‘The Green’s housing policy should be a wake-up call for Labour’

This week Zack Polanski’s Green Party launched its local election campaign, with its sights set on Labour’s flagship councils in London. Polling suggests the Greens are threatening Labour in boroughs like Islington, Lambeth, Hackney and Lewisham – long-standing Labour strongholds.

Their pitch to Londoners leans heavily on the capital’s brutal housing costs. Private rents now average about £2,273 a month, while the typical London home costs an eye-watering £554,000. For voters locked out of ownership or handing over half their pay cheque in rent, the populist promise of rent controls and a tough new approach to ‘greedy developers’ is understandably popular.

Polanski’s offer is simple. Attack Labour councils supposedly in hock to developers, mandate 50 per cent social housing on all new schemes, and institute rent controls for the private market. But will this get more homes built and bring prices down? 

READ MORE: ‘Ending leasehold abuse is central to tackling the housing crisis and cost of living’

The Greens are right on one count. They, like nearly everyone, understand that the current system is not delivering the homes London needs, and their policies have an instinctive appeal to Labour voters. A month out from polling day, the promise of capping rents in one of the most expensive cities on the planet presents a big challenge for Labour.

But the Greens fundamentally misunderstand the root cause of the capital’s housing affordability crisis. The primary problem is not developers refusing to build social housing, and the solution is not found in hard-line rent controls that have slashed housing supply in places like Catalonia, and led to an emergence of a black market in Sweden. 

Put simply, the Greens seek to decouple housing affordability from questions of overall supply across all tenures, ignoring the evidence which tells us that adding homes at any price point can improve overall affordability, because new supply allows people to move up the ladder and free up more affordable homes lower down. 

Polanski’s housing policy should be a wake-up call for Labour, which must quickly grapple with the real reasons why housing is so unaffordable in London: it has become too difficult and expensive to build anything at all.

Housebuilding in the capital is now among the lowest of any major city in the developed world. New housing starts have ground to an effective halt. There were just 4,170 starts of any tenure in 2024/25, down from 21,660 in 2022/23. Between April and December 2025, affordable housing starts in six London boroughs were in single digits. 

This dramatic fall in new starts is the cumulative effect of hundreds of planning obligations, environmental and building safety regulations, challenging affordable housing requirements, the cost of unpredictability within the planning system, delays with getting sites through the building safety regulator and rising construction costs. 

For example, the second staircase rule on buildings over 18m adds an extra £22,500 to the cost of every home. While each regulation may look virtuous on paper, the compounding effect has driven housebuilding to an effective halt, and has left London with roughly 281,000 ‘ghost’ homes, existing on paper with planning permission, but that remain unbuilt. A death by a thousand cuts. 

Labour’s answer to the Greens should be to prove its commitment to ‘build, baby, build’ by tackling the systemic problems behind the collapse in housebuilding in London, coupled with its own populist pitch about taking on vested ‘NIMBY’ interests.

There may be a time for going after developers, but at present, many schemes really are unviable, and it is understandable why profit-making businesses walk away rather than take a hit. Our housing market is structurally broken and fixing that must be the priority before pointing the finger at housebuilders. 

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While May 7th could be a tough night for Labour in London, it gives ‘YIMBY’ ministers in central government an opportunity. With the prospect of Green councils in London, the government could go gung-ho on its housing targets during the remainder of this Parliament.

If Green councils block development with unrealistic social housing quotas, onerous planning requirements, and demands which make schemes unviable, ministers should intervene quickly. They can tighten national and London policy, enforce housing delivery tests, and step in where councils fail to identify sites or grant permissions. 

Ministers have a large toolbox at their disposal, including intervening in local plans to require realistic and pro-building policies, setting sounder viability assumptions and, in extremis, centralising plan-making powers away from authorities persistently reluctant to say yes to new development. The Secretary of State, Steve Reed, can also ‘call-in’ planning applications where local delays threaten critical housing supply.

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“Never let a good crisis go to waste,” the saying goes. If Labour is brave enough, possible Green victories in inner London could provide the cover it needs to reassert national responsibility for getting homes built and delivering on its pledge to build 1.5 million new homes.

In doing so, the government would be acting in the national interest and delivering on its mandate to get Britain building. Accomplishing this and tackling the housing crisis for good would set Labour on a clear path to victory at the most important election of them all.

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