Our London Growth Commission is designed to get the capital back on the front foot after a lacklustre Budget for growth.
We’re looking across the sectors that drive success – from professional and business services to the creative industries, higher education, digital and tech, financial services, life sciences, and housing, alongside the cross-cutting enablers in government, investment, and productivity that support them all.
At our first deep-dive session, the Commission turned its attention to housing, a major influence on growth in the capital. London cannot deliver a credible plan for economic renewal without fixing the housing system that plays a big part in the ability to attract and retain talent.
We started by looking at things that can be actioned right now, requiring only a policy change or tweak – examples here would include flexibility on affordable housing requirements, alignment of policy between tiers of govt, and improvements to the Building Safety Regulator – all designed to reduce friction, speed things up and reduce costs.
Next up, a set of ideas that can be actioned in the medium-term: introducing fast-track planning routes, granting permission in principle around stations and other locations – measures designed to add certainty and get to ‘yes’ faster.
Finally, we considered measures that inevitably require some upfront fiscal firepower: investment in planning resource to get quicker/better decisions, more forms of tax relief to alleviate costs, reintroducing some demand-side stimulus such as Help to Buy or Stamp Duty reliefs, as well as infrastructure investment.
The consensus view is that Government reforms have moved in the right direction, but without the required scale or speed. Measures to accelerate affordable housing have been too prescriptive, too narrow, or too short-term to shift behaviour. To restore confidence, reforms need to be more ambitious, more predictable, and easier to use.
The Commission is continuing to sift through these and other growth booster proposals that have been submitted. But it’s clear that if London wants to thrive, it needs a housing system that removes barriers, improves incentives, and creates places where people genuinely want to live. Getting that right is a central part of the Commission’s wider job of strengthening the capital’s foundations for long‑term success – and, crucially, of boosting the UK’s economic performance. When London succeeds, the whole country benefits.