Build, baby, build (with lower rates of affordable housing in London)

The housing secretary's Alan Partridge populism is not the answer we need

Oct 08, 2025

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Build, baby, build

It’s very easy to laugh at housing secretary Steve Reed’s attempt to bring Trumpian populism to planning reform - so long as you can stomach the vicarious embarrassment that comes from watching a man in late middle age shoot for @realdonaldtrump and land on @accidentialpartridge.

Steve Reed on stage throwing hats to an audience

Picture: Stephen Delahunty

Consider this account from Inside Housing’s Stephen Delahunty, who was at Labour conference last week:

Steve Reed skipped into the room only once the well-orchestrated chanting by his party faithful was deemed loud enough to the tune of We Built This City by Starship. He then took to the stage and proceeded to throw more signed and branded merchandise into the crowd, before cracking open a bottle of alcohol because “all builders need a beer”. One sector professional’s response to the proceedings was “dear, God”.

The problem is not just what people younger than me call ‘ick’, but that everything about the approach is wrong.

First, on a purely political level, it misunderstands populism, which requires politicians to make unfulfillable promises which are, well, popular. Reed is doing the former, but not the latter.

We can have long arguments about whether or not planning reform is necessary, and how it should be done - but the big challenge with doing it is persuading people instinctively opposed to building new homes that it’s a good idea.

This is the decade’s third attempt at major planning reform. Robert Jenrick tried to introduce a zonal planning system to the UK in 2020, Liz Truss had her shot at an even more radical solution in 2022. Both fell apart on first contact with the political reality of the scale of opposition from voters and were abandoned.

Will ‘build baby build’ sloganeering and cheap baseball caps finally convince these voters that it is actually a good idea to convert relatively modest amounts of agricultural land to residential use? I doubt it. Labour’s challenge was to bring people along, to understand the kind of planning reform people might support and to find the middle ground where enough NIMBY-coded voters would see the benefits to get on board.

Reed, instead, seems intent on starting a fight with anyone who disagrees with him, and given that he has picked an enemy that other parts of the party will term ‘must-win voter’ he might discover he has made a mistake.

But then there is the policy direction itself. One of the reasons why housing and planning is difficult is because it involves trade offs and competing objectives.

These range from solvable but complex issues like protecting nature and combatting flood risk while also finding more developable land, to much harder intrinsic problems like how to ensure the quality of new homes rises, as well as simply the volume.

Then there are broader, strategic questions like what objective we are actually pursuing with new build? Is it economic growth from increased construction output? Lower house prices? An end to homelessness?

Too often, all of these aims are bundled up into one easy pot marked ‘just build more houses’ without an acknowledgement that all of them might be in competition with each other.

Take this video from Reed, filmed while travelling backwards on an escalator for some reason. In it, he says the ultimate objective of his plan is to “end the moral stain of homelessness”. Strong words.

With this in mind - the construction of more affordable and social housing in the city where two-thirds of the country’s homeless population are found should be a pivotal part of this mission, right? Right? Er…

(With lower rates of affordable housing in London)

When Sadiq Khan was first elected as London mayor in 2016, he promised that 50% of all the homes built in the city under his watch would be ‘affordable’.

If you asked him or his deputies about this target during his first term you were told that the target was a “marathon not a sprint”, but that we would get there eventually - so long as we kept voting Khan and didn’t let those dastardly Tories back in.

At the time, builders in London were making use of ‘viability assessments’ (calculations of the profitability of a scheme) to get away with laughably low rates of affordable housing while banking extraordinary profits and selling upwards of 60% of new developments off plan to investors.

Khan’s first step forward to fulfiling his promise was to offer a carrot-approach to tempt them out of this behaviour. If developers promised 35% affordable housing (50% on public land), then they would be fast-tracked through the planning system. If they wanted to dip below this rate they would need to submit a viability assessment, and could expect it to be thoroughly interrogated.

I thought, and still think, that this was a good first step. It should have been a way of nudging the market along to mandatory targets in zones of particular affordable housing need - and especially on public land - which would eventually have been incorporated into land prices.

But in the end, this first step has proved to be the furthest Khan would go towards fulfilling his promise of affordable housing targets in his now three terms in office. And now, in negotiation with Reed, he is planning to undo even this step.

As the Financial Times first reported (but this Substack first signalled), Khan is planning to reduce the fast-track threshold down towards the region of 20% or even 15%.

This is being erroneously reported elsewhere as a cut to affordable housing requirements - which is wrong (and one former London Assembly member in particular has no excuse for making this mistake).

There is not currently a requirement for 35% affordable housing, there is a reward for meeting this target - namely, rapid approval and no scrutiny of whether you could have afforded to build more. The plan is to still offer the reward and take the target away.

Builders protest that a variety of headwinds - from rising build costs to collapsing off-plan sales and Building Safety Regulator compliance - mean they can’t afford 35% anymore.

But where this is true, the system permits them to put a viability assessment in and prove it. Sure, argue that it is worth speeding that process up. But to accept at little as 15% affordable housing and not even asking for a viability check is an extraordinary surrender of the needs of Londoners to the demands of businesses - one which neither David Cameron or Boris Johnson got to the level of.

Really, the current market strife should be pushing us to ask different questions. Should we be so reliant on the volume house builder model to meet housing need in London? Can that ever work, even if we give them more of what they ask for? Should we be looking for other development models, and other types of long-term land ownership and placemaking? What do we need to do to get there?

Instead we land on housing’s version of trickle-down economics - a theory which has become gospel for parts of YIMBY Twitter and has been adopted as the official policy position at City Hall.

This theory holds that any form of house building is good for solving the housing crisis, because it creates of chains of vacancies. In other words, if you build an expensive home, someone moves up and out of a cheaper home into it, which frees up a cheaper property, which someone else moves into - and so on and so on down the chain until homelessness is over.

Anyone who has lived in a city where there has been rapid speculative new build development knows this is a fallacy. If you lived in Manchester before half the world’s pension funds started turning up and building skyscrapers, you are not wrong to feel that it used to be easier to pay your rent. The same is true in London. Canning Town, where I grew up, has not become cheaper since the bit around the station converted itself into a plastic version of Manhattan.

The problem is that while the trickle down theory is cute on paper, but it doesn’t interact with the complexity of the real world, especially in major cities where investor demand remains a major part of the market for new homes and the arrival of this kind of money in a new area can rapidly increase local prices - rather than dampening them.

But when City Hall is challenged about its housing plans, it refuses to accept anything other than the idea that more new build is good for everyone. “In London we know from City Hall analysis that building new homes improves the affordability of existing homes,” is roughly the mantra it repeats when challenged with new thinking.

It regularly cites a research note to justify its reliance on this theory, Housing Research Note 10.

However, if you take the time to read it, this document actually paints a much more nuanced picture.

While it does come to the overall conclusion that more new build has a positive effect on affordability, it also heavily cavaets that conclusion by saying the economic theory has “a number of limitations”. The vacancy chain effect, it says, takes place “over several years or even decades” and “therefore cannot tell us what the short-term impacts of housing supply are”. It adds that even within this longer time period, the research which supports the view “has been dogged by the challenge of identifying causation” relating to changes in house price.

In particular, it points out that the ‘vacancy chain effect’ is not limited to a particular spatial area. The new, wealthier buyers could come from anywhere on earth, theoretically. But it’s where they came from that gets the vacancy. So if someone moves to an expensive London flat from Hull, we have gained a vacant more affordable home in Hull, which does not help solve London’s homelessness or keyworker accommodation crisis. City Hall’s own research note calls this issue “a serious shortcoming” of the overall theory.

Instead, it says that the local effect of new build can be a price rise - especially in low income areas.

“If [new build] is focused only in low-income areas it can lead to localised increases in prices and rents in those areas (while still improving affordability elsewhere),” it says. This is effectively what anti-gentrification campaigners argue - while being shouted at by YIMBY twitter for failing to understand econmics.

“Building market-rate housing therefore indirectly increases the availability of homes affordable to low-income households, although not as directly as building social housing and other kinds of affordable housing,” the research note adds (emphasis mine) - which does not sound like a ringing endorsement of fast-tracking proposals with lower rates of affordable housing.

So, Steve Reed and his baseball cap may end up doing very little to end the “moral stain of homelessness”.

It seems that what we are really interested in build, baby, building is the profit margin on developer balance sheets. Plus ça change.

In other news

Thouria Istephan has been appointed the Chief Construction Advisor - a role recommended by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report. Ms Istephan, an architect, sat on the inquiry panel herself, and has spoken about the need for culture change in construction.
The government’s latest update on the Grenfell Tower Inquiry recommendations pushed the production of a green paper on the critical issue of construction product regulation back to spring 2026.
Manchester City Council has set out plans to increase its affordable housing requirements, including introducing requirements for purpose-built student accommodation for the first time.

My new book Homesick is out now, and available here:

‘Apps set the gold standard with his Grenfell coverage. With Homesick, he dismantles the sham of UK housing policy – razor-sharp, stylish, and morally unflinching.’ ―Darren McGarvey, author of Poverty Safari

‘A beautifully thorough, mesmerising and big-hearted book that manages to bring housing policy alive without losing any of the detail or analysis.’ ―Isabel Hardman, author of Why We Get the Wrong Politicians

‘Apps… knows his stuff and writes with a confident understanding of the politics and the business of housing. This book will add its considerable weight to the rising sense that this country has got a lot wrong in the past 50 years… Leaving housing purely to the market was an ideologically driven mistake, the price of which many Londoners are now paying.’ ―The Times, Book of the Week

‘Homesickis one of the most important books I’ve read on the housing crisis, especially it’s changing face in London. Pete doesn’t just talk about policy he shows the human impact of years of government failure and neglect. As someone who’s seen that devastation firsthand, I found this bookpowerful, heartbreaking, forensic and necessary. If you want to understand how we got here, you start with reading Homesick.’ ―Kwajo Tweneboa

‘All of life is here – you will laugh, cry and learn from reading Peter Apps. Take this book, put it on the curriculum and turn it into government policy.’ ―Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants

‘A vital book which underscores the human cost of the housing crisis with a forensic analysis of how we got there.Peter Apps is one of the most important writers on housing today.’ ―Anna Minton, author of Big Capital

‘I don’t think there is anyone else out there capable of writing a book on housing with such quality, depth and humanity. The book is detailed and informative but always readable – the analysis and arguments are convincing; the personal accounts are relevant, enlightening and at times heartbreaking.’ ―John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams

‘An essential, epic love letter packed with hope for what housing was, should be and could be again. Apps is a skilled storyteller albeit every word is real and meticulously researched. This is the definitive account of how London’s relationship with house and home went wrong. A must-read’ ―Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles

‘An erudite, careful, plausible, and heartfelt call for change, for building sensibly on the greenbelt, and for the far more efficient use of London’s existing stock including the house-in-every-street, small scale, flat-by-flat, nationalization (aka municipalization) of enough homes in London to make the capital liveable and social again, not just a place for servants and those whose parents gift them property.’ ―Danny Dorling, author of Seven Children

‘Pete Apps’ enlightening account of how we got to where we are and how we might get out is a tour de force of storytelling and analysis.’ ―Gillian Slovo, author of Ice Road

‘Homesick is a powerful elegy to the relative affordability and security of housing in the London of Apps’ childhood. His superb account of its systematic unravelling is rooted in the intimate experiences of everyday Londoners, across different time periods, spaces, and tenures... A must-read for governments and the wider public in the UK, and beyond.’ ―Loretta Lees, author of Gentrification

Peter’s Substack

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