London Mayor Sadiq Khan has shared the details of his inaugural scheme to develop publicly owned land for affordable housing.

As reported by Building.co.uk, Sadiq Khan’s first ‘Small Site, Small Builders’ housing development scheme using small plots of publicly-owned land to develop affordable housing has been given the go-ahead by Barnet Council.

Delivering 97 homes, 35 of which will be what the mayor’s office labelled “genuinely affordable”, the 1.4-acre Beechwood Avenue plot is being developed by Croydon-based firm Kuropatwa and is expected to start by the end of this year.

The mayor’s office said that with many of the 35 homes’ rooms being large in size the affordability level worked out at 50%, using Barnet council’s habitable rooms methodology.

Insider Housing stated that: The Small Sites, Small Builders programme is backed by £13.4m from the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the London Economic Action Partnership.

It aims to encourage community land trusts (CLTs) and small and medium-sized builders to build out small, publicly owned plots of land.

TfL will continue to bring forward small sites on a rolling basis, with the GLA asking councils and other public landholders to take part.

There were 134 bids from 80 potential builders for the 10-site pilot, including CLTs and housing associations.

James Murray, deputy mayor of housing and residential development, said:

“It’s great to see Beechwood Avenue get the green light, helping to deliver a range of much-needed, genuinely affordable homes in Barnet.

“The fantastic response to the mayor’s Small Sites, Small Builders programme has shown that using these plots of public land is an effective way to get new genuinely affordable homes built, and to reinvigorate our small and medium-sized homebuilders after years of over reliance on large developers.”

At the same time that these small plots of land are being utilised to build affordable homes, 76 new tall buildings will be joining the London skyline this year, making this an interesting period for developments both large and small in scale in the capital!

Related feature: Construction activity is booming in regional UK cities according to Deloitte.