Londoners will finally see the light at the end of the tunnel in 2026 when it comes to the city's enduring accommodation crisis, the Deputy Mayor responsible for housing has vowed.
Tom Copley, Sir Sadiq Khan's Deputy for Housing in City Hall, said reforms announced in the "very challenging" 2025 year will start to bear fruit in the coming months. The Mayor of London has faced heavy criticism for failing to meet ministerial targets on affordable housing, while private sector housebuilding continues to stagnate.
Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures
Sir Sadiq and Mr Copley have blamed a myriad of factors for the crisis, including high interest rates, soaring construction material costs and the "botched" implementation of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) slowing down applications. However, last year City Hall announced an emergency package of measures alongside the government designed to kickstart housebuilding, including reducing the affordability quota for developers from 35 to 20 per cent and targeted partial relief from the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) for eligible schemes. The final version of this, which included measures such as expanding the Mayor of London's "call in" powers to any scheme above 50 homes which is rejected by a local authority, was finally confirmed late last month.
City Hall's Pledge to Londoners
London's housing crisis is likely to be one of the central issues of the 2028 Mayoral election. Should both a supply and affordability crisis continue to push Londoners into deeper financial trouble - or out of the city altogether - questions will be asked around whether the Labour administration is up to the task. But Mr Copley said Londoners should see significant progress made in the next two years. In an exclusive interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS), he said 2026 is going to be "the turnaround year".
"It is going to be the year that things begin to turn around after what was a very challenging year in 2025," he said on the sidelines of the London Housing Summit, held by the Centre for London this week. "The emergency package of measures that we announced is now just starting to kick in. We're already seeing schemes now come forward that have been essentially enabled and supported by that. I believe we're going to see many more. So I think throughout this year, we're going to start to see a real - we'll start to see that uptick that we need in housing, in housing starts, and in terms of affordable housing as well."
Until recently, the Mayor of London has been able to boast of his housing record during his time in office. His 2016-2023 Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) delivered more than 116,000 starts. Three years later, however, fewer than 8,000 homes have been started under the 2021–26 programme, leaving the Mayor needing almost 10,000 more in the final three months to hit a target already lowered twice by the government.
City Hall figures have been quick to blame the previous government for the slowdown in housebuilding, including what Mr Copley calls the "botched" introduction of the BSR - which has recently announced reforms under new stewardship - and regulations introduced in a "very chaotic and haphazard way". "All of this is really conspiring to make housebuilding in London particularly challenging - I think we are now starting to see that turn around," he said.
It is a claim disputed by opposition figures, including Sir James Cleverly - the senior Tory MP who has hinted at a run for City Hall in 2028 - who said blaming the previous government, which left office in July 2024, makes little sense. "The fact that we have now got a Labour government, and London figures are getting worse, shows that his trying to blame the Conservatives in Westminster was basically a distraction technique," he told the LDRS this week. "The fact is, he [Sir Sadiq] has been asleep at the wheel. The fact is, he lost any passion for the job years ago, and is really just phoning it in, and the figures don't lie. London housebuilding has collapsed on his watch."
Building Safety Regulator Blame Game
Mr Copley said the BSR, introduced in 2022 in response to the Grenfell Tower Tragedy, was good "in principle" but poorly executed. He added: "It lacked any kind of real communication with applicants. It was far too slow, far too many delays. And it was a process that was not fit for purpose." Last year former London Fire Commissioner Lord Andy Roe took charge of the organisation, promising to speed up the often arduous and bureaucratic process some developers had to go through to get approval. "It's like night and day," Mr Copley said. "I mean, we're seeing those waiting times, those processing times for applications come down. We're seeing more applications being approved. Now there's a much more open process, which is exactly what you need as part of this. We all really want to make sure that the buildings we're building are safe. Nobody disagrees about that and the principle of the Building Safety Regulator is absolutely right. But the way that it was set up was simply not fit for purpose."
When the LDRS put Labour's comments on the BSR to Mr Cleverly, who was an MP when the body was set up, he claimed it was "Labour voices pushing to go further, to be more restrictive" at the time.
Labour Mayor Working with a Labour Government
For the first eight years of his tenure, Sir Sadiq often sparred with the previous Conservative government over various policies and priorities. When Sir Keir Starmer was elected in July 2024, the Mayor suggested a Labour Mayor working with a Labour government would be far more effective in delivering for Londoners. While there have been public disagreements on the direction of the party - with Sir Sadiq making several interventions in the run up to the May 7 elections - housing appears to be an issue where the two are united on many aspects, including exploring building homes on low-quality Green Belt land. The agreement between Sir Sadiq and Housing Secretary Steve Reed on the emergency housebuilding package also indicates strategic alignment.
Mr Copley said that City Hall has "never had this level of engagement with a government", adding: "The change has been like night and day. That is really sort of encapsulated in the process we went through with the emergency measures. It was a really collaborative process. We agreed a package and we managed to agree new powers for the Mayor - there's no way we would ever have had that kind of engagement or been able to secure those powers from previous Housing Ministers and Housing Secretaries. So it has been transformational and I think that is all to the benefit of getting the homes that we need to be built. We have actually [now] got a lot of the things that we've been asking for for a very long time."
