Report Slams London's Building Rules

LONDON — A new report from a leading developers' trade body has urged London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, to take drastic measures to address the capital's worsening housing crisis. The Home Builders Federation (HBF) has called for a significant reduction in affordable housing quotas and the release of protected green belt land for construction, arguing that current policies are stifling the building of new homes.

The report, titled 'Mind the Gap', points to a number of contributing factors to a "perfect storm" in the capital's housing market. According to the HBF, London completed only 30,000 new homes in the past year, a figure far short of the 440,000 homes London is expected to deliver as its contribution to the government's ambitious 1.5 million new homes target by 2030. This decline in London's housebuilding contrasts with a smaller drop in the rest of England. The HBF believes a combination of low demand from first-time buyers, excessive bureaucracy within the planning system, and delays caused by the new Building Safety Regulator (BSR) are to blame. The BSR, which was established in 2022, has also faced criticism from the mayor's office over its slow approval processes.

According to the HBF, the mayor's current London Plan is too complex and off-putting for developers. The report's authors stated that London's policies are more cumbersome and difficult to navigate than anywhere else in the country. To combat this, the HBF recommended that the next London Plan, due in 2027, should be simplified to ease the burden on developers. John Myers, a director at the YIMBY (Yes in my Back Yard) Alliance, supported this view, noting that only 731 new market homes were started in London during the second quarter of 2025. He highlighted specific rules, such as the "dual-aspect requirement" and an "arbitrary cap of eight homes per staircase or lift core," as examples of policies that make some building sites financially unviable.

A key point of contention in the report is the current requirement for new developments to have 35% of their units designated as affordable housing. The HBF considers this percentage to be too high and proposes a reduction to 25%. The report also called on the government to scrap the Building Safety Levy, which is scheduled to come into force in 2026 and would require developers to pay to fix building defects.

However, the report's findings have been met with strong opposition. Suzanne Muna, from the Social Housing Action Campaign (Shac), argued that developers' calls to cut the number of affordable homes are driven more by a desire for profit than genuine concerns over planning complexity. She also stressed that regulations are essential and should be maintained, especially following the Grenfell fire tragedy.

A spokesperson for City Hall responded by saying that the mayor is "doing everything in his power to deliver more homes of all tenures" and is "taking hard decisions," including exploring the potential for developing on green belt land. They added that the current national housing crisis is a "disastrous inheritance from the previous government."