According to analysis released earlier this year by NLA, GLA Economics, and LSE, London’s built environment contributed £111 billion to the economy in 2023. At Places for London, we’re proud to be part of that story, but our role goes deeper than economic output alone.
At an event hosted by Arcadis and BusinessLDN in November, we launched a report that, for the first time, quantified the social, environmental, and economic impact of our work in the capital. Our Contribution Report revealed that the total value generated across our activities in 2024 was approximately £440m.
It found that over the past year, our housing developments have enabled over 1,700 daily trips on Transport for London’s network. As well as increasing ridership, we take every opportunity to deliver wider transport benefits as part of our schemes, whether building new facilities for our TfL colleagues, providing step-free access, or reimagining streets to prioritise people over cars.
Housing delivery is central to our mission. Working in partnership with organisations like Barratt London, Ballymore, and Notting Hill Genesis, we are building thousands of new homes: 4,400 so far, of which we have completed 1,600, with 50 per cent affordable. The report sets out the importance of housing to value creation – we estimate that the homes completed in the last year have contributed £43m of economic and social value in their local communities and London as a whole.
Our delivery of affordable housing achieves important impacts for residents and their communities – our report quantifies this at £6m. The areas that benefit include health, because modern, efficient, comfortable homes can reduce preventable illness; education and career prospects, because lower costs of living mean families can invest more in learning, development, and planning for the future; and cost of living, because all Places for London developments are energy efficient, which means lower utility bills. The 4,000 Passivhaus homes we’ll build in partnership with Barratt London in the future will only increase the scale of these benefits.
More than 1,500 businesses in 2,000 retail units and arches on the Places for London estate support more than 11,000 jobs, generating an enormous economic benefit. Ninety-five per cent of those businesses are SMEs, too. The wages and taxes our tenants pay support a total economic contribution of £388m.
Social value is embedded in all we do. We have trained more than 10,000 Londoners in our construction skills academies, and 4,200 of them have secured employment in the built environment sector as a result. Our 2024 trainees alone will benefit from an overall £34m uplift in lifetime earnings. We also recently opened a new temporary market right above Seven Sisters London Underground station, with social value at its heart. This vibrant space is the result of a fantastic collaboration between Haringey Council and us, replacing the previous market with a fresh, temporary home for its 40 beloved traders.
The report shows that the homes we build, the businesses we support, and the training that we provide are generating millions of pounds worth of monetary value in addition to the profit we return each year to TfL for reinvestment in the transport network. At Places for London, we believe that social value and doing the right things for London and Londoners go hand in hand with running a successful property business, and we’ll continue to do just that.