Sadiq Khan pledges to create GLA-owned housing developer if re-elected

Mr Copley added: “The initial stage is expanding on the work that City Hall’s already doing in the space of development, and in the next mayoral term we’ll be looking to pilot direct delivery through a City Hall developer.”

“The key thing is, we’re going to add value,” Mr Khan said. “We don’t want to duplicate what others are doing.”

“This is not about displacing the private sector or existing affordable housing providers,” Mr Copley said. “This is about things like bringing forward sites that perhaps wouldn’t come forward without public sector involvement, as we’re doing at Barking Riverside.

“At a time when housing associations are having to pull back a bit from direct development because of all the other pressures they’ve got around building safety, retrofit, maintenance and management, there’s a real space there for City Hall to add value,” he added.

Mr Khan and Mr Copley spoke to reporters at an event in Brent, where the mayor announced he had hit his target of 20,000 council-built homes by 2024 a year early.

In the past five years, work began on 23,000 new council homes funded by City Hall, the equivalent of 13 new council homes being started every day since 2018.

But the Conservatives dismissed the mayor’s record, saying Mr Khan was “marking his own homework”.

Andrew Boff, housing spokesperson for City Hall Conservatives, said: “The target that matters is the one he had received from the government with a record amount of funding, and unfortunately he is 18,000 homes short of achieving this. This invented target is just gaslighting Londoners.”

Mr Boff is one of at least four Conservatives who has expressed interest in challenging Mr Khan for the mayoralty. Mr Khan is running for a record third term in next May’s election.