SUMMARY
London’s housebuilding rescue plan is starting to work, but London housebuilding itself is still in trouble.
The clearest early progress is not a surge in completed homes. It is the removal of specific blockages: Building Safety Regulator approval times have roughly halved, private starts have bounced from the 2025 trough, and City Hall now has dedicated money to rescue stalled projects.
The scale of the crash still dominates the picture. Molior recorded only about 5,550 private starts on larger schemes in 2025, down roughly 84% from 2015, so even an annualised pace above 8,000 starts would still be historically weak.
The forward pipeline is the more worrying number than today’s completions. Existing private projects could still deliver roughly 16,250 homes in 2026 and 10,000 in 2027, before the pipeline falls towards about 4,600 in 2028 unless starts recover quickly.
London does not mainly have a shortage of permissions in the short run. Roughly 147,000 homes had planning permission but no recorded start near the end of 2025, which points instead to finance, sales, construction costs, affordable-housing deals and regulatory delays as the immediate constraints.
The temporary 20% affordable-housing route is therefore a real experiment in additionality. It is a good trade only when the lower requirement gets a genuinely stalled scheme built; it is a bad trade when a project that could have delivered 35% affordable housing simply takes the easier route.
Public funding is big enough to unblock some projects but not to restart London by itself. The £324 million Developer Investment Fund targets specific financing gaps, while affordable housing has much deeper backing through up to £11.7 billion over ten years and planned low-interest lending; given the previous programme’s missed target, actual starts matter more than the headline sums.
Demand remains a serious brake on private construction. New-build sales fell sharply in the first half of 2026, thousands of completed homes were still unsold, and developers cannot solve weak end-prices simply by receiving easier planning or faster approvals.
The new draft London Plan makes a larger recovery more plausible by planning for around 55,800 homes a year and simplifying some development rules, but even that target sits far below the Government’s estimate of roughly 84,900 homes of annual need. The rescue becomes convincing only if starts, stalled-site restarts, affordable-housing delivery, Gateway 2 processing and the 2027-29 pipeline improve together.
For now, the right description is early repair rather than turnaround. Some of the machinery that broke London housebuilding is being fixed, but the city is still delivering only about 32,000 homes a year and the private market remains far from normal.
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Why did London need a housebuilding rescue plan?
London needed a housebuilding rescue plan because private construction had fallen to a level that threatened an even bigger shortage of new homes over the next few years.
Molior recorded roughly 5,550 private housing starts on larger London schemes in 2025. A decade earlier, the figure was about 33,800. That is an 84% fall.
The timing makes the collapse particularly worrying. Homes completing today often started several years ago, so completion figures can look reasonable long after developers have stopped launching enough new projects. Molior estimated that roughly 16,250 homes in the existing private pipeline could complete in 2026 and around 10,000 in 2027, before the figure drops to about 4,600 in 2028. Another 4,600 homes were sitting on developments where work had stopped.
The wider housing numbers are hardly better. Government estimates put London at roughly 32,300 net additional homes in 2025-26, while its assessment of annual housing need is close to 84,900. London is therefore adding only around 38 homes for every 100 the Government says it needs.
That combination explains the emergency response better than any individual announcement: private starts collapsed first, the forward pipeline became dangerously thin, and total delivery was already far below need.
| Measure | Earlier level | Recent level | Change | What it tells us |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private starts on larger schemes | ~33,800 in 2015 | ~5,550 in 2025 | -84% | Private development fell dramatically |
| Estimated annual housing need | — | ~84,900 | — | Scale of London’s underlying shortage |
| Estimated net additions | — | ~32,300 | — | Around 38% of assessed need |
| Permissioned homes without a start | — | ~147,000 | — | Many approved schemes are still not moving |
| Existing private pipeline expected to complete in 2028 | — | ~4,600 | — | Future supply is much thinner than current completions suggest |
What is actually in London’s housebuilding rescue plan?
London’s housebuilding rescue plan combines planning concessions, public investment, cheap finance and more direct intervention in stalled developments.
The most controversial part is City Hall’s temporary planning route. Eligible private developments can qualify for a faster process with at least 20% affordable housing instead of reaching the usual 35% affordable level needed for London’s established fast-track route. At least 60% of the affordable homes under the emergency route should normally be social rent.
The Government is also working on temporary borough Community Infrastructure Levy relief. A qualifying scheme with 20% affordable housing could receive 50% relief, rising towards 80% for projects reaching 35% affordable housing.
City Hall has meanwhile opened a £324 million Developer Investment Fund for schemes that have stalled or need extra money to become viable. The shared target with Government is to commit funding associated with at least 5,000 homes by March 2029.
Affordable housing has much deeper financial backing. London has secured up to £11.7 billion through its new ten-year Social and Affordable Homes Programme. Another £1.5 billion of low-interest loans is intended for social-housing providers.
Each measure deals with a different problem. A developer struggling with planning obligations needs something different from a housing association struggling with debt costs, while a half-built site may simply need a financing gap filled. That broad approach makes sense because London’s downturn came from several problems hitting the market at once.
| Measure | Main problem it tries to fix | Scale | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temporary 20% affordable route | Planning viability | London-wide | Available |
| Borough CIL relief | Upfront development costs | 50%-80% potential relief | Still being implemented |
| City Hall Developer Investment Fund | Stalled schemes | £324m initially | Open |
| Cheap housing-association loans | Borrowing costs | £1.5bn | Planned |
| Social and Affordable Homes Programme | Affordable-housing funding | Up to £11.7bn | Underway |
| Stronger mayoral intervention powers | Borough refusals and delay | London-wide | Available |
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Can we already tell whether London’s housebuilding rescue plan is working?
Only partly. London now has some encouraging early evidence, but most of the rescue package is still too young to judge through completed homes.
The timing is crucial. The £324 million Developer Investment Fund opened for expressions of interest in March 2026. The new affordable programme only opened for bids in February. Temporary CIL relief has taken longer to put into practice. Homes completing today were usually designed, financed and started long before these measures existed.
Even starts have to be interpreted carefully. A project beginning construction these days may have been negotiated before the emergency package, while a development saved by the new policies may take months before activity appears in official data.
So the useful tests for now sit one step earlier in the process. Are starts moving away from their historic lows? Are stalled developments being funded? Are regulatory queues shrinking? Are affordable-housing providers actually getting enough money to start building again?
Are London housing starts finally recovering?
London housing starts have bounced from the bottom, but the recovery is still tiny compared with the scale of the collapse.
Molior recorded 2,294 private starts in the final quarter of 2025, the strongest quarter of that year, followed by another 2,103 in the first quarter of 2026. The average quarter during 2025 was only around 1,400.
If London maintained a pace of roughly 2,100 starts every quarter, larger private schemes would produce more than 8,000 starts a year. That would be a noticeable improvement on 2025.
The comparison with the previous cycle is much harsher. Private starts exceeded 30,000 in stronger years. Even an annualised 8,000-plus pace would remain roughly three-quarters below London’s 2015 level.
| Private-start measure | Homes | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | ~33,800 | Strong previous market |
| 2025 | ~5,550 | Crisis-level activity |
| Average quarter in 2025 | ~1,390 | Very weak baseline |
| Q4 2025 | 2,294 | Clear bounce |
| Q1 2026 | 2,103 | Bounce broadly sustained |
| Q1 pace annualised | ~8,400 | Better, but still historically weak |
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Is London actually building more homes overall?
No. London’s overall housing supply remains stuck around 32,000 additional homes a year, so the rescue has not yet produced a visible city-wide increase in delivery.
Government estimates put net additions at roughly 32,300 in 2025-26 after 32,680 the year before. That is basically flat.
Against London’s estimated need, the shortfall is huge. The Government’s current figure is around 84,900 homes annually, leaving a gap of roughly 52,600 homes between recent delivery and estimated need.
There is an awkward second comparison. The new draft London Plan proposes capacity for 558,000 homes over ten years, about 55,800 annually. Even that much more ambitious rate would remain roughly 29,000 homes a year below the Government’s assessment.
Getting London from roughly 32,000 homes towards 50,000-plus would represent a serious turnaround. It would still leave the city well short of estimated need.
Why are 147,000 approved London homes still not being built?
Around 147,000 London homes had planning permission but no recorded construction start near the end of 2025, which shows how badly the market has struggled to turn approvals into actual building.
For perspective, 147,000 homes are equivalent to more than four years of London’s recent total annual housing output.
The number needs some care. A large regeneration project can hold permission for thousands of homes that were always supposed to be built in stages. Some sites still need remediation, infrastructure, land assembly or planning conditions cleared before work can begin.
Even allowing for that, the scale is too large to dismiss as normal phasing.
Construction costs rose sharply after 2020. Borrowing became much more expensive. Housing associations pulled back from buying some Section 106 affordable homes. New-build sales weakened. Taller buildings then ran into long Building Safety Regulator approval delays.
A scheme can therefore have perfectly valid planning permission while no developer or lender is willing to fund construction at the expected selling price.
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Will London’s 20% affordable-housing rule and CIL relief actually get stalled projects built?
London’s temporary 20% affordable-housing route should unlock some stalled developments, while CIL relief could improve the economics further, but both need to be judged by extra homes started.
Under London’s established fast-track system, schemes reaching 35% affordable housing can usually avoid a detailed viability assessment. The emergency measure creates a temporary route at 20% for eligible projects, with at least 60% of that affordable element normally expected to be social rent.
Take a 500-home development. At 35%, the project would contain 175 affordable homes. At 20%, it would contain 100, a reduction of 75 affordable homes.
That can still be a good trade when the alternative is a scheme sitting unbuilt for years. A completed 500-home development with 100 affordable homes clearly adds more housing than an economically impossible project that delivers zero.
The harder case is a project that could have been built with 35% anyway. Giving that scheme the lower threshold would sacrifice 75 affordable homes without creating additional supply.
The planned CIL discount works on another part of the same development appraisal. Qualifying brownfield projects providing 20% affordable housing are intended to receive 50% relief from borough CIL charges, potentially rising towards 80% at 35% affordable housing.
City Hall has tried to contain the risk of developers taking concessions without building through eligibility rules, grant funding and reviews when construction fails to progress. Expanded mayoral call-in powers also let City Hall become involved in some developments of 50 to 149 homes where boroughs are minded to refuse them.
CIL relief is still too new to explain the current improvement in housing starts. The real test for both measures is whether schemes using them actually move into construction.
| Example 500-home scheme | 35% route | 20% emergency route |
|---|---|---|
| Total homes | 500 | 500 |
| Affordable homes | 175 | 100 |
| Market homes | 325 | 400 |
| Affordable homes given up | — | 75 |
| Minimum social-rent homes if exactly 20% is provided | — | 60 |
| Good outcome | Scheme proceeds with 35% | Previously stalled scheme now gets built |
| Bad outcome | — | Scheme takes 20% route without adding genuinely extra delivery |
Is London’s £324 million developer fund actually unblocking stalled sites?
London’s £324 million Developer Investment Fund is aimed squarely at stalled schemes, but today we have much stronger evidence of a funding mechanism than of homes actually unlocked by it.
City Hall opened the fund for expressions of interest in March. It can support land acquisition, remediation, infrastructure, construction costs and direct viability gaps. Public bodies, housing providers and private developers can all apply.
The initial focus is on developments that can complete by summer 2029, and Government and City Hall share a target of committing funding associated with at least 5,000 homes by March 2029.
Five thousand homes equal roughly one-sixteenth of a single year of the Government’s estimated London housing need. The fund is therefore better viewed as a targeted tool for projects with specific financing gaps than something large enough to restart London by itself.
City Hall is still accepting expressions of interest, so the more useful evidence will come from named projects, signed investments and starts.
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Will £1.5 billion of cheap loans get London housing associations building again?
The £1.5 billion low-interest lending plan could remove one of London’s biggest hidden housing bottlenecks if housing associations actually use it to restart development and buy affordable homes from private schemes.
Housing associations affect much more than their own construction programmes. They also buy affordable homes from private developers through Section 106 agreements. When associations cannot afford those purchases, the private development can become harder to finance as well.
Their finances have been squeezed from several directions: higher interest rates, safety work, repairs to existing stock, decarbonisation spending and expensive construction. Building new homes has had to compete with fixing the homes they already own.
Loans priced as low as 0.1% could change that calculation substantially, particularly for projects held back by debt costs.
The next evidence we need is straightforward: how much of the £1.5 billion gets allocated, which providers take the loans and whether their affordable starts or Section 106 purchases rise.
Does London’s new £11.7 billion affordable-housing programme look big enough to matter?
Yes. London’s new £11.7 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme is large enough to change affordable housebuilding, although the number of homes it will ultimately fund still has to be proved through delivery.
The programme runs from 2026 to 2036, with projects able to start through March 2036 and complete later. Social rent is the priority tenure, in line with the wider national goal for at least 60% of programme homes to be social rent.
There was strong demand in the initial bidding round. That is useful because it suggests London does have organisations and projects willing to build when enough grant is available.
The programme also pushes London towards a different delivery mix. Councils are expected to play a much larger role, reducing some of the dependence on private developers selling expensive homes to individual buyers.
Still, £11.7 billion covers a decade, while London's affordable-housing need is estimated at around 45,500 homes every year. The programme is big enough to matter, but not big enough for the headline sum alone to tell us how much of the shortage it can close.
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Did London’s last affordable-housing programme actually deliver what it promised?
No. London’s 2021-26 Affordable Homes Programme missed a target that had already been cut twice, which is exactly why we should be careful with the much larger funding promises being made now.
The programme began with an ambition of 35,000 affordable starts. That was later revised to 23,900-27,200 and then cut again to 17,800-19,000.
By the end of March 2026, the programme had recorded 14,335 starts. That was only around 81% of the bottom of the final target range. Government later allowed some projects up to six additional months to start on a case-by-case basis, so the final total can still rise.
The tenure mix was much better: 11,383 of those starts, or 79%, were for social rent.
There is also a useful warning in completions. The older 2016-23 programme recorded 8,773 completions during 2025-26, yet 32,081 homes that had already started under that programme were still waiting to complete by March. Another 11,728 started homes from the 2021-26 programme were unfinished.
Many of today’s affordable completions are therefore coming from older projects rather than proving that the newer starts pipeline is healthy.
| Affordable housing measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Original 2021-26 starts ambition | 35,000 |
| First revised target | 23,900-27,200 |
| Final revised target | 17,800-19,000 |
| Starts by March 2026 | 14,335 |
| Social-rent starts | 11,383 |
| Social-rent share | 79% |
| Unfinished homes from 2016-23 programme | 32,081 |
| Unfinished homes from 2021-26 programme | 11,728 |
Has the Building Safety Regulator finally stopped holding up London housing?
The Building Safety Regulator has improved dramatically, and this is currently the clearest hard evidence that one major London housebuilding bottleneck is being removed.
Higher-risk residential buildings need Gateway 2 approval before major building work can begin. London is especially exposed because it produces so many taller apartment developments.
A year ago, new-build applications handled through the regulator’s specialist Innovation Unit had a median approval time of around 43 weeks and an approval rate of only 39%.
The latest published 12-week figures show a median of 22 weeks and a 91% approval rate for new higher-risk buildings. The regulator made 45 decisions in that period, approving 41 of them.
Cutting roughly 21 weeks from an approval timetable reduces the amount of time developers carry expensive land and financing without being able to build. It also gives contractors and lenders far more certainty.
London was still carrying 256 regional Gateway 2 applications in the system at the end of March, more than any other region by a wide margin. The queue has not disappeared, but the improvement is real.
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Can London developers actually sell enough new homes right now?
London’s weak new-build sales remain one of the biggest reasons the rescue plan may struggle to restart private construction quickly.
Molior recorded around 5,600 new-build sales in London during the first half of 2026, compared with roughly 8,800 in the same period a year earlier. That is a fall of around 37%.
At the same time, around 4,600 completed new homes were reportedly sitting unsold, the highest level in Molior’s series, with a combined estimated value of roughly £3.5 billion.
The wider price market has also been soft. Official house-price data showed London recording an annual decline while most English regions were still rising.
For developers, cheaper homes do not automatically help. Construction costs have remained high, so lower expected selling prices squeeze the margin on a new project. A development that looked viable at £800 per square foot can become very difficult if buyers will now only pay £700 while the cost of building barely moves.
Planning can become easier, public money can fill selected gaps and safety approvals can accelerate, but a private developer still needs confidence that hundreds of flats can be sold at a profitable price.
Can Build to Rent rescue London while homebuyers stay cautious?
Build to Rent can keep some London schemes moving when individual buyers are weak, but the sector is nowhere near large enough to replace the missing private-for-sale market.
Institutional rental housing expanded quickly during the previous decade. Between 2009 and 2024, more than 62,000 London Build to Rent homes started and roughly 51,500 completed.
Recent starts weakened sharply. About 2,600 Build to Rent homes started during 2024, around a third fewer than in 2023 and roughly 62% below the 2022 peak.
That may sound strange when London rents are so high. The problem is that institutional investors compare rental projects with other investments. Higher interest rates and bond yields increased the return they can earn elsewhere, while London construction costs also rose.
A rental project therefore needs stronger income to justify the same land and building cost. Recent numbers show that institutional rental capital has been hit by much of the same viability pressure as the private-for-sale market.
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Is London’s housing problem really about running out of land?
London’s immediate housebuilding crisis is mainly about getting existing sites financed and built, although land becomes a much bigger constraint when we look ten years ahead.
The stock of permissioned but unstarted homes is the clearest short-term clue. London already has roughly 147,000 homes with consent but no recorded start. Finding another site does little for a project whose existing site cannot be financed.
Over the longer run, the maths changes.
The new draft London Plan says London can accommodate around 558,000 homes over the decade to 2037. Reaching that figure requires more intensive use of brownfield sites, growth corridors and some Green Belt land.
Government estimates that London needs around 850,000 homes over a comparable ten-year period.
Even after squeezing much more capacity out of the city and accepting some Green Belt development, the draft plan still identifies only about two-thirds of the assessed need.
Does the new London Plan make a real housing recovery more plausible?
The new draft London Plan makes a bigger London housebuilding recovery more plausible because it plans for much more housing and strips out some planning complexity, but its own target still falls far short of estimated need.
The draft sets capacity for 558,000 additional homes over ten years, around 55,800 a year.
That would be a major improvement on recent delivery of roughly 32,000 homes. London would need to increase output by around 70% to get there.
The plan also tries to make development easier. It is nearly half the length of the current London Plan, aligns more closely with national planning policy, simplifies some requirements and pushes for more consistent rules across boroughs.
Green Belt development is included too, which would have been politically much harder to imagine in earlier London Plans.
Yet the proposed housing number remains well below Government-assessed need of around 850,000 homes over ten years. London would still be short by approximately 292,000 homes across the decade even if every home in the draft target were delivered.
| Housing benchmark | Homes per year | Difference from recent delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Recent London net additions | ~32,300 | — |
| Draft London Plan target | ~55,800 | +73% |
| Government-assessed need | ~84,900 | +163% |
| Annual gap between draft target and assessed need | ~29,100 | — |
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What would prove that London’s housebuilding rescue is actually working?
London’s rescue will be working when several quarters of real construction data improve together, rather than when another funding pot or planning change is announced.
Private starts are the first test. The roughly 5,550 starts recorded in 2025 created such a low base that merely returning above 8,000 or 10,000 would count as meaningful early progress. Sustained levels much higher than that would finally start rebuilding the private pipeline.
The emergency 20% affordable-housing route gives us another unusually clean experiment. City Hall can track which schemes use it and whether construction follows. A large number of permissions with few starts would be a bad result.
The £324 million Developer Investment Fund has a similarly measurable target: funding commitments associated with at least 5,000 homes by March 2029. Those commitments then need to turn into active building sites.
Affordable housing should improve as the £11.7 billion programme and cheap-loan programme start flowing through provider balance sheets. Given the failure of the previous programme to reach even its reduced starts target, starts matter more than the amount of money announced.
Above all, the ugly 2027-29 forward pipeline needs to start filling up.
Is London’s housebuilding rescue plan actually working?
Partly. London’s housebuilding rescue plan is now fixing some of the blockages that caused the crash, but actual housebuilding has not recovered enough for us to call the rescue a success.
There are real improvements.
Building Safety Regulator new-build approval times have dropped from around 43 weeks to 22 weeks while approval rates climbed from 39% to 91%. Private starts produced two better quarters after a disastrous 2025. City Hall now has £324 million specifically to put into stalled developments. Up to £11.7 billion is available for social and affordable housing over the next decade, alongside plans for £1.5 billion of unusually cheap lending.
The new draft London Plan also goes much further than the current planning framework. It targets 558,000 homes over ten years, accepts some Green Belt development and tries to simplify rules that have made London development increasingly difficult.
The output numbers have yet to follow. London is still adding only around 32,000 homes a year against estimated need of almost 85,000. New-build sales fell heavily in the first half of 2026. Thousands of completed flats remain unsold. The previous affordable-housing programme missed a starts target that had already been cut twice.
Several headline rescue measures have also barely had time to work. The Developer Investment Fund is still building its project pipeline, the new affordable programme is only entering delivery, and CIL relief cannot yet explain current construction.
The strongest evidence so far comes from fixing individual bottlenecks rather than from a broad surge in housing starts.
We would therefore describe London’s rescue as an early repair, not a turnaround. If starts rise for several consecutive quarters and the thin 2027-29 pipeline begins filling up, the answer can change quickly.
For now, London’s housebuilding rescue plan is starting to work, but London housebuilding itself is still in trouble.
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OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis tests whether London’s housebuilding rescue plan is actually working by looking across the parts of the housing system that would need to improve for a real recovery to be underway: construction activity, the forward development pipeline, project viability, affordable-housing delivery, development finance, regulatory bottlenecks, planning capacity and buyer demand.
We gave more weight to observed outcomes than policy announcements. A new fund, planning concession or lending programme tells us that a mechanism exists; allocations, approvals, construction starts and completed projects tell us whether that mechanism is actually changing delivery.
Because housing construction moves slowly, we separated leading indicators from lagging ones. Completed homes largely reflect decisions made years earlier, so recent starts, stalled-site activity, regulatory processing and the shape of the future pipeline can reveal a change in direction earlier than completion statistics.
Where activity was recovering from an unusually weak base, we compared recent improvement with both the immediate trough and stronger historical levels. That helps distinguish a genuine recovery from a rebound that still leaves the market far below normal.
We treated the roughly 147,000 permissioned but unstarted homes as evidence of blockage inside the development process, not as 147,000 identical shovel-ready projects. Large regeneration schemes can be deliberately phased, while individual sites can still be held back by remediation, infrastructure, land assembly, planning conditions, finance or sales risk.
For the temporary 20% affordable-housing route and CIL relief, we focused on additionality. The central test is whether a concession gets homes built that would otherwise remain stalled, rather than simply reducing affordable-housing delivery on schemes that could have proceeded under the normal rules.
For the affordable-housing programmes, we judged performance mainly through starts, tenure mix and the stock of already-started homes still awaiting completion. We also treated the previous programme’s missed and repeatedly reduced target as an important benchmark for assessing the credibility of new funding promises.
For regulatory performance, we used Building Safety Regulator Gateway 2 approval data because London’s concentration of taller residential projects makes that bottleneck unusually important. For private-market activity and Build to Rent, we used specialist Molior data alongside official and GLA evidence rather than relying on one dataset in isolation.
Key sources used for this analysis include GOV.UK on the emergency housebuilding package, the Government response on support for London housebuilding, GLA guidance on the temporary planning route, the Government consultation on time-limited CIL relief, City Hall’s Developer Investment Fund, City Hall on the £1.5 billion low-interest lending plan, and the London Social and Affordable Homes Programme 2026-36.
We also used official housing-supply estimates, the draft London Plan’s housing-need assessment, the draft plan’s 558,000-home capacity assessment, Building Safety Regulator Gateway 2 data, the London Affordable Housing Monitor 2026, GLA material on permissioned but unstarted homes, and Housing in London 2025 for the Build to Rent series.
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