The Good, the Bad and the Confusing

I have been grappling with conflicting data and policy moves in the housing sector this week.  Taken together, they illustrate something PropViews has been arguing for months: the government is simultaneously trying to accelerate housing delivery, increase the cost of housing delivery, and reform the system that determines whether housing delivery happens at all. The signals are contradictory. The market is confused. And confusion, in development, means delay.

## The Good: Starts Are Up

The headline number is genuinely encouraging. There were 37,300 house building starts in England in Q4 2025 — a twenty-three percent increase on the previous quarter and twenty-four percent up on the same quarter in 2024. MHCLG attributes part of the increase to reforms at the Building Safety Regulator, which has been processing applications more quickly.

This is real. It should be acknowledged. But it is not a rising tide floating all boats. Molior recorded just 2,103 private residential starts in London alone in Q1 2026, against a quarterly requirement of 22,000.

The capital is not recovering. The national uptick appears to be driven by suburban and regional markets where viability constraints are perhaps less acute. London’s brownfield pipeline, which PropViews has documented through the recent Peckham and Battersea appeal decisions, remains broken. A national starts recovery that excludes London pulling its considerable weight suggests more targeted brownfield recovery policy is needed.

## The Bad: The Building Safety Levy Arrives in October

On 1 October 2026 — four months away — the Building Safety Levy comes into force. Every residential development of ten dwellings or more in England will be subject to a new charge per square metre of chargeable floorspace. The levy is designed to raise £3.4 billion over ten years to fund remediation of unsafe buildings.  The timing and the interaction with everything else in the development cost stack is just bonkers. 

The HBF has been direct: the levy adds approximately £3,000 per plot on average and will make development financially unviable in some parts of the country. It is a tax on new homes at the precise moment that new homes are least viable. Brownfield sites receive a fifty percent reduction — which is sensible — but even with that reduction, schemes that have already been acquired but not started planning now face a cost that was not in the original appraisal.


## The Confusing: The Planning & Infrastructure Bill

The Planning & Infrastructure Bill is moving through Parliament with measures that, in principle, address several of the structural problems PropViews has identified: streamlined planning permission, land access reform, clearer pathways for development, infrastructure delivery improvements. This is the right direction. The ambition is not in question.

What is in question is the sequencing. The Bill’s reforms will take years to bed in. Local Plans take years to adopt even under an accelerated process. The infrastructure delivery improvements depend on coordination between planning authorities, utilities, and transport bodies that has historically been the weakest link in the development chain.

Meanwhile the Building Safety Levy arrives in October. The London LPG judicial review appears imminent. The May elections have handed multiple key boroughs to administrations opposed to the government’s housing targets. Berkeley has paused London land acquisition. Molior’s projections show completions in 2027 and 2028 at their lowest level since the 1940s.

The Planning & Infrastructure Bill is a long-term reform arriving into an immediate emergency. It is the right medicine for a different patient. The patient in front of us needs something that works faster.