House Building: London

Debate between Meg Hillier and Bob Blackman

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[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.