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London deputy mayor Tom Copley on council housebuilding, Help to Buy and emergency measures
Tom Copley is in charge of tackling homelessness and building new homes in one of the world’s most expensive cities. London is facing criticism for some of its development policies, but should the rest of the UK follow its lead? Jess McCabe sits down with the deputy mayor to find out more
London deputy mayor Tom Copley on council housebuilding, Help to Buy and emergency measures #UKhousingTom Copley is in charge of tackling homelessness and building new homes in the capital. Jess McCabe sits down with the deputy London mayor to find out more #UKhousingAndy Burnham has said he wants to build a new generation of council housing led by a new ‘Number 10 North’. But to find out how to accomplish this, the UK’s likely next prime minister could do worse than visit London.
More than half of the total council homes built last year were in the capital, driven by London mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, who in 2018 set up a specific funding stream for local authorities.
At the forefront of delivering that affordable housing programme, and trying to deal with housing and homelessness in one of the world’s most expensive cities, is Tom Copley, deputy London mayor for housing and residential development.
Inside Housing has come to City Hall to sit down with Mr Copley and find out more. We also talked about whether emergency measures to boost housebuilding in the capital are working yet, the role of build-to-rent, and whether a new Help to Buy scheme is needed.
London’s City Hall is located in the Royal Docks in the east of the city, right next to the London Cable Car terminus. An all-glass, angular building that was originally designed by Siemens to be a museum, in 2022 it was converted into office space and the Greater London Authority (GLA) moved in.
When we catch up with Mr Copley in one of the modern but compact meeting rooms, he’s in a blue suit that brings to mind the Transport for London brand colours. We’ve only got half an hour to chat, and top of the list is London’s housing development slump. Earlier this year, the GLA and central government put in place emergency measures to turn that slump around. Is it working?
“We got a really good response,” Mr Copley says. “We are already getting some applications through under it. Developers have until 31 March 2028 to get their applications validated, but I think the early signs are positive.”
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Among the measures was a new ‘fast track’ planning route for developments on private land, which cut the proportion of affordable homes required from a minimum of 35% to a minimum of 20%. Grant will also be available for of half the affordable homes in a project – normally something that is only possible if developments exceed the number of affordable homes required by planning.
Speaking about the measures earlier this year at the MIPIM property conference in the south of France, Mr Copley acknowledged that the percentage drop was “hard for all of us to swallow”. Still, the hope was for the measures to boost building in London and make 2026 a “turnaround” year for housing.
35% of nothing?
A few months later, events may have taken some of the polish off. “Obviously, the emergency measures coming in has coincided with the war in the Middle East, and Donald Trump bombing Iran, which has inevitably created some uncertainty that we didn’t really need in the housing sector,” Mr Copley says.
Closer to home, the cut to affordable housing is also now being challenged by three London boroughs, two of which have turned from Labour to Green in the May local elections.
Green-led Lewisham and Hackney joined up with Aspire-led Tower Hamlets to launch a judicial review at the end of June, with Lewisham mayor Liam Shrivastava saying London mayor Sir Sadiq “has provided no justification for these changes, which will undoubtedly reduce the number of affordable homes built in London”.
Mr Copley won’t comment on the judicial review process directly, but stresses: “The emergency measures are in place. We do expect boroughs to adhere to them. We at the GLA will be continuing to adhere to them as well.”
However, he does passionately defend the principle of the measures. “We absolutely do want more affordable housing,” he argues. “The thinking behind the emergency measures, is very, very sound, [it] is that 20% of something is better than 35% of nothing, or very little.”
If City Hall had pressed ahead with the 35% requirement, he argues, “in terms of overall numbers, you end up with less affordable housing. I don’t think any of us want that”.
The previous 35% threshold of affordable housing “was definitely the right policy when the previous draft of the [London] Plan was published in 2017, but we do have to be flexible, and there’s been so many changes that have taken place in that time”.
The next draft of the London Plan is expected any day. Mr Copley says it will be a “slimmed-down document – and not because we’ve made the font smaller”.
The GLA has rationalised and reduced the London Plan with the aim of getting more homes built. “It is genuinely half the length of the current London Plan and half the number of policies as well, and that’s a result of number of things,” Mr Copley says.
Some of the policies in the last London Plan have since been adopted nationally and don’t need replicating, he says, but there’s also been a clear attempt to cut the planning burden. “We very much heard the message around the burdens that can be placed on developers, particularly at this moment, where the viability is very, very strained in London. So we think that a streamlined, simplified London Plan is the right approach going forward,” Mr Copley explains.
The next plan will aim to “maximise” the number of affordable homes, he says. “But we’ve also got our funding levers as well.”
This is a reference to the £11.7bn slice of grant that the GLA has to distribute in the next 10 years, but Mr Copley also notes the GLA is “taking bids for” its £324m City Hall Developer Investment Fund, aimed at unlocking stalled sites and boosting new home development, which was also part of the emergency package.
“Twenty per cent is not something that we regard as the ceiling, you know,” Mr Copley observes. “We want to use the funding levers that we’ve got to push that affordable housing level up even more.”
He is also keen to mention the £100m that Sir Sadiq has invested for the GLA to join the Silvertown Partnership, which is building 7,000 homes in the area around City Hall, on a site that Mr Copley says has been derelict for 40 years.
“We’ve just had the first of just over 100 affordable homes completed by Guinness and Lendlease on there, so this investment will secure the future of that site,” he adds.
Councils leading the way
We’re doing this interview in a moment of political change, in the period before Mr Burnham is all but guaranteed to take up the post of prime minister. Mr Burnham has already staked out his interest in council housing, something the London mayor and his deputy have long supported.
When Inside Housing last profiled Mr Copley three years ago, we did the interview on the site of Newham Council’s Mews House development of 26 houses designed by Peter Barber, and the deputy mayor called the uptick of London council building the “proudest achievement of Sadiq’s administration”.
So it’s maybe not surprising that Mr Copley is enthusiastic about Mr Burnham’s commitment to council housing. “My ears really pricked up, and actually I was really pleased, because London has been leading the way,” he says.
Since the GLA’s council programme started in 2018, Mr Copley says: “We started just shy of 30,000 council homes, just over 16,000 complete, and in recent years we’ve been delivering more new council homes in London than the rest of the country combined. So when Andy Burnham talks about this mass council housing housebuilding programme, I’m really delighted”.
The figures include all homes started by councils, not just those supported by grant from the GLA, but this has clearly been a huge boost for London councils.
In our most recent Biggest Council House Builders list, out of the top 10 councils in the UK building the most homes, eight were London boroughs. Southwark took the top spot, having completed 689 homes in 2024-25.
“When Sadiq took office in 2016, there were just three homes for social rent in City Hall’s pipelines,” Mr Copley says.
The mayor’s response included a specific fund of over £1bn called Building Council Homes for Londoners, as well as funding for local authorities to beef up their development skills. The GLA has also been a flexible partner for local authorities, councils have told Inside Housing, working with them to boost development.
London has “a real desire to do more”, Mr Copley adds. “There’s a real appetite out there from councils, despite the fact that lots of them have been struggling with finances over the last few years. There’s a real desire to deliver new housing, and actually, when I go and visit these schemes, there’s a real civic pride in councils being back in the business of delivering homes.”
Struggling with finances is putting it mildly. Earlier this year, Southwark Council published a survey of 66 stock-owning councils in England, and found that 41% expect to pause, delay or cancel council housebuilding plans.
This week, the Local Government Association calculated that English councils may face a £7bn funding gap within the next three years.
Councils have been advocating for a rehash of the 2012 finance settlement with central government which, in combination with the George Osborne-era cut to social rents, has left council Housing Revenue Accounts struggling. But many have also been shifting funds into improving existing homes as the regulatory environment has toughened.
Several councils in London have been given failing consumer grades by the English regulator. Analysts speak about a ‘London effect’ when it comes to the tenant satisfaction measures, because scores in the capital trend lower than much of the rest of England.
One of the main focuses of our interview with Mr Copley back in 2023 was a promise by the GLA not to give grant funding to organisations that were failing existing tenants. But it turns out this is no longer the case. Mr Copley points out that the regulatory regime has changed dramatically since that policy was put in place, with the introduction of consumer regulations and Awaab’s Law.
“There’s much less need to be restricting capital, and in fact, what restricting capital can do is prevent social landlords from building really good new high-quality council homes,” he argues. “So, when it comes to regulating consumer standards… we very much expect the regulator to be playing its role in doing that.”
Not just social housing
Outside councils and affordable housing providers, Mr Copley sees a big role for other players, including build-to-rent landlords. “I think if you look at the very high housing needs assessment that we got from the government, I don’t think there’s a way of really getting towards that target without a lot of build-to-rent coming into the system,” he says.
The latest government target for London says the city needs to add 84,884 homes year. Build-to-rent can also be more professionally managed than some small private landlords, he says: “I think it can perhaps be a less patchy experience for all tenants.”
London’s housing market has also been struggling with low demand. What does Mr Copley make of the growing calls for a new version of Help to Buy?
“I think the government should be looking at that,” he says firmly. “It’s no secret that private sales are very sluggish at the moment, and there are all sorts of reasons for that.”
“I think not least the fact that people were expecting two interest rate cuts this year, and because of the war in the Middle East, that has not come to pass, unfortunately,” he adds. “I do think there needs to be some thinking about this now.”
Help to Buy, he concedes, “was not without its problems” – many analysts have criticised it for simply pushing up prices. Nevertheless, Mr Copley does think “there needs to be some serious consideration to some sort of measures to help people to buy in the current market”.
But to go back to the main topic for Inside Housing readers: affordable housing. Only 613 out of 10,000 affordable homes built in the city when we did that last profile of Mr Copley were social rent.
The latest government figures show that 17,750 homes were built in the capital in 2025-26, reflecting the construction downturn. But the GLA’s stats show that 6,545 were for social rent, a huge rise in three years.
“It’s easy to forget, I think, that the Cameron/Osborne government, combined with Boris Johnson when he was mayor, essentially got rid of social rent as a tenure,” Mr Copley notes. “Everyone was supposed to be switching over to affordable rent, which was up to 80% of market rents, and effectively funding for social rent was ended.”
When Sir Sadiq was elected mayor, he created a new tenure called London Affordable Rent. While it is calculated using a different formula to social rent, the intention was the same in that it aims to create low-cost, affordable housing.
The mayor also created a tenure called London Living Rent, aimed at middle-income Londoners. Only 3,150 of these homes have been completed so far. Is this a bit disappointing?
Mr Copley says he recently visited a London Living Rent resident in a “gorgeous” flat in east London, that showed the value of the tenure. “It’s much more affordable than private renting,” he points out.
The new grant programme still includes the option for London Living Rent, which is meant to convert to shared ownership after 10 years, a condition set by the previous Conservative government. But the GLA programme also introduces another new tenure called Key Worker Living Rent, which will be “intermediate rent in perpetuity”.
“The rents are based on being affordable at average key worker incomes,” he says, and rents will increase by Consumer Price Index +1% each year. “It’s got the certainty to encourage more investment in it, so we think it balances affordability with inevitability, and will, as a result, hopefully see more development,” he says.
The main focus, though, is increasingly likely to be on the most affordable tenures: London Affordable Rent and social rent.
“I do think it’s important to acknowledge the success that we’ve seen in London in bringing back social rent as the default low-cost rented tenure”
As the politics around social housing were reset after Grenfell, the grant programme in England shifted to fund more social rent homes, and the Labour government has moved the balance of the current Social and Affordable Homes Programme even further, to target at least 60% social rent. Mr Burnham has indicated that as prime minister he wants to go further.
“Of course, we’re still not where we need to be. We still have long waiting lists. We have one in 21 children living in temporary accommodation, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge the success that we’ve seen in London in bringing back social rent as the default low-cost rented tenure,” Mr Copley says.
The deputy mayor notes that the most recent rough sleeping numbers that came out days before our interview show a decline. He says: “It’s a small fall, it’s 2%. But what I hope that shows is that some of the measures we’ve taken, including the mayor’s Plan of Action on rough sleeping, are starting to have an impact.” However, overall homelessness has been going up.
In the lead up to the Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force this May, many in the government and homelessness sector argued it would reduce the number of people becoming homeless from the private rented sector. Has City Hall detected any evidence of this yet? Mr Copley doesn’t give much away other than saying the GLA is monitoring the impact.
“It’s very early days yet, but our strong belief is that will be an important measure to prevent people from becoming homeless,” he says.
In the lead-up to the implementation date of the act, there was a surge of Section 21 evictions under the old rules. Mr Copley calls this “appalling behaviour” on the part of landlords, adding that this “will have just been a temporary blip that can’t happen anymore, and we’ll also obviously be looking very carefully to make sure that there aren’t any loopholes that landlords might try to try to exploit to get around [the act]”.
Our time with the deputy mayor is running out, but we slip in an extra question about Mr Copley’s future. He’s been doing the job since 2020, when he took over James Murray, who left to become an MP. Mr Murray is now health secretary. What does Mr Copley see himself doing in the future?
Mr Copley’s answer suggests he might stick around in the housing world: “The thing about housing and regeneration is that, and this is sometimes frustrating, it’s really quite slow. It’s long term and slow burn.
“I have a very strong desire to see through some of the stuff that we’re getting started now.”
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