Barratt London’s head of affordable housing Syreeta Robinson-Gayle on how to fix Section 106 and staying optimistic

The offices near Hackney Wick have a brand new feeling, like the wrapping has just been taken off everything – rather like a new build home. Barratt London is the house builder’s London brand, but it is split into two regional divisions, each working on about five to 10 developments at a time. The team in these offices covers the east of the city.

In the past few years, housing associations have increasingly wanted to cut their reliance on Section 106 and develop their own projects from land purchase onwards. Dr Robinson-Gayle is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an advocate for the homes that come through planning requirements.

“Section 106 is a very efficient and effective mechanism for delivering new homes,” she says. “I think it also meets one of our big aims as a society, which is that we provide mixed communities – and a city like London wouldn’t be the city it is if it didn’t provide mixed communities.”

Barratt’s involvement in the affordable sector is purely through the delivery of Section 106 homes – unlike some builders that have dipped their toes into grant and setting up their own registered providers.

London has seen development numbers crash over the past year or so: only 6,325 homes in total were started in the first three months of this year. But Barratt London has been relatively insulated from these ups and downs.

“Post-Covid, we have delivered roughly the same amount of homes annually as we’ve gone along,” Dr Robinson-Gayle says. She shares data back to 2023 showing that the division has delivered roughly 200 affordable homes every year.

Still, the firm, along with the rest of the sector, is still feeling the effects of the slump, which she puts down to the continued aftermath of the pandemic when construction slowed down, as well as the sharp inflation in building material costs from the start of the Ukraine war in 2022.

“Every time the industry slows down, we lose capacity, and it makes it harder and harder to... ratchet it back up when we’re back in the business of building,” she notes, pointing out that development projects take years and the impact of macroeconomic shocks can also take years to play out.

Without wanting to rehash a list of issues that is now becoming very familiar for Inside Housing readers, you can add to this the increased costs of finance, new building safety regulations and stronger requirements for social landlords to spend their money on existing homes.

And house builders, like housing providers, have been absorbing the costs of the building safety crisis. Barratt Redrow spent more than £100m on building safety remediation in the 2025-26 financial year, and projected another £250m this year.

Central government and the Greater London Authority (GLA) took action to stimulate housebuilding in the capital at the end of 2025 and the start of this year, with two packages of emergency measures designed to boost London housebuilding. This has combined with an uptick in delivery as the 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme ended, and the government’s new £39bn grant package has opened for bids.

The intervention has been working, Dr Robinson-Gayle says. “Did it have the desired effect? I think the answer is yes.” For homes backed by the GLA’s grant, there is some evidence of recovery, with starts rising by 135%.

One of the emergency measures allows developers to cut the percentage of affordable homes in their projects. What does Barratt make of this decision?

“I wouldn’t like to second-guess how complicated being an RP is, and the set of skills that are required to be an RP. I don’t think it’s a thing you can do lightly”

“We’re in a position where demand is low and viability is under pressure, so you have to pull all of the levers that you have available to you,” Dr Robinson-Gayle says. She paraphrases Tom Copley, London’s deputy mayor for housing, pointing out that “10% of something is better than 40% of nothing”.

Barratt London decided not to cut Section 106 percentages on its projects in response to the emergency measures.

“We’ve held roughly the same percentage of affordable housing as we had before, because providing affordable housing on site has other benefits... to do with return on capital and speed of delivery, because essentially you have a buyer for a large portion of your site.”

“I would say, in terms of how we view London as a business, we are still buying new sites,” she adds.

Barratt London also comes across as an advocate of the mixed-tenure communities that, thanks to planning rules, it has a hand in delivering. When our conversation turns to “poor doors” controversies, which have seen affordable housing residents on some Section 106 sites locked out of some amenities, Dr Robinson-Gayle says she is proud to say none of Barratt London’s projects have been singled out.

“What we do want is that if you’re a child who lives on the site, you experience that site in the same way, no matter what tenure of block you have lived in,” she says.

Partly for this reason, Barratt London does not favour offsite contributions – when the developer gives a cash sum to the council to build affordable homes elsewhere, rather than include them on the site.

“We do consider them where they’re necessary, but they’re not our preference. I don’t think they shouldn’t be anybody’s preference,” Dr Robinson-Gayle says. “They should definitely be the last-ditch thing that you go for.”

Given resource constraints at councils, this could lead to significant delay in the supply of affordable homes, she argues.

Unlike some developers and house builders, Barratt has not so far been tempted to set up its own for-profit registered provider (RP) to take up the Section 106 homes from its projects, and become a landlord itself. “I’m sure there have been discussions,” Dr Robinson-Gayle says, but the focus of Barratt is on building the homes. 

“I wouldn’t like to second-guess how complicated being an RP is, and the set of skills that are required to be an RP. I don’t think it’s a thing you can do lightly,” she says.

“We have a thing that we do [building homes]; we’re quite good at the thing that we do. And we focus on that thing. And then what we’d like is some other partners who do the other things.”

Instead, Dr Robinson-Gayle is focused on working with housing associations, for-profits and councils willing to take the affordable homes the builder delivers.

Barratt London recently sold more than 300 Section 106 homes from its Colindale development in north London to asset manager Legal & General. And foundations just went in for The Lanes in Wandsworth, south-west London. Wandle Housing Association is taking 95 social rent homes and 125 shared ownership homes on the site. 

“I think we value smaller partners as much as we value larger ones,” Dr Robinson-Gayle says. “For us there’s really no difference, as long as the RP is well managed, and we know that we’ve got a good long-term partner to look after the sites.”

An affordable advocate

Dr Robinson-Gayle comes across as a believer in and advocate for affordable housing. She grew up on the Boundary Road estate in Walthamstow. Last year, Inside Housing’s editor Martin Hilditch revisited the estate with Dr Robinson-Gayle, who lived there during the period it was regenerated, along with Peabody’s chief executive Ian McDermott, who worked on the regeneration.

Dr Robinson-Gayle had an indirect route into the housing world, however. “I’m an engineer by background, and I think I’ve always been interested in buildings,” she says. She started off working on commercial office buildings in Hong Kong and the Middle East.

At one point she was commuting to Germany by plane, to work for a cladding company. “It was the right time of my life to be doing this sort of malarkey, they were an enjoyable crew as well,” she recalls, laughing. “Topping-out ceremonies would involve lots of smuggled beer and Leberkäse.”

In 2006 she went to work for Martin Arnold, a building surveyor firm in south London, which worked on both commercial property and affordable housing. And she found she liked the sector.

“I think that the affordable housing sector does not pat itself on the back enough for the amount of homes that it delivers and the amount of skill that it takes to do it. It is quite self-deprecating as a sector, and I don’t think it claps itself as on the back quite as much as commercial development does,” she says.

“I’m old enough that some of the buildings I’ve built have been taken down,” she says with a laugh, referring to commercial buildings, which typically have a shorter lifespan. By contrast, she says of housing, “[the appeal is] the longevity, it’s the fact that you can have such a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s really good. [It’s] such a good sector to be part of.”