London Housing: What Happened This Week and What It Means for Your Borough

The Greater London Authority confirmed Thursday that planning applications across the capital's 33 boroughs rose 14 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period last year — the sharpest six-month jump since 2014 — as Keir Starmer's housing reform agenda begins to bite at the local level. The numbers land as City Hall and the Ministry of Housing are locked in an increasingly tense exchange over whether Labour's national targets can realistically be met without overriding borough-level objections.

The timing matters because the government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, currently in the Lords after clearing the Commons in May, is expected to receive Royal Assent before the summer recess. Several of its provisions — including a streamlined approval process for sites designated under the new Strategic Development Zone classification — are being watched closely by developers with stalled schemes along the Thames. The bill effectively hands Sadiq Khan's office additional powers to call in applications that boroughs have sat on for more than 18 months, a threshold that critics say is too short and supporters argue is long overdue.

Silvertown and Tottenham at the Sharp End

Two sites dominated planning committee agendas this week. In Newham, a revised masterplan for the Silvertown Quays site — which has been in various stages of development since 2016 — cleared a key GLA review panel on Wednesday. The updated scheme proposes 3,400 homes, of which 35 percent are designated as affordable under the London Plan definition, a figure housing campaigners say falls well short of the 50 percent Khan has repeatedly promised. The Newham Renters Union staged a small protest outside the GLA offices on Lambeth Bridge Road on Tuesday ahead of the decision.

Across the city in Haringey, a long-contested regeneration project along the Tottenham High Road corridor won provisional backing from the borough's planning committee, paving the way for 1,800 homes on a stretch running between Bruce Grove station and the A10. The scheme, brought forward by a joint venture between Haringey Council and a private developer, includes a new primary school and reconfigured public square outside Tottenham Town Hall. Objections focused on the loss of existing light industrial units that house roughly 200 small businesses, many of them run by the area's established Turkish and West African communities.

The Numbers That Define the Crisis

London needs to build approximately 88,000 new homes per year to keep pace with population growth and begin reducing the backlog, according to the GLA's own modelling published in March. The actual delivery rate last year was 34,700 — less than 40 percent of what is needed. Average asking rents in Zone 2 postcodes hit £2,450 per month in June, according to property data firm Rightmove, up 9 percent year on year. In Hackney, where gentrification pressure is among the sharpest, average private rents have risen by 31 percent since 2022.

The government's response has been to push local authorities harder. Under a reformed Housing Delivery Test introduced in April, boroughs that consistently undershoot their targets face automatic presumption in favour of development — a mechanism that planning departments in Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea have described internally as a significant loss of local control, according to documents obtained under Freedom of Information requests filed by the campaign group London YIMBY.

What happens next will depend heavily on the Lords' amendments to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, with a key committee stage vote expected before July 22. If the Strategic Development Zone powers survive intact, developers with consented but unstarted schemes in Barking Riverside and Old Oak Common are likely to move quickly to lock in build contracts before the autumn. For renters and buyers, the practical upshot is that completions on those larger sites are realistically three to four years away at minimum — meaning the pressure on existing stock continues through the rest of this decade regardless of what happens in committee.