House Building: London

Debate between Emily Thornberry and David Mundell

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) on getting this slot. As he can see, the subject is close to the hearts of so many of us; more importantly, it is close to the hearts of our constituents.

In Islington, those who want affordable housing have to have social housing. Nothing else works. In Islington, we therefore need to have a policy to maximise social housing. People can rent privately, but the only way they can afford to rent privately is by renting out one room each: that means having a single person sleeping in the sitting room, and other single people sleeping in the bedrooms. We have lots of large, dark, sad tower blocks that were built under the Liberal Democrats, which have been bought for investment purposes and are not used. Their lights are off at night, nobody is on the voter register —they are just there, and they laugh at the 17,000 people on the waiting list in Islington who desperately need social housing. Those are Islington people who want to live in Islington, and there is no space for them.

Frankly, politics in Islington begins and ends with housing. We have some very rich people, some lucky people and some very poor people in Islington, but moving to Islington is impossible for an ordinary person. We have a vibrant community. We are a tiny community—Islington is one of the tiniest boroughs in Britain. Let me give hon. Members some stats about it: Bexley borough is four times bigger and Bromley borough is ten times bigger than Islington. The Minister is likely to say that 20% of something is better than 35% of nothing. I get that, but I do not think that one size fits all, particularly in little brave Islington.

Since the current Chief Secretary to the Treasury was in charge of housing in Islington, we have had a policy that 50% of all new developments need to be affordable. We say to the developer, “Fine. The land is expensive. You’re going to make a killing on the flats that you build. But half of them have to be for local people, which means that they have to be affordable, which means they have to be social, because nothing else is affordable in Islington. We will let you have half, but half of it has to be for us, and that is how it is.”

We have been doing that, and it has not meant that we have got nothing. Since 2020, seven schemes have gone through in Islington, which has resulted in nearly 1,000 affordable homes. That may not seem like a lot, but it is in somewhere as cramped as Islington where the opportunities are as few as we get. I have the least amount of green space of any MP in the whole of Britain. I have 120,000 people crammed into the seventh smallest constituency in the country. We have 15,000 people per kilometre. Our opportunities for development are limited.

I appreciate that it has recently become more difficult for local authorities to build by themselves, but until recently the joke was that if someone left their garage in the morning to drive to work, by the time they came back the local authority would have built a flat there. It is a political and social imperative to build as much housing for our people as we possibly can, and that is what we want to do. Unlike the Bromleys and the other boroughs, we have only little infill sites. We do not have big developments. Please do not give everybody instructions to do exactly the same thing because that is not going to work.

I ask that we look at what can be achieved and allow Islington to continue to insist on 50% so that when we do get our tiny little sites available for development, we can say to a developer, “You are very welcome. Welcome to Islington. We are headbangers. We have 17,000 people on the waiting list. You have to build half of it as affordable housing. You know that because we have been saying it for 15 years and we will continue to do so.” We would rather the Government did not undermine that so that we can continue to do it.

It is more difficult to get those developments, and it may be that those sites will take a bit longer to be developed. However, we would rather such tiny sites as we have be developed for social housing and local people and take a bit longer to develop than yet another great big tower block that is empty, dark and owned by people in China who have decided to build to buy a flat in Islington instead of a gold bar. That is the reality of housing in Islington.

I know that the Minister knows what I am talking about. I know that he is very thoughtful and an absolute expert in housing and wants to do exactly what we want. We know that the housing crisis can be solved only by building more housing. Absolutely—he has my full support on that. But we need to have housing that local people can live in. The reality of the economy in central and inner London is that we must have affordable housing. Otherwise people will continue to come.

Whenever I speak about housing in Islington, I try not to cherry-pick; I just talk about the last time someone spoke to me about housing. Someone spoke to me about housing on Saturday. I knocked on their door and there was a terrible noise. There was a child in the corridor screaming and screaming. Mum had her headphones on because the child is clearly autistic. She came to the door and said, “Emily, I’ve been to see you so many times and you just cannot get me rehoused, can you? There’s five of us in this one-bedroom flat.” That is the reality. That is why we have to build more social housing in Islington. That is how people live, and it is wrong. Our absolute priority must be to build more homes that families like that can live in.

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

I call Peter Fortune, who I am sure will stick to the five-minute limit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emily Thornberry]

On a point of order, Mr Mundell. I should have drawn the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I rent out my late mother’s flat. We bought it for her so that she could release our council house back to the council.

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

Duly noted.