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LORD BAILEY AM: LONDON MUST GET RADICAL TO GET BUILDING

  • Writer: City Hall Conservatives
    City Hall Conservatives
  • 1 day ago
  • 3 min read

Updated: 35 minutes ago

  • London is now building the fewest homes of any English region per capita. 

  • Housing starts are down by 73% in London over the past year. 

  • London is on track for fewer than 5,000 private construction starts in the whole of 2025. 

  • By 2027/28, just 6% of the homes the government says London needs are forecast to be built. 

 

City Hall Conservatives Assembly Member and former Mayoral candidate Lord Bailey of Paddington AM has today launched a new report, Get London Building (read below), which examines the causes of the London housing crisis and the housebuilding crisis, calling for proactive solutions to tackle it.  

 

Recommendations in Get London Building include: 

 

  • Fast-tracking the building of at least 75,000 homes on land the Mayor, the Greater London Authority (GLA) and Transport for London (TfL) already own. 

  • Identifying and fast-tracking sites for New Villages across London, starting with 10,000+ homes and new infrastructure at the Royal Docks in Newham, on land already owned by City Hall. 

  • Abolishing targets for ‘affordable’ housing, allowing developers to build significantly more homes. Targets for this kind of housing, which most Londoners subsidise through their taxes but will never be eligible for, render developments unviable and stop homes from being built, making it harder for buyers to get on the housing ladder. 

  • The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) is not functioning as intended, placing people at risk by delaying essential building safety works and delaying thousands of new homes by rejecting 70% of applications. Legislation should be updated to reform the regulator and ensure it can do what it was designed for – preventing another tragedy like Grenfell. 

  • The government should commit to funding the DLR extension to Thamesmead in the upcoming Budget, immediately unlocking 15,000 homes. 

  • In the upcoming Budget, the government should introduce a tax relief system for developers proportionate to the number of homes built, abolish stamp duty land tax for primary residences and reinstate first time buyer support. 

  • The government should support more flexible and low deposit mortgage options, especially among middle and higher earners with good credit history. Rental payment history should routinely be used within a mortgage application and should be included in overall credit scores. 

 

 

 

Lord Bailey AM has been a longstanding campaigner for building more homes and held the first London Housing Conference at City Hall in March, attended by figures and experts across the industry. 

 

Lord Bailey said: “We have had a housing crisis in London for many years, but what we have now is a housebuilding crisis as well. We cannot go on like this. Letting this crisis deepen further is a choice. We do not have to make it. We can make London a far more attractive and prosperous city by getting serious about building. 

 

“Nobody benefits from this current crisis – whether you are a private renter spending half your salary on rent, whether you are looking for a buyer for your home but can’t find one because so few young people can get a mortgage, or whether you are on a social housing waiting list. Everybody loses. Having been a youth worker for 30 years and having been homeless myself, I know first-hand everything else in life comes back to having a home of your own.” 



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