London needs to build. But will the new plan deliver?

Nick Cuff has been writing Prop Views since 2018. This month it became a weekly podcast on the trends, policies, politics and deals shaping UK development, co-hosted with Oli Lowrie. The first guest was Dominic Grace, and the first subject was the draft London Plan published on 16 July.

The numbers in the plan are the argument. It targets 558,000 new homes. It reintroduces density matrices tied to height, with a baseline of four to nine storeys across most of the city. And it permits 100-metre towers in just 17 locations.

Set that against the modelling. Only around 23 per cent of development scenarios stack up once affordable housing requirements are applied, against an affordable housing funding gap of £28.3bn.

It's like someone getting out the smelling salts, when what we actually need is a defibrillator, wired up to the mains.

Grace's case is that build costs, land costs and affordable housing contributions together mean build to rent in London does not stack, and capital is going to other UK cities instead. His prescription is not the headline-grabbing one. He argues for a long, steady 20 per cent affordable threshold rather than a zero per cent that solves nothing, and points to Wandsworth as evidence of what sustained regeneration does for a community.

The episode ranges wider than the plan. It covers Prologis's recommended £14bn takeover of Segro, and ends on Building Safety Act gateway approvals now running at 91 per cent, up from 25 to 30 per cent in the regime's early years.

Our read: the plan is half the length of the 2021 version, but shorter is not bolder. It is more prescriptive, particularly on height and density. This government finds it hard to write a plan that is pro-development and pro-developer at the same time, and the consultation closes on 15 October.