Evening Standard comment: The Mayor’s policies harm his housing target; Preventing knife crime; New hope for Nazanin

Remember the Mayor’s promise when he stood for election in 2016? He said housing was his “single biggest priority”, mocked his predecessor’s record and said he wanted half of new homes in the city to be affordable.

He also set a target of 50,000 houses a year, which has risen to 65,000 in City Hall’s new London housing plan.

Anyone trying to find a home in London will know that things have not worked out as planned.

As we report today, building work in the Zone 2 ring around central London has more or less stopped: developers started work on only 77 flats and houses in the first three months of the year, a drop of 97 per cent on the average in the year before the Mayor was elected.

The Mayor blames Brexit, and of course he has a point. Falling prices don’t encourage developers.

But there are still profits to be made and people who want to buy, which makes it all the more extraordinary that analysts at Molior London say there is land with planning permission for 63,500 homes in Zone 2 but little is being done with it.

What is going on?

In part it is the Mayor’s demand that at least 35 per cent of larger sites contain affordable housing. You can see why he wants it.

But if the result is no building at all, then everyone suffers. That is what will happen, too, if Labour’s new national policy to restrict the conversion of office space into homes without planning permission is implemented.

Cutting the supply of new homes isn’t a way to help people.

Preventing knife crime

Today brings more dispiriting news of knife crime in London, with two young men injured in a stabbing in Leytonstone only a day or so after the blade killing of a 21-year-old man in Harlesden and adding to the already grim death toll in the capital this year.

At the same time, the official crime figures published today by the Office for National Statistics show blade offences in London continuing to run at near-record levels, with an average of 40 offences a day, including 74 knife homicides during 2018, despite the intense efforts of the Met to tackle the problem.

None of this is encouraging, of course, but today does at least also bring more positive developments to report: the announcement of a new scheme in Waltham Forest in which the charity Spark2Life will train local residents to act as community mentors to young people feared to be vulnerable to being drawn into knife crime.

The mentoring scheme will also involve teaching a “resilience programme” to thousands of primary pupils and aims to provide vital support and advice to young Londoners who might otherwise fall prey to the malign influence of gangs.

Its aim is to keep their lives on a law-abiding track.

Such efforts are commendable and provide a good example of what the much-vaunted “public health approach” to tackling knife crime should seek to deliver.

As the Met Commissioner Cressida Dick and others have made clear, the answer to knife crime ultimately lies not in enforcement — important though that is — but in stopping the problem at source by persuading young people not to carry blades in the first place.

Positive role models at the community level are vital. We hope to see more schemes of this sort.

As today’s crime figures show, lives ultimately depend on it.

New hope for Nazanin

Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the London mother so regrettably incarcerated in an Iranian jail, has today expressed optimism about Tehran’s suggestion that a prisoner swap could lead to his wife’s release.

We share Mr Ratcliffe’s hope that this apparent offer, which is the most promising sign so far from the Iranian authorities, could finally be the breakthrough that she and her family needs.

True justice will only come when she is freed.