Sadiq Khan’s green belt U-turn is an admission of failure on housing
Sadiq Khan is spinning his plan to build on London’s green belt as a “radical change of approach”, but it’s nothing of the sort. It will have a very limited impact on housing starts during this mayoral term and may only add to the political heat around house building, says James Ford
Margaret Thatcher famously said that “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t”. As lessons in honest political communication go, what we might henceforth call ‘Thatcher’s Law’ is pretty fundamental. Last week, when the Mayor of London announced his decision to allow developers to build on the capital’s green belt, he felt compelled to describe the move as “a radical change of approach” about which he “needed to be honest with Londoners”. By applying Thatcher’s Law, we must conclude that if Sadiq Khan is telling people he is being radical and honest, then he is actually being neither of those things.
Rather than being “honest with Londoners”, Khan is actually pulling the wool over their eyes. He is trying to spin a spectacular U-turn as something bold and brave. Building on the green belt was previously a red line for the mayor. During his first run for City Hall, Khan told the Economist he was committed to protecting the green belt and one of his first planning decisions was to veto a green belt scheme for a football stadium and housing in Bromley. Whilst the green belt gets no mention in Sadiq’s most recent manifesto just weeks after his re-election last year the Mayor reassured the London Assembly that “London’s green belt is as important today as it has always been” and that policies for protecting it would remain in the London Plan.
Unfortunately for Khan, two things have changed since that reassurance was given. Firstly, the new Labour government has made it clear that it expects London to deliver a large proportion of its target of 1.5m new homes built. Within days of taking office, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner publicly rebuked Sadiq Khan for “falling well-short” on his housing targets.
The second change is that it has become much harder for the mayor to hide the scale of his failure to deliver against his existing housing targets. Khan might like to claim his hand has been forced by the government’s decision to set London’s housebuilding target at 88,000 a year. But he had already missed his own target – 52,000 a year – every year since he set it in 2021, building only around 35,000 homes per annum on average. And even that is looking like it cannot be maintained. Just last month the Evening Standard reported that housebuilding in London had slumped to its lowest levels since the midst of the Global Financial Crisis in 2009. According to data from analysts Molior, work began on just 1,210 new private flats and houses in the first quarter of the year. Perhaps most alarmingly, there were no house building starts at all in 23 out of London’s 33 local authority areas between January and March.
Making use of the green belt for development is not “a radical change of approach” by the mayor. It is surrendering to the inevitable. Building on the capital’s green belt is an idea that has been gaining support for a while now. Ahead of the 2021 GLA elections the Centre for Cities urged the mayor to undertake a strategic review of both the green belt and ‘Metropolitan Open Land’ to identify sites suitable for development. In 2023 the Centre for London published a report that estimated London could double the number of homes built to 74,000 a year for a period of 15 years by developing “low quality areas” of green belt. Support is not limited just to think tanks. A London Councils poll earlier this year showed that 56 per cent of Londoners supported building on the ‘grey belt’ – those parts of the green belt which have already been fully or partially developed (such as car parks and old petrol stations). Only 18 per cent of Londoners were opposed to the idea.
Too little too late
Nor is this new policy something that is being pursued with any great urgency. Whilst London policy anoraks like me get excited about the London Plan, it is only revised every five years in a process that fans might describe as ‘methodical’ (and detractors could accuse of being ‘glacial’). What Khan was unveiling in his keynote speech in Greenwich last week was the launch of the pre-consultation phase with the publication of a high-level document. The results of this first consultation will then be considered and a draft London Plan will be published in 2026 for another consultation. This will be followed by a lengthy examination phase before a new London Plan is finally formally adopted in 2027 at the earliest. The current London Plan – adopted way back in 2021 – remains in force until the new one is adopted. Given that the next mayoral elections are set for May 2028 (which is also when we might expect Labour to call the next general election), it is hard to see what real impact this change will have on house building numbers during either this mayoral term or even this Parliament.
Whilst a more permissive attitude to development on the green belt is likely to have a positive impact on house building in London eventually, it is far from the silver bullet that Sadiq Khan is making out. Building on the green built inevitably means building on London’s outskirts. As has been argued elsewhere in City AM, increasing housing density in inner London would be better as people are more likely to want to live a short distance from the capitals’ cultural and economic centre and the supporting infrastructure (most notably transport links) already exists.
A doughnut strategy?
Targeting outer London also amps up the political confrontation inherent in this policy change. One of the most stark political divides in the capital is between Labour-supporting inner London and Tory leaning outer London (the famous ‘doughnut’ that voted for Boris Johnson in 2008 and 2012). All four Conservative-controlled boroughs in outer London (Bexley, Bromley, Croydon, and Hillingdon) previously refused to participate in a City Hall review that sought redesignate green belt land as ‘grey belt’ earlier this year. If these same boroughs choose to fight a further rearguard against green belt development, then it is likely that many housing schemes will find themselves mired in legal challenges that will further delay getting spades into the ground. This issue could also be a flag that Conservatives (or even Reform) are able to rally support around, paving the way for taking control of boroughs that Labour currently holds in next year’s local elections.
Housing is one of the hottest political issues in the capital. These proposals look set to increase that political heat without providing much extra housebuilding in the short term. Building on London’s green belt is not the honest or radical solution that it is being pitched as. It is arguably too little, too late. If Sadiq Khan wanted to be honest, he would admit that his approach over the past nine years has failed. And, if he was serious about being radical, he would be proposing a much wider range of supply-side reforms to really turbocharge housebuilding in the capital. Instead, the mayor has chosen to spin, spin, spin when really he needs to build, build, build.
James Ford is a public affairs consultantand former advisor on transport, environment and technology policy to then mayor of London Boris Johnson