House Building: London

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I salute my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) for initiating the debate.

The debate is timely given the decision last week, by the Government and City Hall, to lower targets for affordable housing in developments, in exchange for the granting of supposedly faster planning permission. That is a real concern. The briefing that we have received from Crisis demonstrates that more than 13,231 people were rough sleeping in London during the last year—a record high and a 10% increase on the previous year. Some 70,000 households, including 90,000 children, are in temporary accommodation. Not only is that bad for the families, but it is costing Londoners and the taxpayer something like £5 million a day in London. In particular, money is being spent on bed and breakfast accommodation, which is not only unsuitable for families but expensive for London authorities to bear. There are 336,366 households on social housing waiting lists in London. The crunch is whether this decision is actually going to deliver any improvement in social housing.

Before anyone starts talking about the previous Government or the former Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, I remind hon. Members, particularly newly elected Labour Members, that I tried to carry through a Bill on behalf of Boris Johnson to increase house building in London. We were blocked by the right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), the hon. Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter), who is no longer in his place, and the hon. Member for Islington—I am not sure which.

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

Me?

[Bob Blackman]

No, the other one: the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). That meant that whole sites in London were not developed to provide housing when they should have been.

Clearly we have a serious problem here. In my constituency, there is a planning application that has been outstanding, after having been reviewed at various times, for nearly 10 years. It would provide housing units that we desperately need, but the housing association refuses to develop it. It is now trying to sell the site again to further developers.

Our other problem in London is where developments have taken place. There have been developments such as Battersea power station, around Wembley stadium and other areas where housing has gone up, but that housing has not been sold to local people; it is been sold to developers or owners abroad, then rented out at exorbitant cost to local London people, who then have to apply for housing benefit and depend on welfare payments rather than having a home of their own. We have to conquer this.

[Dame Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman made a very good point about overseas sales, although I would contest his statement that people are having to receive housing benefit to live in many of those developments because, as he probably knows, they are advertised overseas by yield. We are seeing homes in London as financial investment vehicles for people who have no connection with this country. Many of those landlords have never even visited the property. What would his party’s policy be to tackle this issue?

[Bob Blackman]

I do not speak on behalf of my party; I speak on my own behalf. As the hon. Lady well knows, I have been promoting building 90,000 socially rented homes a year across the country, and for the past 30 years Governments of all persuasions have failed to build the homes that we need at the prices that people can afford.

The sad reality is that we have to look at how we are going to deal with this. We could deal with the Transport for London land. TfL owns huge amounts of unused land that could be developed for housing, and that could be done in co-operation with City Hall, but the sad fact is—[Interruption.] Government Members need to focus on this: not only was Sadiq Khan as mayor given the money that my hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup mentioned, but he returned it to the Treasury; he could not spend it because he could not get development under way.

We have to look at what we are going to do across the House to make sure that houses are being built in London. I hope that we are not going to reduce the safety requirements for these buildings. That would be a disaster—we know of the terrible tragedy that happened in Grenfell. We should not even contemplate moving away from what has been done to protect people. Lessening those protections would be a mistake in many ways.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister. How are the Government going to ensure that the affordable homes that we need in London are provided when the restrictions have been removed and developers are therefore less likely to build affordable housing that we need? Before agreeing to this decision, what assessment has the Minister made of the impact it will have on those on the affordable housing waiting lists in London? That is a real crisis, and London councils right now are in desperate need of more finance to build more housing. There are possibilities to develop the brownfield sites that TfL and the Government own, but that is being restricted. There is a solution that we could advance. We hope the Government and the Minister, who I have a lot of respect for, can influence the Mayor of London to make that happen.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Housing and Planning (Matthew Pennycook)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Mundell. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) on securing this important debate, and I thank other hon. Members who have spoken for their passionate and—with some notable exceptions—thoughtful contributions. It has been a good debate. I also welcome the shadow Housing Minister, the hon. Member for Orpington (Gareth Bacon), to his place. It is a pleasure to debate opposite him, and I thank him for the kind words he said about me in particular.

It is not in dispute that house building in London is in crisis. The causes of that crisis are multifaceted. London has faced development challenges common to all parts England over recent years, including a significant increase in the price of building materials, a rise in financing costs, and planning capacity and capability pressures. However, it is important to recognise that the capital also faces a number of distinct challenges unique to its housing market that differ in important ways from the rest of the country.

Those challenges include the fact that London is overwhelmingly reliant on flatted developments that have become more challenging to deliver over recent years. It has depended over recent years on demand for international buyers and investors, whose appetite to purchase private market homes has diminished. It also has a higher proportion of landowners, and traders acting on their behalf, who are global investors allocating development funding based on competing returns globally and across asset classes. The combination of those and other factors has resulted in a perfect storm for house building in our capital. That perfect storm has real-world implications for Londoners in housing need.

As you will know, Mr Mundell, as part of our overhaul of the national planning policy framework in December last year, we addressed the fantastical housing target of over 100,000 given to London by the previous Government. That target was based on the punitive application of the now-abolished urban uplift, and it bore no relation whatsoever to addressed housing need in our capital. However, London is still falling far short of the more appropriate target of 87,992 homes per year, which results from the new standard method that we put in place.

We have heard the statistics cited by many hon. Members. Overall home starts in London in 2024-25 totalled just 3,990. In the first quarter of this year, more than a third of London boroughs recorded zero housing starts. I do not mean to single out the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup—this applies across the board—but in the borough of Bexley, construction was started on just 160 homes, and completions numbered just 210, in the whole of 2024. Those numbers are far too low. In short, London housing delivery is on life support, as is broadly recognised across the Chamber.

In the first 15 months of this Government’s life, we took steps to support the mayor and the GLA in addressing the house building challenges facing the capital. We withdrew the previous Government’s direction of March 2024, which required the GLA to complete an unhelpful, partial review of the London plan, and we have provided the GLA with certainty on grant by making it clear that up to 30% of our new £39 billion social and affordable homes programme will be allocated to London.

However, although those and other vital interventions were beneficial, the Government concluded over the summer that we had no choice but to take further decisive action. That is why, on 23 October, via a written ministerial statement, as is often the case—it was not snuck out; it was published on the Government website for all to see—the Secretary of State and the Mayor of London announced new emergency measures designed to arrest and reverse the collapse in house building in London by lowering development costs and improving scheme viability. The time-limited emergency measures, which I should stress to hon. Members are subject to consultation, are as follows.

First, we will introduce mandatory partial relief from borough-level community infrastructure levy charges for qualifying brownfield residential schemes that start construction before the end of 2028. As hon. Members will be aware, CIL funds strategic infrastructure, such as schools and health facilities, but if no development is taking place, boroughs do not benefit from CIL payments. The more schemes we can get moving, the more CIL funds flow into borough coffers. The reliefs we have announced will cover 50% of the CIL charges for schemes with at least 20% affordable housing, with greater relief for higher proportions of affordable homes, to incentivise house builders to deliver more.

Secondly, we will remove elements of planning guidance that can constrain density. The mayor, supported by Government, will consult on revising guidance in respect of dual aspect requirements, the number of dwellings per core and cycle storage standards. Looking ahead, the next London plan will streamline requirements to reduce duplication and complexity, making it easier to build homes quickly, without compromising quality.

[Bob Blackman]

Do the new standards apply to new planning applications that are being considered or to ones, already in the pipeline, in which developers have proposed developments with less affordable housing?

[Matthew Pennycook]

As I have said, there will be consultation on the specifics of many parts of this package, but I will address his particular point about the new time-limited planning route. This route, which will be open for two years, will allow schemes on private land in London to proceed without a viability assessment, provided that they deliver at least 20% affordable housing—importantly, with a minimum of 60% social rent. To incentivise schemes to come forward on this basis, grant funding will be made available for homes above the first 10%, which will remain nil grant.

Crucially, a gainshare mechanism on schemes or phases of schemes not commenced by 31 March 2030 will ensure that, if market conditions improve, communities benefit too. In our view, that is a pragmatic, temporary measure to unlock delivery now, while maintaining our commitment to affordable housing in the long term. It will sit alongside the GLA’s existing fast-track route, which retains its 35% affordable housing threshold.