London is falling behind big time. Not slowly, not quietly – but visibly, measurably, embarrassingly behind. And while Sadiq Khan has spent nine years telling Londoners that the housing crisis is someone else’s fault – blaming the government, and now the developers – the city has been building less, employing fewer, and losing the economic ground that generations of Londoners worked to create.
This year, London’s leading developer Berkeley Homes announced it would no longer be investing in new sites in the Capital. It also admitted it would be shedding around 12,000 on site jobs as the market grinds to a halt.
All this is a man-made demolition by clumsy design. Here’s how.
The plan that isn’t
The starting point is local plans. Or rather, the near-total failure to use them properly. A local plan should be the moment a community makes its democratic choice about where growth goes, what it looks like, and numbers it can deliver. Why does it need to be anything more?
Do that work once, do it properly, with real representative consultation and you earn the right to say where something gets built. Full stop. No second war of attrition at application stage. No relitigating settled questions site by site, year by year.
Instead in London we have overly detailed local plans that are outdated, under-zoned, and treated as a starting point for saying “no” rather than a settled framework for saying” yes” to delivery. The London Plan – the Mayor of London’s statutory document which all local authorities must give due regard – has loaded so many requirements, assessments, and viability hurdles onto housing development that schemes which look good in principle face years of attrition in practice. The London Plan is not a statement for growth, it is a statement for managed decline.
My view is straightforward: local plans should zone properly for growth, with genuine, representative community input front-loaded into the plan-making process itself. Once a borough has adopted a plan through that process, a scheme should have a fast route to consent. The democratic decision will have been made. We should not have to make the decision in painstaking detail twice!
A long winded and expensive road to no
It doesn’t take a bult environment professional to see the system is falling apart.
Let’s look at just the last few weeks. The Aylesham Centre in Peckham. A site the council itself allocated for housing redevelopment. Berkeley Homes proposed 867 homes on a brownfield town centre site. A site the local plan indicated should have at least 850 homes. It got refused on heritage grounds and the Leader of Southwark Council called it “a great day”. The local MP also joined in the self-harming congratulations. She was the government’s Housing Minister before resigning a week prior. You can see why London is in trouble.
Glassmill on Battersea Bridge Road. The Labour administration encouraged the promoters to build tall, only to then cut and run when the local celebrities came out against building homes – from their comfortable multimillion pound homes. The application was rejected. The system invited the costly bet, then refused to pay out, destroying investment and rendering the site undeveloped for another generation.
And then there is the Stag Brewery in Richmond – perhaps the most complete indictment of City Hall’s approach that exists anywhere in the planning record.
This scheme took nearly a decade from start to decision. You read that right. Nearly ten years to make a planning decision. Eventually, 1,075 homes were consented, after an Inspector agreed with the developer on every single City Hall disputed viability input. 65 affordable homes. Seven and a half percent of the original demand. The previous application, the one Khan’s GLA refused – would have delivered thirty percent affordable housing.
However, the Mayor demanded lower building heights. He got what he wanted because he is the Mayor, and in getting them, he also destroyed the viability that made thirty percent affordable housing possible. Again, you can see why London is in trouble.
Here is something almost nobody in this debate will say out loud: the damage is not limited to homes alone. Every stalled development site in London is a hole in the local economy as much as it is a hole in the ground.
When a major scheme sits in planning limbo for three, four, five years – or even a decade, as at the Stag Brewery has – the groundworkers don’t get hired. The scaffolders, the electricians, the plasterers, the fit-out contractors – none of them get jobs, and young apprenticeships never materialise.
The supply chains that feed a live construction site – the timber merchants, the plant hire business, the skip companies -they don’t get the call either. We have built a system that doesn’t just delay housing. It eats growth and destroys job opportunities.
This is just one sector where the powers of a Mayor has effectively ruined opportunities for so many. London’s unemployment and business closures are currently tracking above the national average. A global city like London should not be in decline. It does not have to be this way.
The communities I have spoken to across this city are not opposed to development. They are opposed to development that ignores them, steamrolls them, and delivers nothing they recognise as a benefit. That is a failure of process, not a failure of appetite. Fix the process – put communities in the room at the plan-making stage, give them genuine influence over what gets built and where – and you unlock something Khan has never managed to unlock: London’s true potential.
Festus Akinbusoye is a Westminster City Councillor and former Police and Crime Commissioner.
