London's housing crisis explained - and why it's only getting worse

0:06Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For the latest news, head to thelondonstandard at standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, we'll be out and about with the London Standard's chief theatre critic, Nick Curtis, as he talks about some of the best shows in town.

0:34But first, new data reveals how entrenched the London housing crisis really is. Despite the mayor's claim of really positive progress in housebuilding under his mayorality, the number of homes starting construction in the capital has sunk to its lowest level since the 2008 global financial crisis. Joining me now is the London Standard's local democracy reporter Noah Vickers. Noah, what has this data from City Hall revealed about housing in London? Well, this data is the quarterly release from the Greater London Authority showing how many homes have got started and have been completed under the Mayor of London's affordable homes programme.

1:17And they show that basically those affordable homes remain at very low levels by historic standards. This continues a trend that we've seen over the last sort of 18 months or so with very few affordable homes getting started, despite the fact that the Mayor was given billions of pounds of funding by the last Tory government. which has since been topped up by hundreds of millions of extra pounds from the Labour government. But fewer in the last financial year, 2024 to 2025, fewer than 4 ,000 new affordable homes got started. Are there any boroughs which are particularly badly affected? Yes. So the worst in the latest batch of data is Bexley, which saw zero affordable homes subsidised by the mayor start construction.

2:04That doesn't mean that no affordable homes were built in that borough, but it does mean that under the mayor's programme, zero projects received funding and began construction in that financial year. Several boroughs also stayed in the single digits in terms of starts. They were Redbridge, which only saw two affordable homes get started. Wolf and Forest and Bromley had three each. Merton, four. Harrow, five. And Sutton started only six affordable homes. Then at the other end of the spectrum, the best boroughs really in terms of starts under the mayor's programme were Greenwich with 608 homes, followed by Suffolk with 377.

2:44Labour made big promises to build new homes nationwide. How many are needed in London to meet demand and what needs to happen for the government's ambitions to be realised? Well, the target that the government has set London is 88 ,000 homes being built each year. That's a target for all types of homes, not just affordable ones. London hasn't built anywhere near that level since the 1930s. It's a huge ask. I mean, in 2023 to 2024, we saw just over 32 ,000 homes built. So the ask is basically to more than double the number of net additional properties being created in the capital. Clearly, an enormous amount needs to change.

3:25There's some debate over how exactly the government should go about doing that. But changes are already being made to the planning system, the hope being that you could make it more flexible and more sort of attractive to developers. Certainly councils need to be better resourced to process planning applications. So there are enormous obstacles in the way of this goal. Labour have come out with various promises, including the creation of a new category of land called the grey belt land, where low quality sites on the green belt would be redesignated. but it's unclear how much of a difference that will really make.

4:02So what has the reaction been to the findings of this data? Well, the reaction for some time to the Mayor's affordable house building programme has been really negative. There's very few homes, as I say, by historic standards are getting started. But Robert Colville at the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, and it's worth saying that he is the co-author of the Conservatives' 2019 manifesto, so he's not a sort of neutral arbiter on this. But he points out that, you know, of the homes that have been built, 505 of them are homes which have been acquired as new council housing. So they were existing properties that councils have basically bought and rebadged as council homes.

4:41That's not really adding to the overall supply in London. And he also argues that because the mayor managed to achieve his previous housing target in 2023, he argues that the way that the mayor did this was by basically pulling forward projects from future years in order to hit that number. And that's possibly what's then led to a particularly low number of new affordable homes getting started since then. But the mayor team are very clear that as far as they're concerned, this is due to what they call the horrendous legacy of the last government, including a lack of national funding, high interest rates, spiralling building costs, delays from bodies like the Building Safety Regulator and the lasting impact of Brexit.

5:26Now, last week, Sadiq Khan was criticised for another housing policy. Can you explain more? Yeah, this was a big landmark announcement from the mayor about building on London's Greenbelt. He'd previously been very protective of the Greenbelt. He wanted to ensure that that land wasn't built on. That Greenbelt has existed basically since 1938. Back then there was a lot of concern about urban sprawl and about sort of cities growing uncontrollably across boundaries. But since then, he says that basically he's become convinced that something needs to change. Too many young professionals are living in their parents' bedrooms.

6:05Too many teachers, key workers are living in shared houses or even temporary accommodation or otherwise in dammed or mouldy flats. And he thinks that a step change is needed. The details of exactly where would be built on are still a bit thin on the ground. The mayor is developing his new London plan, which is the main document that outlines how the capital should develop. But he's been very keen to reassure Londoners that, you know, their parks and their precious sort of green spaces that they enjoy having access to currently won't be built on. He says that actually only a very small percentage of the green belt is accessible, open green space.

6:45And what does this mean more broadly for the capital? It's terrible news for London if not enough affordable housing is being built because it has real knock on impact kind of on everyone's lives. I mean, families are being pushed into homelessness or being put up in temporary accommodation by councils who are being forced to spend more and more of their own already massively strapped funding on this issue, putting people up in hotels or bed and breakfast accommodation at enormous cost to them, which then impacts other services. and it means that people who just can't afford market rents in London are having to live further and further out of the city, sometimes being pushed into the home counties.

7:27The fact is that the average cost of a room in London, I don't mean a one-bed flat, I don't mean a studio, I mean a room and a house share costs a grand or more on average in London. So this really raises questions about how the city can carry on functioning if low-income workers doing really vital jobs can't continue living in London. That's why it's so important enough affordable housing gets built to meet the needs of everyone. We've just heard today in other news that the target that the mayor is working to on affordable housing has actually been reduced quite substantially. He'd previously been working to a target of between around 23 ,900 to 27 ,100 starts.

8:07But that's been slashed down to 17 ,800 to 19 ,000. So the range has been brought down substantially. It had already been brought down from 35 ,000 under the previous Conservative government. So it's been almost halved since that original aspiration. And it shows that actually the government is recognising that there are incredibly challenging economic conditions to house building in London particularly. And if they don't bring the target down, there was a real risk that Sadiq Khan wouldn't have hit that target.

8:42Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, all the latest from Theatreland, what's hot this summer? We'll see you back here in just a moment.

9:02Welcome back. As the capital basks in spring sunshine, it's the perfect time to head out for some evening entertainment. Luckily for us, the London Standard's chief theatre critic, Nick Curtis, is here with a round-up of theatre shows if you're looking for a culture fix. Nick, you described Ava Pickett's debut play, 1536, as electrifying. Can you tell us more about what the play is actually about and why you awarded it an almost five-star rating? It's a bold and peculiar play about three women in Henry VIII's England, in Essex specifically, reacting to the news that Henry has repudiated, put on trial and eventually executed his once-loved Queen Anne Boleyn.

9:46The language in it is a mash-up of modern and archaic with a lot of swearing in it and it basically uses the execution of the Queen to throw a spotlight on the lives of women back in 1536 and by implication and inference, women still today. There's a line in it which one of the three main characters says, has it always been like this? Is it always going to be like this? And you sort of come out and play thinking, well, unfortunately, yes. It's dealing with very hard themes about the patriarchy and sort of slightly less weighty observations about female friendship. But it's also surprisingly daringly funny all the way through.

10:20And it provides three really sort of meaty, enjoyable, knock it out of the park roles for three of our finest young actresses. Tanya Reynolds, who some people may know from sex education. Sienna Kelly, who's been on telly quite a bit, but is also, you know, quite a big sort of theatrical course and live hill and they're just they're terrific together really all three of them shakespeare's globe is showing romeo and juliet but this time the tale of star-crossed lovers is set in the wild west i've heard it doesn't quite work as a concept but what were your thoughts on their performance yeah i mean i'm boys i came away from this rather mystified by the wild west setting and wondering whether the director had just you know seen it set in every other possible location and period of time and just thought, oh, nobody's done Wild West yet, maybe I'll do that.

11:05The sort of setting doesn't really bleed down into the other concepts in the production. Nobody attempts an American accent or hardly anyone attempts an American accent. Most of them sound like Londoners. And there's a sort of implication that this is sort of set in London gangland. So why everyone is wearing sort of six guns and Stetsons, I don't really know. It's also been done, the first half is played as a comedy, which is not as mad as you might think, because actually the speed with which Romeo and Juliet fall in love is fairly comic and the sort of posturing masculinity of the young men in the play is also fairly comic until, of course, somebody gets killed and then things turn deadly serious.

11:44So the second half of it is played as both a romance and a tragedy. What other shows are worth checking out? Well, the two absolute standout shows of the moment are The Brightening Air, Conor McPherson's new play at the Old Vic, which is a sort of Irish family drama which acknowledges its debt to Chekhov's plays. Conor McPherson was adapting a Chekhov play just before, well, he had adapted a Chekhov play just before lockdown, so he never actually got to see the production because it was pulled, of course, when the theatres shut down. So I think this is his way of sort of almost repaying the debt to Chekhov.

12:17And it's just a tremendous piece of work with sort of folky, slightly magical overtones. And the other really great show at the moment is Giant, which I've seen twice in the space of three months, which explores Roald Dahl's anti-Semitism through an event in 1982 when he wrote a book review about Israel's retaliation against Lebanon, which strayed into wider anti-Semitic tropes. That features John Lithgow, the great American actor, 79 years old, I believe now, as Dahl. And it's just, I doubt you'll see a better performance on the London stage this year. Is there anything coming up which is on your radar or which you're particularly looking forward to?

12:57Well, it's just been announced that Cynthia Erivo is going to come back to the London stage next year, next February, in a production of Dracula in which she will play all, I think it's 23 parts, may even be 32 parts. It's by the director of Sydney Theatre Company, who did a similarly one-person picture of Dorian Gray with Sarah Snoop, the actress from Succession. Cynthia Erivo is obviously sort of riding extremely high between the first and the second parts of the Wicked movie. I think the second part is going to be out next year after this show hits. So there's obviously going to be a hell of a lot of attention on that.

13:32So yeah, that's one of the sort of big new things. And there'll be something new happening in the West End because the Tina Turner musical is coming off after seven years. It's just been announced. So there'll be something going into that theatre on the Aldwych soon. To check out Nick's latest reviews, visit the London Standards Culture pages or listen to him on the London Theatre Review podcast.

13:58and that's the standard for all the latest news head to standard.co.uk and please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk this podcast returns tomorrow at 4 p.m we'll see you then