Cllr Henry Higgins is the Chairman of Planning Committee on Hillingdon Council.
London needs more housing; everyone agrees. There is space for over 400,000 homes on ‘brownfield’ land and for more than half of these, necessary planning permissions have already been granted for them to be built. Yet the land stands empty.
We have not failed to plan. We have failed to build. The distinction matters enormously because it tells us what the issues actually are.
The problems lie in what happens after planning permission is granted:
That last point deserves emphasis.
‘Land banking’; or holding planning permissions but not using them, is not a consequence of rapacious capitalism. It is a failure of local government management. Specifically, it is caused by a system in which waiting, and not building, is more valuable and profitable than actually building. Until that incentive structure is corrected, the delays will continue.
There are three distinct sets of problems that prevent brownfield development. They are not mysterious and they are not inevitable.
The first is the infrastructure gap.
Many brownfield sites – former industrial land, contaminated plots, fragmented urban parcels – cannot be developed until they are remediated, serviced and connected. The contamination must be removed. The utilities must be extended. The roads must be built. Under current arrangements, the entire cost of this preparatory work falls on the developer, as a condition of the permission they have already been granted.
On the most complex contaminated sites, remediation costs can constitute a very significant share of total development costs before a single home is designed — enough, in many cases, to make development commercially unviable regardless of how much demand exists for the completed homes.
The second are the conditions imposed when a council grants planning permission. The requirements attached to planning consents have accumulated over decades, each individually defensible, but cumulatively they are impossible.
They include, for example:
These stack on top of one another until the arithmetic breaks. This is not because any single requirement is unreasonable in isolation, but because no one is responsible for the sum, or how to address them all.
The third is the tangle of governance
London has three tiers of government — Borough, Mayor and Whitehall — all of whom take an active interest in housing but none of whom bear clear, unambiguous, responsibility when homes are not built. The mayor’s office can intervene in schemes above 150 units, adding a second layer of assessment to developments a borough has already evaluated. The conditions applied at mayoral level frequently duplicate or conflict with those applied at borough level. Central government sets targets that it then expects the mayor to enforce through powers that override local borough decisions. The result is a system in which delay is everybody’s option and delivery is nobody’s responsibility.
The answer to these three barriers is a better-designed, simpler, more effective, government process.
The solutions are these:
On the infrastructure gap: we should create a London-wide Brownfield Infrastructure Corps — a technically expert public body whose sole function is to remediate and service brownfield sites before they go to market. This is not a grant fund handed to developers. It is a public works function, analogous to the highway authority or the water utility. That body will do the preparatory work only a public sector body can coordinate efficiently across fragmented land ownership, and it can recover its costs through land sales. The state will do what only it can do, then step back. Transport for London, which owns or controls hundreds of underused sites across London, should be a mandatory responsible partner in this new body – its land, its connections and the value uplift its infrastructure generates should be working for Londoners, not sitting in a balance sheet.
On planning conditions: Boroughs should grant automatic planning permission on all registered brownfield sites above a minimum threshold, with no pre-conditions attached. They should replace the upfront conditions burden with a legally binding completion bond, lodged by the developer before work begins. That bond will be forfeit if agreed standards on design quality, affordable housing and infrastructure contribution are not met on completion. This new mechanism would eliminate the accumulation of conditions that currently stop projects before they start, while preserving full accountability for outcomes. The state will get what it needs. The developer can build. The homes will be built.
On governance: the mayoral referral threshold – currently set at 150 units – should be kept at or above that level for routine approvals, rather than lowered further.
London boroughs should also be permitted to retain a significantly larger share of the business rates collected in their area. The incentive effect of this single change — aligning council financial interest with local economic activity and development — is important. Councils that benefit directly from growth will find ways to enable it. Councils that do not will obstruct it.
No serious brownfield policy can avoid the land banking question. It is estimated that across London, thousands of homes with valid planning permission are being deliberately withheld from development by owners calculating that waiting will be more profitable than building.
The solution is: a hard five-year clock from the grant of planning permission to practical completion, enforced by escalating financial penalties in years three and four and compulsory purchase at existing use value in year five. No appeals on grounds of market conditions. No extensions for undischarged conditions – the conditions should have been discharged before the clock started. The threat alone, credibly enforced, would end speculative delay at the scale we currently tolerate it.
No brownfield policy paper can ignore the question of who the homes being built are actually for.
Social housing obligations are currently structured as flat-rate levies that make many schemes unviable and therefore unbuilt. This is wrong. An affordable housing requirement that results in no homes being constructed is not serving anyone.
The reform needed is viability-tested, site-specific obligations proportionate to the economics of each development rather than blanket requirements that stop projects before they
start.
For young people, this honest answer is harder but more useful than political promises. The average London house price places ownership beyond the reach of most people on median incomes by a margin that policy alone cannot close in the short term. The policy should acknowledge this and respond with a real ladder rather than a false promise.
That ladder needs clear rungs:
None of this is a promise that every young person can buy in Zone 2. It is a promise that if you work hard, save responsibly and make realistic choices, the system will reward you with a genuine path to ownership. Right now it does not. Fixing that is the most fundamental thing a housing policy should do.
The urgency is real. But urgency has been the justification for some of the worst housing decisions in British history. The tower blocks of the postwar decades were built with the highest intentions and the most modern thinking available. They became some of the most socially damaging environments Britain has ever created. We are still paying for that mistake.
We should not build tower blocks. We should not build homes without proper light, space and the dignified proportions that make a dwelling worth living in across decades. We should not build communities without the schools, surgeries, parks and local shops that give a neighbourhood life.
The proposal to relax design guidance in the name of delivery — as set out in the ‘Homes for London’ initiative — should be approached with considerable caution. Relaxing requirements around single-aspect units and dwellings per core may be defensible in some contexts; reducing standards across the board is not. A home that is cheap to build but uninhabitable to live in is not a solution. It is the next generation’s crisis, deferred at their expense.
London’s unbuilt homes on approved brownfield land represent a policy failure. The land is there. Many of the permissions are there. The demand is overwhelming. What is missing is a system that enables rational actors — developers, builders, investors — to do what they want to do, which is build homes and make a return on doing so.
The answer is a better-designed government process:
Britain has treated housing as a political football for 40 years. Every party has set targets. Every party has underdelivered. Every party has blamed the others. The cost of that failure is measured not in statistics but in the lives of people who cannot afford to rent, cannot imagine buying, and have stopped believing that the system was designed with them in mind.