Sadiq Khan’s planning deputy, Jules Pipe, has cast doubt on the Government’s promise to deliver an average of 300,000 new homes per year over the next five years.
Labour promised in its manifesto to “get Britain building again, creating jobs across England, with 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament”.
The last Conservative Government pledged to build one million homes between 2019 and 2024 - a target it said it had just about managed by the time of this year’s general election, though official data later this month will confirm whether the milestone was achieved.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Centre for London think tank on Monday, Mr Pipe, who serves as London’s deputy mayor for planning and regeneration, said: “I don’t understand how you deliver 1.5m in those [next] five years.
“I can’t understand why the Government didn’t say, ‘We’ll be building at that rate at the end of the five years.’ If they can do that, then actually I think they will have come out of it with some degree of honour, that they are actually beginning to meet what they promised.
“But no Government can hit the ground running, building at the same rate that it builds at the end of its five years. The infrastructure isn’t there, the skills system isn’t there, let alone the funding.”
Approached for comment, a spokeswoman at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “We will deliver the 1.5 million homes that the country desperately needs.
“We have already taken decisive steps to get there by unclogging the planning system, setting up a taskforce to build new towns, reintroducing housing targets, and unlocking brownfield sites and grey belt land for thousands of new homes.
“At the Budget, we also announced an extra £500m for the Affordable Homes Programme as part of our commitment to deliver the biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation.”
Mr Pipe’s comments came shortly after Mr Khan had told the conference that London is caught in the “toughest environment for housebuilding” since the 2008 global banking crash.
The deputy mayor also spoke candidly about the capital’s specific housing targets, saying that more funding would be required to ensure that enough of the homes are genuinely affordable for Londoners.
Under the last Tory Government, London was tasked with building 99,000 new homes per year. But Labour has reduced the capital’s target to 81,000 homes, despite having increased England’s overall target.
This lower London target would still, however, mean doubling the number of homes currently being built in the city. According to Government data, only 35,305 ‘net additional dwellings’ were created in the capital in the 2022/23 financial year.
Mr Pipe said the previous Conservative target for London was a “fantasy figure”, but added: “The best we’ve done in recent years is 40,000 a year, and we’re probably heading now south, down towards 30,000.
“If you were building any one of those higher numbers [under the former and current Government’s targets], two thirds of them would need to be affordable… So where’s the money coming to make two thirds of those homes that we build genuinely affordable?
“Because otherwise, if you were building at those rates - 70, 80, 90,000 homes a year - very quickly, you’re going to be building homes that are going to go unsold, because the market will not absorb those numbers.
“But what the wider, social market will absorb, is genuinely affordable homes, as fast as you can build them.”
Mr Pipe’s was speaking in a panel discussion about London’s future development. He was joined by Peter Mason, the Labour leader of Ealing Council, who said targets “focus the mind” in terms of boosting the capital’s housing stock.
“But I think London has to face the hard reality that our challenge is not land and it’s not planning applications,” he added.
“300,000 [homes proposed in] planning applications are already in the system and have been given consent, that are waiting to be built.
“Ten years ago, the build-out rate for planning permissions was 25 per cent, for planning applications submitted and granted. That rate is now 10 per cent.”
The higher cost of borrowing to finance housing projects has eaten into developers’ profits and reduced their incentive to proceed with schemes, the conference was told.
