One of the first decisions taken by Southwark’s new Liberal Democrat-Green Joint Administration has been to back the legal challenge against the Mayor of London and MHCLG’s decision to reduce affordable housing requirements from 35% to 20%.
For me, as Southwark’s new Deputy Leader responsible for Strategic Planning, this was a straightforward decision.
Housing has always been one of the defining Liberal Democrat issues in our borough. For years we have challenged Labour’s failure to build enough genuinely affordable homes, called for stronger affordable housing requirements, and argued that local people deserve to be able to afford to live in the communities they grew up in.
Now that we have the opportunity to put those values into practice, we intend to do exactly that.
Southwark has 23,000 households on its housing waiting list and more than 4,300 households living in temporary accommodation, including more than 5,000 children. The shortage of genuinely affordable housing is the defining challenge facing our borough.
Affordable housing requirements are the benchmark against which councils work with and negotiate with developers. Lowering that benchmark makes it harder to secure genuinely affordable homes through the planning system and risks setting a weaker standard across London for years to come.
That is why Tower Hamlets, alongside Lewisham and Hackney, has launched a legal challenge. Southwark is proud to support it.
Some have suggested that councils should simply accept the Government and Mayor’s decision and get on with negotiating the best deal they can. I disagree. Liberal Democrats have never believed that local government should quietly accept decisions that make life worse for residents. If a decision from Whitehall and City Hall will leave London with fewer affordable homes, it is right to challenge it.
The decision also says something more fundamental about Labour’s approach to housing.
Labour has been in charge at City Hall for a decade. Until this May, it had controlled Southwark Council for sixteen years. It is now in government nationally as well. Yet London’s housing crisis has continued to deepen, with more families priced out of their communities and more children growing up in temporary accommodation.
The response should be to deliver more genuinely affordable homes, not to weaken the expectations placed on developers.
We have to build the city we want to live in. There are generations of Londoners growing up in our city who simply cannot afford to live in the neighbourhoods they call home. The answer to London’s housing crisis is absolutely to build more homes. But “build, baby, build” cannot simply mean asking the same handful of volume housebuilders to do more of what they already do.
The uncomfortable truth is that London’s housing delivery has stalled. High construction costs, interest rates, labour shortages, expensive finance and years of economic uncertainty (all of the above worsened by Brexit) mean the current market is unable to produce the volume and mix of homes we need. Twenty-five per cent of nothing is still nothing.
The problem is not that developers have no role to play. Far from it. But London has become too reliant on a small number of large volume housebuilders. When that part of the market slows, housing delivery across the capital slows with it.
If we want to build at the scale this country needs, we must diversify who is doing the building. That means backing housing associations, community-led housing, smaller and medium-sized builders, development corporations and, crucially, local councils. A more diverse housing market is a more resilient one, capable of continuing to deliver homes even when one part of the sector faces economic headwinds.
History shows that when councils were able to borrow, acquire land and build at scale, they played a central role in meeting London’s housing needs. They can do so again but only if government gives local authorities the powers, freedoms, long-term funding and borrowing powers to build once more. So when ministers say “build, baby, build”, I agree. But empower councils build the genuinely affordable homes our communities desperately need.
When residents voted for change in Southwark, they expected a council that would stand up for local people, including when decisions taken elsewhere make that harder. Supporting this legal challenge is part of delivering on that promise.
I also hope it says something about how Liberal Democrats should approach local government more broadly. Winning power is only worthwhile if we are prepared to use it. That means working constructively with developers while also standing firm on the public interest, standing up to central government, and, when required, standing up to our own Mayor.
Housing is the biggest challenge facing Southwark and London. Liberal Democrats now have the chance to show that there is a different way of tackling it. That means building more homes, insisting on more affordable homes, and giving councils the tools to become major housebuilders once again.
* Victor Chamberlain is the Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader of Southwark Council, Vice Chair of Federal Council and Liberal Democrat Vice Chair of the Neighbourhoods Committee at the Local Government Association
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16 Comments
“ and argued that local people deserve to be able to afford to live in the communities they grew up in.”
So, is the plan that local people who ‘grew up’ in the area will be prioritised for affordable housing units that become available?
This seems a surprising decsion. The problem in the London housing markets is not ‘ deevlopers arent building affordable homes’ is that noone is building homes of any sort. as Victor says ” High construction costs, interest rates, labour shortages, expensive finance and years of economic uncertainty (all of the above worsened by Brexit) mean the current market is unable to produce the volume and mix of homes we need. Twenty-five per cent of nothing is still nothing.” . This is right – and might have added that in parts of london prices of flats are dropping. in the private sector developers wont build unless it is profitable to do so. How does making it less profitable – by increasing the mandatory % of affordable homes, do anything but recuce the number of new homes?
Given this, how does making it
Victor, it is great to hear of Liberal Democrats ambitious for a diverse, resilient, house building sector.With Andy Burnham a keen proponent of devolution isn’t now the time to make the case for greater fiscal devolution for London.
Continental Europe shows insurance and pension funds willing to provide the necesaary capital on debt markets. Small and Medium Sized builders need the security of work to grow. Further Education can train a workfirce in partnership with builders.
What is lacking is the strategic direction of City Hall and the Boroughs. Time to admit that relying on volume builders will never alleviate the problem. We need to grasp the nettle and build the sociap housing London needs by giving London the powers it deserves. This should be the centre piece of our Mayoral campaign in 2028.
Excellent to read this from Southwark Liberal Democrats. I am proposing a motion for September Conference calling for Emergency action to be taken for sufficient provision of Social and affordable housing country-wide. As Victor also calls for, local authorities need to be given the powers and freedoms and the central government finance to build again, and should now be calling on a diversity of builders. I want to see councils throughout the country empowered, and hope governmental enthusiasm for greater mayoral financing powers won’t bypass our councils in providing finance for this necessary great expansion of building social and affordable homes country-wide.
Can London build its way out of this crisis ?
Londons population has gone up by more than half since the 90s & all the “Plans” are for it to go up more. London is a victim of its own success, money pours in, People pour in, simply building more housing is not going to help any more than building Roads stops Traffic congestion.
It looks like Andy Burnham has some sense of what needs to be done, moving money and opportunities away from London, out into The Countries , its a Liberal idea & we should back it but we probably need mush more Radical proposals.
The point about Council waiting lists is that many of the people on them could never buy places to live however “Affordable” they are. What they need is Council Housing.
I’m a bit surprised at this position. The problem is that poor viability has killed all house building in London. It has literally dropped off a cliff. I don’t understand how making developers’ viability worse (by imposing a high % of affordable housing) is going to help. I understand the principle (we clearly need more affordable homes), but making developers pay the price because Government refuses to directly subsidise social and affordable housing – that seems a bit unrealistic. In the end it just means no more homes being built at all. No more market homes and no more social/affordable homes either…
Council houses; ‘no right to buy’!
Council housing with no right to buy unless the whole of the purchase income remains locally and can only be used to build more council housing.
David Garlick 29th Jun ’26 – 10:33am…..Council housing with no right to buy unless the whole of the purchase income remains locally and can only be used to build more council housing…
The system has massive discounts for those with long term council tenancies.. When they get options on ‘new’ builds they, or more likely their children, can buy at less than the cost to build the house..
No ‘right to buy’, period!
There is no way out of the housing crisis without mass private building. Private building has stalled because it is unprofitable, as this article explains. This will not be reversed by keeping the affordability quota unviably high.
When I was an MP I remember being shown a block of Council flats in London. We stood on a first floor walkway and my guide pointed to one door that after RtBuy had ended up with a private landlord and the one next to it that was still a Council flat. The Council/Government through Housing Benefit paid the rent on the now private flat at a level 3 times or more what the rent on the identical Council flat was. An absolutely ludicrous way to have to have to spend scarce taxpayers money.
As a 10 year old I and my family were saved from homelessness by a Council flat on a very large Council estate in Sheffield. Starting with the clearance of jerry built, disease ridden private slums over a hundred years ago, Councils built decent housing for poor people. I have been a homeowner since 1979 so I certainly don’t object to people owning their own home, quite the reverse. But we need both sectors.
Between 1950-1980 the private sector on average built around 150,000 houses a year and Councils around 100,000. Since the 1980’s Council House building has all but ceased and private sector building has ticked over at roughly the same average as always. Believing that the profit driven private sector will suddenly start building decent housing for the poorest third of society is like barking at the moon. As a historian I cannot think of any point in history where that has happened.
“Affordable” housing schemes do not make housing more affordable. The billions that the government ploughs into them push up general property prices, subsidise finance companies and owners of existing properties. The requirement on developers of large schemes (by number of houses) to include “affordable homes” results in fewer and the wrong kind of homes being built.
All these schemes should be closed to new entrants and the money given to local authorities to deal with their own housing crises in their own way.
Good luck Victor. It is now almost 30 years since Blair’s regeneration speech
on the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark (he did it in my ward with the three Lib Dem councillors banned from the occasion!) Tenants voted in huge numbers for refurbishment but the Blairite regime at the time vetoed this and demanded large scale demolition. The chaotic legacy is for all to see. Perhaps we should be wary of a new PM’s big talk on housing too.
I work in architecture and construction and find this article infuriating. New high density housing is essentially being regulated out of existence. Viability was already teetering due to planning, and dozens of new, non-safety related regulations that combined add up to huge costs.
And then within the past couple of years, we’ve had massive Building Safety Regulator compliance costs imposed, a second staircase demand based on flimsy evidence that reduces the number of flats on a given plot, and now a second lift rule is being proposed. The number of specialist consultants now required to help ensure compliance with everything is insane.
And yet you believe forcing developers to deliver below market prices on schemes that will be barely viable to being with is a good thing? That stance is essentially “no housing whatsoever is better than no ‘affordable’ housing”.
If you want to lower market prices, either encourage large scale building (the opposite of what ‘affordable’ housing requirements achieves), or bring back state house builders.
or both. We could also add new town corporations. The current “new towns” use a different model from those that delivered the likes of Milton Keynes. As far as I can tell, only one is actually a new town. I would also like to see local authorities attacking the problem from more angles. They could for instance buy land and commission new build for commercial sale or rent.
There’s a TV program – shown recently – called ‘Flood: When the Thames drowned London’. About the actual 1928 flood – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_Thames_flood .
The more land which goes under concrete the greater the risk of a major flood occurring, especially taking climate change into account. The same applies in my view to any large city with a major river flowing through it.
If London needs more housing suitable for people who cannot afford to buy but who need to live in London because of work etc. then it seems to me that ‘building up’ rather than ‘building out (horizonatlly)’ is essential. such properties should not be available for the private sector to build and market. Profit-greedy private firms
who appear to want to build what better off people can afford and never mind everyone else’s needs should leave the stage.
As long as we remember Grenfell and build safe housing.