Labour claim they want to fix the housing crisis. But their latest package of reforms for London proves yet again whose side they really are on – and it’s not the millions of people priced out of a safe, secure home.

The joint paper from the Labour Government and London’s Labour Mayor is a developer’s charter. Fast-track rules will now apply to schemes with just 20% “affordable” housing – down from 35%. In practice that means fewer than one in eight homes will be for social rent, with the rest falling into the elastic category of “affordable” that still leaves most Londoners shut out. In my ward the average one-bed prices are £659,000, an “affordable” flat still costs over £527,000. That’s 16 times the average Southwark salary. Completely out of reach for the vast majority.

Worse, the Community Infrastructure Levy – the money developers must pay to councils to fund parks, safer streets and sustainable transport – will be halved. Southwark Liberal Democrats successfully fought to release £20 million of these funds to benefit local communities. Labour are now ripping up that principle and leaving boroughs weaker while protecting the Mayor’s own levy.

But the most outrageous element is the new subsidy regime. Labour plan to hand over vast sums of public money – £220,000 per home for social rent, and tens of thousands more for other tenures – directly to private developers to “improve viability.” This is not investment in public housing; it is a taxpayer-funded boost to private profits. And with a “gain-share” mechanism that only kicks in years down the line, there is little guarantee communities will see a fair return.

Meanwhile, the Mayor is being handed sweeping new powers to overrule borough decisions on schemes over 50 homes. Local communities and councils will be pushed further to the margins, while Labour centralises power at City Hall.

This is not a plan to solve the housing crisis – it is a plan to bake in low levels of affordable housing, strip communities of infrastructure investment, and funnel public money into private developer coffers.

In Southwark we’ve already seen how weak Labour is when it comes to standing up to developers. They recently waved through a scheme in my ward with only 17% social rent. Now that weakness is being written into national policy.

Liberal Democrats know that building the homes we need means more than cutting deals with big developers. We need to empower councils to build again and work with other providers to deliver genuinely affordable homes, built to high standards, with communities benefiting from the growth around them – not another Labour handout to the private sector.

* Cllr Victor Chamberlain is Leader of Southwark Liberal Democrats, Vice Chair of Federal Council and Liberal Democrat Vice Chair of the Neighbourhoods Committee at the Local Government Association