capital had collapsed.Only 40,000 homes are under construction – two-thirds the normal rate – and in the first three months of the year builders started work on just 3,248 private sector units.“It is a perfect storm of economic conditions impacting housebuilding,” said one City Hall source.
“It’s an emergency, we cannot wait to act,” added a senior Whitehall official.The reasons behind the sudden collapse in new building are complex.When Khan became mayor he increased the amount of affordable housing that developers had to include to qualify for the fast-track approval process from 20% to 35%, or 50% for developments on industrial or public land.He also tightened the definition of affordable housing so it applied mainly to the cheapest rented homes and those being sold under shared ownership schemes.For a while it worked.
Although overall housebuilding levels fell, the number of social and affordable homes went up.In 2023, builders began work on more than 116,000 affordable homes in London and more council houses than at any time since the 1970s.But then economic conditions began to take a toll.Building in the capital has always been expensive given there is not much undeveloped land and developers often have to knock down existing buildings first.But when inflation spiked in late 2022, followed by a sharp rise in interest rates throughout 2023, it became much harder for developers to make a business case for starting new projects in the city.
An analysis of government figures by Ben Hopkinson, the head of housing and infrastructure at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), shows that between 2021 and 2023, the cost of building homes rose by 21%.Added to this, builders were facing a host of new costs and regulations following the Grenfell Tower fire.The biggest companies have agreed to pay to remove and replace cladding on their buildings, and from next year will have to contribute to an additional building safety fund to pay for those companies that have not made such agreements.A tax on landfill is also increasing steeply.However, the biggest problem could be that many developers cannot get their plans through the new Building Safety Regulator, which has to approve any projects over 18 metres tall but is struggling to process applications.
Data from the BSR shows 92% of applications are being held up, with companies having to wait an average of 36 weeks for a decision.This all contributes to London’s housing affordability crisis.The CPS found the median home in London was more than 11.5 times the median salary.That is compared with a ratio of 7.
6 across England, and far above the level of 5, which is deemed unaffordable by the Office for National Statistics.The report found the average renter could expect to pay between 40% and 50% of their income on rent.The city also has a homelessness crisis.Official figures published on Thursday showed there were a record 74,720 London households, containing 97,140 children, living in temporary accommodation at the end of June.A third of these households had been waiting for secure and affordable housing for at least five years.
London’s 32 boroughs spent an estimated £5.5m a day funding emergency housing last year, an increasingly unsustainable bill that threatens to push some councils to the verge of effective bankruptcy.It is against this backdrop that Steve Reed, the housing secretary, and Khan are trying to find a solution.But their proposals are facing pushback even before they are launched.While plans to increase subsidies to developers for affordable homes and to allow councils to offer greater tax breaks are causing some consternation, it is the idea of reducing affordable housing quotas that has infuriated many Labour MPs and campaigners.
One Labour MP in London said: “My council will just use this as permission to build more yuppie flats and bring more people to the area so the current population can pay higher rents.”Matt Downie, the chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis, said it would be “really concerning” if ministers were to water down affordable housing targets.“Only a few months ago ministers set out ambitious plans for a new generation of social and affordable housing.We urge them to stick to this focus, and work with organisations on sensible options to make this a reality, without rowing back on ambition,” he added.But others believe the scale of the crisis warrants such measures.
One government official said: “This is an extreme problem, and we make no apologies for looking at extreme solutions.”
Inside San Francisco’s new AI school: is this the future of US education?
In the world’s tech innovation epicenter, an “AI-powered” private school has made headlines for unabashedly embracing the technology.Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools. Its learning model entails just two hours of focused academic work per day, during which the school says students can learn twice as fast as their counterparts in traditional schools – with the help of artificial intelligence.AI, Alpha says, is central to the school’s learning philosophy, brand and impact on students.Alpha is not alone in its efforts to incorporate AI into the classroom
The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools
Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who.And if you ask OpenAI’s technology to do the same, a similar thing happens. What’s wrong with that, you may think?The answer could be one of the biggest issues AI chiefs face as their era-defining technology becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives.Google and OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be just that – generative, meaning it develops novel answers to our questions. Ask it for a time-travelling doctor, you get one that their systems have created
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states
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Parents will be able to block their children’s interactions with Meta’s AI character chatbots, as the tech company addresses concerns over inappropriate conversations.The social media company is adding new safeguards to its “teen accounts”, which are a default setting for under-18 users, by letting parents turn off their children’s chats with AI characters. These chatbots, which are created by users, are available on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta AI app.Parents will also be able to block specific AI characters if they don’t want to stop their children from interacting with chatbots altogether. They will also get “insights” into the topics their children are chatting about with AI characters, which Meta said would allow them to have “thoughtful” conversations with their children about AI interactions
AI chatbots are hurting children, Australian education minister warns as anti-bullying plan announced
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UK MPs warn of repeat of 2024 riots unless online misinformation is tackled
Failures to properly tackle online misinformation mean it is “only a matter of time” before viral content triggers a repeat of the 2024 summer riots, MPs have warned.Chi Onwurah, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, said ministers seemed complacent about the threat and this was putting the public at risk.The committee said it was disappointed in the government’s response to its recent report warning social media companies’ business models contributed to disturbances after the Southport murders.Replying to the committee’s findings, the government rejected a call for legislation tackling generative artificial intelligence platforms and said it would not intervene directly in the online advertising market, which MPs claimed helped incentivise the creation of harmful material after the attack.Onwurah said the government agreed with most of its conclusions but had stopped short of backing its recommendations for action
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