Housing delivery – THF
The Housing Forum (THF) has published useful reports. One assessed Progress at July 2025 towards 1.5 m new homes target. Another in September 2025 is Barriers to housing delivery. It identifies challenges bringing housing delivery almost to a halt and offers solutions to financial constraints, planning complexities, regulatory pressures, workforce capacity and efficiency of working practices. The Government, the next London Plan and London’s local authorities will need policies to address those issues.
Right to Buy sales
The Government published figures in a report for the number of social homes sold, the number replaced and the receipts for LPAs.
Annual eligible sales in London peaked at 4,000 in 2014 and declined after that as discounts were reduced, although receipts from sales remained high.
Replacement properties for those sold have increasingly failed to meet the one-for-one target since 2017-18, as described in the report, and some reasons are suggested.
Assembly Affordable Housing report
The London Assembly Housing Committee published a report on affordable housing delivery. It shows that, as of March 2025, starts had been made on 5,200 new homes compared with a target of a minimum of 17,800.
Details and comments are at
London Assembly affordable housing monitor 2025.
Savills: Challenges for affordable housing delivery in London.
Rhys Williams: Politics and market reality are worlds apart.
Living on the streets
TfL have been granted permission to clear a temporary encampment of homeless people on the strip of green land in the centre of Park Lane. The Mayor pledged to end rough sleeping in the capital by 2030, as in the update in July on rough sleeping.
Figures from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (CHAIN) released as here show that almost 4,400 people were “living on the streets” in London from April – June 2025 which is up 26% from the same period last year and more than [more…]
Assembly questions for next London Plan
The London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee put questions on ‘Towards the next the London Plan’ on 9th June 2025 to two sets of guests.
The transcripts here and here of the discussions indicate what the Assembly may take into account in their scrutiny of London Plan Team work in preparing the 2026 draft replacement London Plan which will be consulted upon.
Comments by London Forum’s members on what was said are welcome, as there are likely to be variations across London on the points made by the [more…]
Will the next London Plan rise to the city’s real challenges?
This article was first published in Housing Today.
Ben Derbyshire reflects on Sadiq Khan’s latest policies to boost housebuilding in the capital.
You could be forgiven for thinking, following Sadiq Khan’s volte face on building in the green belt, that Londoners would be all over this issue like a rash. Far from it, if the mood among members of the London Society and the London Forum of Amenity and Civic Societies at a meeting convened on 13 May is anything to go by.
The [more…]
Cut in affordable homes
According to a 14th May 2025 BBC News report, the GLA and Government have agreed to reduce London’s target for the Affordable Homes Programme 2021-2026 from a range of 23,900 to 27,100 starts to 17,800 to 19,000 – a cut of 22%.
A GLA Housing in London report last November showed 2,358 City Hall funded affordable homes in 2023 until the end of Q2 2024 – a 91 per cent cut in the 25,658 affordable homes 2022-23. In 2024, 528 GLA-funded affordable homes began construction between March [more…]
Review of Green Belt
News channel ONLONDON reported Sadiq Khan’s review of London Green Belt following the Government’s addition to the December NPPF of ‘grey belt’ land. The Mayor intervened in the public inquiry of LB Enfield’s Local Plan in a way that has implications for any borough with Green Belt land as in another ONLONDON article here. A report from member, the Enfield Society, is here.
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