Khan favours grandstanding over delivering once again

Sir Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, has just announced that under the new draft London plan he intends to make a third of London boroughs return to the 35% affordable homes target on new developments from 2028.

He lowered the target to 20% last year as part of his plan to improve on the utterly miserable performance of his administration in 2025 when construction started on a pathetic 5,547 new private sector homes in the capital. To put that into context, that compared to the nearly 36,000 that were started in 2015, the year before Khan was elected.

Despite this shambolic outturn, Khan clearly longs to push up his demand for affordable housing because, as in so many other areas under his control, he prefers grandstanding to delivering,

This is a mayor who doesn’t want Palantir, the US AI darlings who already deliver significant savings to the NHS, to agree a £50m contract with the Met Police to automate intelligence analysis because Palantir has previously worked for the Israeli government.

This is a mayor who only charges poor people to drive into the ULEZ zone around the capital. Richer motorists don’t pay because their engines are compliant.

This is a mayor who has required affordable homes to be built in the capital as a condition of consent that have been left empty because no housing association has been in a position to buy them.

We already know that private sector construction has effectively come to a halt in the capital. Rob Perrins, the CEO of Berkeley Homes, has already made clear that until conditions allow him to invest, he will seek his company’s fortunes elsewhere. We know that Vistry and Crest Nicholson are having a rough time these days in part because of the lack of opportunity in the capital.

In light of this, you might have thought the penny would drop in City Hall that, yes, construction costs are higher in London and that skilled labour is hard to find, but being Khan, he also cites Brexit. Really? Since when did our relationship with the EU translate into the ability to build homes in the place where they’re most needed, namely in the nation’s capital.

So, under the new London Plan, the affordable housing threshold will be 35% for 12 of the 33 boroughs from 2028. Unsurprisingly, not all boroughs have taken the news well.  Hackney, Lewisham and Tower Hamlets have launched judicial review proceedings since two of them came under control of the Green Party after the local elections.

Other councils may well follow, but at the heart of the problem is a failure in City Hall to understand that developers will only build where they see the opportunity to do so and to make a reasonable return on their investment in the process.

Mayor Khan would be better serving his city if he argued to abolish the Building Safety Act and the two staircase regulations. If he ordered his staff to talk to every applicant to ascertain just what the site they were dealing with could afford in terms of affordable housing, there might be cases where the answer was 50%. But where basic viability tests show an epic fail, the future for those in the city faced with less yet more expensive rental property thanks to the Renters Reform Act and the impossibility of getting on the housing ladder because so little property is actually available is, frankly, bleak.