Sir Sadiq Khan was lambasted by a senior Tory this week for overseeing a “catastrophic” rate of progress on his affordable homes programme. The criticism from the Conservatives’ shadow housing secretary, Kevin Hollinrake, came as the Labour Government announced it would provide an extra £300m to boost affordable housebuilding nationally - of which London will receive £60m. The mayor’s office blamed the programme’s sluggish progress on “the disastrous legacy of the previous Government”, adding that Sir Sadiq is “determined to turbocharge the delivery of housing”.
According to the latest data, construction started on only 902 new affordable homes - under the mayor’s programme and across the whole of Greater London - between October and December of last year. While the figure is up somewhat from the previous two quarters, both of which saw fewer than 200 affordable property starts, it still leaves Sir Sadiq a considerable distance from reaching his target. The bulk of funding for the mayor’s current programme was handed down by the last Conservative Government. They gave him £4bn to get started on at least 35,000 affordable properties by March 2026.
The target was later revised downwards to a range of between 23,900 and 27,100 homes. The programme’s funding has also since been topped up with £100m in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ Budget last year, and now with the further £60m - meaning that the total London pot amounts to £4.16bn. However, just 3,026 homes have started construction in total, meaning that the mayor is only 13 per cent of the way towards hitting the lower end of the reduced target - having now used up more than half the time available since funding for the programme was signed off by the Government in July 2023.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Mr Hollinrake said the “catastrophic” rate of progress demonstrated that Sir Sadiq is “not fit for purpose” as mayor. Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank and an author of the 2019 Tory manifesto, said: “His original argument for failing to build in 2024 was that he hadn't got the money from central Government. Then he got the money, and started claiming he needed more money.
“But at some point, failure to build is just failure to build. And he is absolutely failing to build.”. Approached for comment, a spokeswoman for the mayor said: “The disastrous legacy of the previous Government has meant a slump in housebuilding across the country, but there are welcome green shoots of recovery in these figures, with an increase in City Hall-backed affordable housing starts and completions compared to last year.
“Since being elected, Sadiq is proud to have delivered record-breaking genuinely affordable homebuilding, including backing London’s boroughs to start more new council homes than at any time since the 1970s. The result of this success is that, even in these tough times, affordable housing completions are 50 per cent higher in just the first nine months of this year than what the previous mayor delivered during his entire last year in office.
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