The borough with the best-performing housing stock in the country got there mostly by being built late. A third of it went up after 2012.
Tower Hamlets averages 75.1 on the SAP scale. That is the highest of any local authority in England or Wales, eight points clear of the national average and nearly thirty above the Isles of Scilly at the other end of the table. Only 20.6% of its homes sit at band D or below, against a national 49.5%.
It also has the least room left to improve. The distance between its current and potential scores is 4.7 points, the narrowest in the country, at a national average of 14.1.
| Authority | Current | Potential | Climb |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tower Hamlets | 75.1 | 79.8 | 4.7 |
| City of London | 70.8 | 76.6 | 5.7 |
| Hackney | 71.1 | 78.5 | 7.4 |
| Islington | 70.3 | 77.8 | 7.5 |
| Southwark | 71.2 | 78.7 | 7.5 |
It would be a nice story if this were the reward for decades of retrofit work. It isn't. Tower Hamlets' single largest construction age band is 2012 onwards: 35,087 homes, more than a quarter of everything in the borough. Eighty-three per cent of its stock is flats, against 26.2% nationally. This is Canary Wharf and the surrounding towers, built new, built dense, and built after most of the standards that older housing is now being retrofitted to meet.
Flats help twice over. They share walls, floors and ceilings with other heated homes, so there is less external surface per household for heat to escape through, and they tend to arrive in blocks built to a single recent specification rather than accumulating over a century.
Which puts the top and bottom of this table in an odd relationship. Scilly's homes have thirty-four points of documented improvement waiting in them. Tower Hamlets' have under five. The borough scoring best is also the one with the least left to do, and it got both by being young.