Milk and water localism served with meat and potatoes

Boris Johnson has chosen mid-August to slip out a couple of interesting housing policy documents. A Framework for Devolved Delivery is the Mayor of London's 17-page milk-and-water attempt at localism, which can be safely ignored. But the 108-page London Housing Design Guide is real meat-and-potatoes set of rules which will prevent developers building shoe boxes - and may influence councils well outside the M25.

You don't have to read very far into the localism document to discover it is little more than a nod to the Conservative Big Idea. London's 33 boroughs don't even have to sign up to the idea of deciding what to do with money allocated to them by the Homes & Communities Agency. The HCA remains firmly in control of the budget and can reallocate cash if the council is tardy in building. Boris remains in charge of the deciding large site applications

.
You don't have to read very far into the housing design guide to see that (apart from one key exception) house builders have lost their fight to prevent Boris going back to the 1960's and introducing a 2010 version of the Parker Morris set of minimum space standards, which means 2-person units now need to be a minimum of 50M2. But the standards go much further than setting minimum floor areas. House builders will need to revise their standard designs.

But the positive coverage of the new standards has failed to spot the loophole - the one person flat. This does not appear in the table of minimum sizes. But the appendix gives the detailed guidance on their layout - and shows they need be no bigger than 37M2: the size of the "Hobbit Homes" disparaged by Boris. There was a good deal of lobbying to keep the one-person flat in the mix. But it may, in the end, prove to be only a small comfort to developers.