Sadiq Khan has said he will not hit his current affordable housing target without further support from the Government, despite having only just received an extra £100m from Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
The mayor’s admission comes as it was revealed this week that his affordable homes programme is continuing to make glacial progress, with work starting on fewer than 200 properties between July and September this year – barely up from the 150 started in the previous three months.
Mr Khan is working towards a deadline of March 2026, using £4bn of funding handed down by the previous, Conservative Government.
He was originally set a goal of starting work on 35,000 properties by the end of the programme, but the target was slashed last year to a range of between 23,900 and 27,200 homes, following a “re-profiling” exercise as costs rose.
So far, Mr Khan has started only 2,124, meaning that he is only nine per cent of the way towards hitting the lower end of the already-reduced target, having now used up more than a third of the time available since receiving funding for the programme in July 2023.
City Hall Conservatives said that if the mayor continues at the current rate, it will take him more than 30 years beyond the deadline to hit the target. In August, Tory assembly member Lord Bailey said the Government should put Mr Khan into “special measures” due to the “unacceptably low” amount of affordable housing being built.
Critics of Mr Khan, including the Centre for Policy Studies think tank director Robert Colvile, have also pointed out that some 204 of the 2,124 homes ‘started’ under the programme so far are not new properties, but are existing homes which have been purchased and repurposed as council homes, meaning that they have not boosted the capital’s overall supply of housing.
The mayor told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “This ‘perfect storm’ that affects housing across our country is affecting London.
“From low growth, high interest rates, the cost of materials to build homes, the consequences of a hard Brexit, the shortage of workers, the lack of funding from the previous Government, is causing big challenges.
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“The amount of grant we would be giving to a council or a registered social landlord, to build an affordable home, is now much higher than it used to be, for the reasons I’ve set out.”
The mayor said he had “a number of asks” of the Labour Government to turn the situation around.
“One is additional support financially, in relation to affordable housing,” he said.
“Secondly is support towards a City Hall developer fund. We think £1bn, roughly speaking, can lead to the construction of 16,500 homes – around half of them by 2027.
“Thirdly, give councils the ability to borrow to build – really important when it comes to HRA [Housing Revenue Account] and other accounts as well.
“It’s going to be challenging, in relation to the target we’ve got with the Government. We’re going to make sure we do everything we can to get these affordable homes built.”
Mr Khan’s request for extra funding came despite the fact that in her Budget just last month, Chancellor Rachel Reeves allocated a further £100m to City Hall’s affordable housing fund, bringing the total to £4.1bn.
Asked whether he was saying that more support was still needed, if he is to hit his March 2026 target, the mayor replied: “Yes.”
A spokesman at the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “We know that we must radically boost housebuilding in the capital.
“That is why we will work in partnership with the Mayor of London to tackle the housing crisis and deliver the homes that London needs.”
