Some big news for housing has occurred elsewhere. Last week, Angela Rayner descended on Swale Borough Council and plucked from its control the destiny of plans to build 8,400 new homes next door to Sittingbourne – plans the council’s officers had recommended for refusal, citing their “urbanising impact“.
Peter John, former leader of Southwark and ex-London Councils chair, welcomed Rayner’s action. It “underlines the government’s absolute commitment to housing delivery” and “may well send a much needed signal to colleagues in local government,” he said. And the meaning of that signal? “Don’t complain about a lack of new homes and affordable housing and then stand in the way of schemes which respond to that demand,” said John.
Well, good. But since then there’s been some other housing news. In his speech to Tuesday’s Centre for London conference, Sadiq Khan characterised the current period as the most difficult for housebuilding in the capital since the 2008 global financial crash. He said there’s no time like the present for lots more public money to be spent.
At the same event, Jules Pipe, the Mayor’s deputy for planning, said much the same thing, but bigger. He found it hard to believe that the government’s national target of an average of 300,000 homes a year over its five-year term will be hit, including Greater London’s portion of 81,000 of those a year. He elaborated, without mercy: “The infrastructure isn’t there, the skills system isn’t there, let alone the funding.”
At present, we are proceeding southwards towards just 30,000 annually, Pipe said. As for “affordable” homes of various kinds, the sort needed most, the latest data for completions and starts in London, highlighted by The Housing Forum‘s Anna Clarke, are, in her words, “dire” and “even worse”. The graph below, from City Hall’s newly-released Housing in London report for 2024, says it all.
What, then, has Rayner been doing to help the capital? Well, she has liberated London from a yearly target of 100,000 new homes set by Michael Gove as a departing-from-government gift. The standard method of that time for generating the figure was “divorced from reality”, Rayner said, and replaced it with the 81,000. She called this “ambitious but deliverable“. The average in recent years has been 37,200.
Still, the deputy PM has been keeping City Hall busy. Even in advance of Keir Starmer becoming PM the ground was being laid for a simpler and more flexible new London Plan, the capital’s planning master blueprint. We know this because the Greater London Authority officer responsible for that work told a gathering of the London Property Alliance about it just days after the general election. The harder things have got, the louder has become the development sector’s pleading for such a change.
Efforts are also being made to grow a decent crop from the 300,000 homes – yes, that’s 300,000 – for which seeds have been planted across the city in the form of planning consents, but, for a familiar array of reasons – costs, interest rates, inflation, insufficient infrastructure – have failed to rise from the earth.
With Rayner on its case, in a partnership kind of way, City Hall has been talking to boroughs and developers about distributing its Affordable Homes Programme cash more quickly and flexibly to get parts of that pipeline unblocked. London has been given £100 million in Rachel Reeves’s budget, a fifth of the additional national sum. Collaboration with the government’s New Homes Accelerator programme is taking place, with hopes of future results. A senior City Hall housing figure confided the other week that having a Labour government is great, but there’s not much time for rest.
There is also, alas, as Khan and Pipe are far from alone in saying, no substitute for public money. Deregulation and supply and demand’s invisible hand can work for some up to a point, including by boosting “affordable” supply on the side, but not by anything like enough to house the estimated 183,000 Londoners in temporary accommodation or the 323,000 on social housing waiting lists. The Mayor has now said his own, already revised, affordable target will not be met.
Council finances are fraying. New safety demands mean that London’s housing associations are spending lots on retrofitting and new construction is delayed. Meanwhile, countless would-be first-time buyers are stuck in costly private renting limbo without recourse to funds from Banks of Mum and Dad. The way things are going, a London planning sage lately remarked, all new home ownership in London will be inherited in some shape or form. So what about that 81,000 target? It’s looking more ambitious every day.
OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.