26/12/2016 London News

Good afternoon and Merry Christmas from BBC London News.

In the last year, a record 40% of Londoners

buying their first home have ended up leaving the capital.

According to the estate agents Hamptons International,

it's part of a bigger trend of people moving out of London

For Nicola Latham, moving out of London means a bigger kitchen,

which means more mince pies and more space for her guests to eat them.

It also means she and her husband can finally buy a house.

We have a three-bed semidetached house with a garden and lovely,

In London we probably wouldn't even afford a one-bedroom flat.

The compromise came with a longer and pricey commute from Stansted,

This year 40% of first-time buyers in London ended up buying

They bought 74,000 homes outside London.

So how far does London's commuter belt stretch?

One in five Londoners who bought headed to

Some say a tougher climate calls for more drastic action.

Within the M25 alone, there are 100,000 hectares

A hectare is about the size of Trafalgar Square.

Choosing 5% of that to be built on could supply 200,000 homes

which would be enough for London for three or four years

Earlier this year it emerged that half of London's firefighters,

ambulance workers and frontline police officers could no longer

WE are being told the exodus should slow next year

But until then, the whole of England has the potential to become

Next: He's being called "Builderotti",

a singing builder who wants to following in the footsteps

Gani Shabi from Swiss Cottage has been making a noise on building

sites around London, and he's even impressed

Walk past a building site in south-west London

and you might just hear something rather unusual.

Gani is a builder who likes to sing while he works.

It is not where you would expect to hear opera, but his voice

is so powerful, it can cut through pretty much any noise.

And he is starting to attract attention.

Former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell has filmed his singing close

I worked opposite her house and she heard me singing

Gani's dream is to perform professional opera, following

the greats like Pavarotti, but he is self taught

and with his current staging he is being called "Builder-otti".

Builderotti is good because it is connected to Pavarotti.

He is now singing out while he works on a building site in Barnes

and during breaks he sometimes takes to nearby streets.

Of course there are times when the work comes first,

but this is a builder with big dreams and a voice to match.

And now here's Kate with the weather.

Good afternoon. A beautiful afternoon for a Boxing Day walk.

Cold, crisp and sunny. It is much chillier than it was yesterday.

Looking at a maximum of nine Celsius in central London. Once the sun has

set, the temperature will fall away very quickly. A widespread frost by

dawn tomorrow morning, leading to another bright day on Tuesday. Cold,

crisp and sunny. I will be back at just after 6:20pm with your evening

bulletin. Until then, enjoy your Boxing Day.

Good afternoon, some decent weather, not a bad day to get out and walk of

some of the Christmas access perhaps! As we can see from the

radar picture, a lot of showers piling in in the Scottish Highlands,

mostly but not exclusively over high ground, but most showers have been

falling as snow. Still a Met Office amber warning across the northern

isles, wind close to 95 mph in Shetland earlier