What you need to know about… London housing
What you need to know about housing in London – from development to homelessness and what the changing politics might mean. Jess McCabe reports ahead of Housing 2026
What you need to know about… London housing #Housing2026 #UKhousingWhat you need to know about housing in London – from development to homelessness and what the changing politics might mean. Jess McCabe reports ahead of #Housing2026 #UKhousingLondon’s housing crisis is bad for the residents in the capital, but it also has ramifications for the whole of the UK. Next week in Manchester, a theatre at the Housing 2026 conference will be dedicated to London housing.
So before you go, we bring you a short guide to what is going on in London’s housing sector. What will be the main topics of debate? Who are the important people to hear from? And what ideas might come up?
From ‘build, baby, build’ to ‘oh, please can someone build some homes’
London has a housebuilding problem.
Only 6,325 homes were started in the first three months of the year. Or, as JLL pointed out earlier this month, only 7% of the annual target set out in the London Plan. The consultancy’s research pinned this on the growing number of unsold homes, as the new build premium (new build in London costs 26% more per square metre than buying an existing home) combines with familiar issues of high service charges.
To this, you can add in: high construction costs, delays in building regulations for tall buildings, planning issues and the high cost of finance.
There is a slightly different story for affordable housing compared with the wider market – the latest statistics from the Greater London Authority (GLA) show a 135% jump in affordable housing starts in the last financial year. Starts on new homes funded by the GLA’s programmes hit 9,355 in 2025-26, compared with just 3,991 the year before. Most of these homes are social rent.
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While that’s obviously a big bounce back, it’s hard to get too excited when the GLA was targeting 17,800 homes in this period.
The GLA, mayor and central government have been pulling levers to try and stimulate housebuilding: London has an £11.7bn share of the 10-year Social and Affordable Homes Programme. On top of this, there have been two sets of emergency measures. This included a cut to the percentage of affordable housing that private developers must include, among other things.
Take the case of Clarion. It is one of the most ambitious developing housing associations in the country. But in an interview with Inside Housing editor Martin Hilditch last week, development chief Richard Cook explained how Clarion has shifted its development focus away from London. “When I came to the business seven years ago, we were 80% London and South East-centric, 20% the rest of the country, and now our balance is 35% London and the South East and 65% rest of the UK.”
Readers keen to know the latest on this issue might want to take themselves to the ‘Fireside chat’ on 23 June, where Inside Housing contributing editor Peter Apps will be in conversation with Tom Copley, deputy London mayor for housing and residential development.
Clarion’s Mr Cook is speaking on a panel that looks at how to get tall buildings right – from development to management and the resident experience. The panel also includes architect Craig Sheach from PRP Architects and Abi Oguntokun, director of landlord services at Southwark Council.
Where next?
Plenty of voices have been calling for further government intervention, with some kind of incentives for buyers on the list. “One of the strongest temptations this government has is to flip that switch of Help to Buy,” says Daniel Reast, senior research officer at the Centre for London.
The thinktank’s chief executive, Antonia Jennings, is also speaking at Housing, on a panel on developing London for national growth, alongside Joanne Drew, executive director for housing and regeneration at Enfield Council.
Enfield Council, Inside Housing readers might know, switched control at the recent local elections and almost immediately pulled its support for the new town that was slated for construction in the borough.
One factor on the horizon is how the Renters’ Rights Act will play out in the market. In the lead-up to the implementation of the act, evidence suggested a surge in private rented sector landlords using Section 21 to evict tenants before it was abolished.
Interestingly for social landlords, the Centre for London is proposing a renewed focus on delivery of intermediate rent homes in the light of small landlords exiting the market. The city has the London Living Rent tenure aimed at ‘middle-income’ residents. According to the GLA, this equates to about £1,409 a month for a two-bedroom London Living Rent home. However, only 923 of these have been built so far, as the government’s most recent statistics show.
The Centre for London is proposing something on a bigger scale – a municipal version of build-to-rent that involves the public sector.
The thinktank is one of a growing number calling for a more radical overhaul: scrapping stamp duty and council tax, and replacing them with a property tax. Whether such a big and difficult change is seriously being considered by this government is another question, but the Conservatives have committed to end stamp duty and some in Reform UK are in favour, too.
Leasehold reform is also going to be particularly significant for London as it is home to the biggest concentration of leasehold homes in England. Any policy will have to consider London at its heart because, as Mr Reast says, the capital is “the golden goose”, bringing in one-third of the total stamp duty income to the Treasury at £4bn a year.
Affordability and homelessness
London accounts for half the homeless population in England, and one in 21 children are living in temporary accommodation. At the end of last year, the GLA launched the London Ending Homelessness Accelerator with the intention of testing ideas that could help ease the crisis, and this is slated for discussion on the conference agenda along with other ideas for improving the city’s approach to homelessness and making a dent in those figures.
There will also be a session on ‘Housing, work and cost-of-living pressures on households’. As well as looking at the role of social housing providers, this panel will touch on what further devolution could do and how national programmes could be tailored to London’s Labour market.
Lynsey Sweeney, managing director at Communities that Work, will be on this panel. Communities that Work has been running an employment pilot based on social housing estates, borrowed from a successful programme in the United States, which Inside Housing reported on last year.
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