House Building: London

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

Thank you, Mr Mundell. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship. I thank the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Mr French) for securing this debate. It is extremely timely, because it is less than a fortnight since I was last in this Chamber debating housing policy—it seems that I am the Liberal Democrats’ housing spokesperson for London. Contrary to what some in the Government seem to think, there is no inherent tension between the three most important tasks facing us: to build safe homes, to build green homes and to build affordable homes. The limitations or structural problems with the market are self-imposed by our lack of ambition and our worrying proclivity to shun innovation.

During the debate two weeks ago, the Housing Secretary and the Mayor of London were announcing the raft of measures that triggered this subsequent debate. The measures were announced not at the Dispatch Box, or even in this Chamber in front of what would have been a captive audience, but to the press, giving us no opportunity to scrutinise them and rendering that Westminster Hall debate moot. I invite the Minister to confirm that no subsequent major changes with such a profound impact on the local authorities that everyone in this room works with on a daily basis and on our constituents will be made outside of this place.

Frankly, those measures are not small fry; they hand developers a get-out while Londoners on waiting lists across our city continue to suffer, and they are a threat to the financial stability and forward-planning ability of local authorities across London. The Liberal Democrats are clear: the plans will not solve the housing crisis in London, but make things worse.

[Munira Wilson]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that the measures announced by the Mayor of London and the new Housing Secretary actually reward developers and do not incentivise them? Not only will the mayor be funding half of developers’ affordable housing if they meet the new target, but our local authorities will have their community infrastructure levy money slashed. In Richmond, we could lose £21.5 million of CIL money from the Stag brewery site. That comes on top of the Labour Government cutting our core Government funding under their so-called fair funding formula. Our communities are going to be left without the infrastructure they need and deserve alongside new housing developments.

[Luke Taylor]

I thank my hon. Friend for providing that example of the impact on a specific project, which shows how difficult this will be for our councils.

The announced measures will quietly reduce the requirement for affordable homes from 35% to 20%, forcibly slash the community infrastructure levy money, and barely scratch the surface of the bigger and more profound structural barriers to getting green, affordable and safe housing built. The Government have triggered great uncertainty and more financial instability for local authorities while achieving very little in the shake-up, seemingly because they think that big, decisive action with very little prep work and no consultation is the way to get things done. The Housing Secretary is clearly taking more than just headwear inspiration from a certain world leader—which would make sense if it were not his own zone that he is flooding with a substance that the courtesies of this House do not allow me to name.

In all seriousness, the housing crisis in London deserves more than a knee-jerk reaction. There are 330,000 households stuck on social housing waiting lists—more than the total number of households in our two largest boroughs, Barnet and Croydon, combined. As we have heard, London boroughs are spending £5 million a day on temporary accommodation, although I have heard that figure for about a year, so it must be considerably more by now. According to London Councils, there is a £700 million shortfall in the housing revenue accounts that fund new house building.

The proposed measures will simply make that worse, for two main reasons. First, the Government will facilitate the right kind of house building not by dropping the regulations that developers face, but by amending them and fixing the structural issues within the Building Safety Regulator. Secondly, the measures actively—and inexcusably—disrupt the already stretched financial picture for local authorities. I will take them in turn.

First, granting the right to reduce the level of affordable housing per project fails to recognise that the proliferation of a particular kind of luxury, unaffordable housing in London means that it is unlikely that new building accelerated under the scheme will ease upward pressures on house prices in the capital. Giving the mayor new powers to call in decisions and accelerate them almost on a whim does nothing to address the concerns that local authorities and local residents will have about their ability to object to new housing that will not contribute to solving the crisis. The measures seem to be imposed in an imagined battle against the nimbys, when most in London have lived experience of housing instability—either their own or that of younger family members, co-workers or friends—and, as such, are in favour of the kind of house building that actually addresses the crisis.

[Danny Beales]

I share the hon. Member’s view of the general public’s opinion on the issue, but as a cabinet member during seven years of planning and redevelopment in Camden, I rarely heard those voices in planning committees. Unfortunately, the voices that are heard are often disproportionately against development and do not represent the people on housing waiting lists. I just challenge the presentation of the public view through the planning system. Is it not true, too, that many local authorities take far too long to determine applications? In my borough—I have just had an email—it has taken six months to draft a section 106 heads of terms document, two years since the planning was approved. Is that not unacceptable?

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

Order. Mr Taylor, you have taken two lengthy interventions. I am afraid that they will not be in addition to your time.

[Luke Taylor]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention, but I will move on swiftly.

In my experience in Sutton we subscribe to the “yify”—“yes, if”—approach that I have spoken about a number of times. We do not need to water down community buy-in. We might need to make it faster and more efficient, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater will only lead to the wrong housing being built in the wrong places and leave us wondering, in 30 years’ time, why the mistake was not glaringly obvious to people today. That is not a new approach that has reared its head in these measures; the decisions to cut the portion of affordable housing expected from developments in the recent “Homes for Londoners” plan, and to set the annual national social house building target at just 20,000 social homes per year, show that the Government simply do not have a credible plan to provide the kind of housing the country needs.

We need an ambitious whole-of-Government approach to build up to 150,000 social homes each year. It can be done, and the Government need look no further than the Liberal Democrats’ plans. We would give local authorities the power to stop Help to Buy in their area and, as a last resort, to stop the right to buy too, and give them the first right to purchase all public land for social housing. We would also fix the Building Safety Regulator by ending the mismatch between fire safety standards and the Building Safety Act 2022, speeding up the backlog of confusion and incomplete assessments for remediation, while ensuring that the building safety levy covers all the costs so that leaseholders are protected from paying. As well as making it more affordable to insulate existing homes, we would ensure that all new homes are zero carbon and provide proper incentives for critical household infrastructure such as heat pumps. That is how we build more affordable homes—not by tearing up regulations with no regard to the impact, but by smartening regulations and intervening with serious, meaningful incentives to build the right kinds of housing.

Secondly, it will be news to nobody that the financial picture for London councils is dire. The city’s 32 boroughs overspent by £330 million on housing and temporary accommodation budgets last year alone—double the previous year’s figure. As London Councils has demonstrated, the cost of the London homelessness crisis is the greatest threat to the financial stability of London boroughs. Watering down the community infrastructure levy—perhaps the most notable way that councils recoup costs and benefits from house building in the short term—is simply another hammer blow in that regard.

[David Mundell (in the Chair)]

Order. I think this might be the point at which you need to conclude.

[Luke Taylor]

Skipping ahead, I invite the Minister to tell us why anyone who cares about solving the housing crisis and protecting local councils in London should vote Labour at the local elections in May, particularly when the only party consistently standing up for those hit hardest by the housing crisis, and for our cash-strapped local councils, is the London Liberal Democrats.