London Plan

More substantially, to accompany this episode, you will also find links to the following in the description.

Two of Simon's blogs, one on evidenced unmet need and one on the London Plan.

Stacey Robbins' LinkedIn post about settlement boundaries.

A blog by Simon Posse at ICENI about construction traffic.

In a conversation recorded online last month, August 2026, Alex tells Andrew about his time before switching allegiances as a Conservative councillor in Redbridge that included a spell as the cabinet member for planning.

They then touch on the London Plan and the package of emergency measures proposed by the Government and the Mayor of London to support house building in the capital.

Having heard from Alex, you will then hear from the MP for Boston and Skegness and the Deputy Leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice.

In a conversation recorded online last week, he tells Andrew about his background in property and the live property-related issues in his constituency, which also include viability.

Yeah, so the London Assembly is quite a strange beast in many ways.

In some ways, it doesn't really have that much power itself.

It is more of a glorified kind of scrutiny committee, hugely important roles in holding the mayor to account and commissioning investigations into various different topics and obviously have a full range of policy committees that look at those and has a shaping influence on the London plan as part of that.

But the way it's elected, so 25 members in total, of which 14 represent large constituencies, which are basically two or three boroughs.

No, I think that's a good point.

And I think the reference to the London Plan, I think the concept of an international centre of culture and commerce and the experienced economy as a whole for the West End is really what defies this growth potential.

I mean, pedestrianisation, understandably, has attracted the most of the headlines.

But as you explained, the ambition is not simply Oxford Street without traffic.

... last couple of years, but there needs, you know, it needs a lot more improvement to really kind of expedite house building on the scale we need and the targets that have been set, so.

And turning from the Building Safety Act to the draft London Plan, uh, which is still currently going, undergoing consultation, what are your feelings about, about the London Plan and, and the housing target it sets? Are, are they realistic?

Well, I've gotta say I think there's a real effort in the draft London Plan on balancing realism with ambition.

The government wants London to achieve something like eight hundred and fifty thousand houses over the next decade, which is a huge number, and the draft London Plan cuts through that.

It's not doable.

They're aiming for five hundred and fifty-eight thousand over the next decade, and it sounds so much better.

This will make it compulsory.

From a lawyer's perspective, this is a field day.

Where is the good location for? our logistics hub, our housing to go, our employment areas, which sometimes on a local authority level can be different stakeholders, which muddy the waters a little bit, I suppose.

You mentioned London a moment ago, touched on it, which segues me nicely, but the London plan, key changes, what are they?

Yeah, so one of the key ones, London Plan came out in the draft.

London Plan was introduced in July of this year and it actually followed the Greater London Authority issued some emergency measures and actually showed that they were really trying to kickstart house building.

And so although the draft London Plan isn't quite as say supporting as the emergency measures, it still introduces some key changes.

So one of them being actually location based affordable housing thresholds.

And this again, it introduces that more nuanced approach where London boroughs will be assessed on their own sort of viability context.

And it's actually a really key emerging market.

So the first thing we learned was that Reform is exploring the idea of expanding permitted development rights in towns and cities, saying this would include change of use of buildings generally to residential.

Additionally, we found out that the party wants to abolish the London Plan and spatial development strategies with the planning paper stating that producing local plans places what it called a significant burden for local authorities and developers alike, and that SDSes merely compounded the problem.

Meanwhile, Reform said that it would ban all new so-called net zero projects by blocking them from getting grid connections.

Elsewhere, Reform's head of preparation for government, Danny Kruger, revealed that the party was mulling council tax breaks for residents living near energy and data center projects, suggesting vastly reduced energy bills, council tax, or business rates as examples.

The challenge for us, and it's really acute for London, is delivery.

The Draft London Plan has just been published.

It's a blueprint for the development, the evolution, the management, or even the stewardship of England's capital city for the next 20 years.

It covers almost every aspect of the built and natural environments, from infrastructure to housing to Greenbelt.

I'm the editor of the Planner Magazine, the official member magazine for the Royal Town Planning Institute.

And this is PlannerPod.

Episode 11, where we'll be talking about the London Plan.

With me today, I have my colleague as co-host, Ben Gosling, senior writer for the Planner.

Like a bit of an echo chamber inside a politician's head housing but actually if you ask general person on streets would they like to see more homes I think they would say yeah absolutely.

welcome to prop views the podcast you liked reading it so you now get to hear it it's the podcast about property development uh that intersects politics policy planning uh delivery and really fundamentally how things get built in this country and co-hosting today uh i have two people who really need no introduction whatsoever uh ollie lowry and the uh ever-present dominic grace uh welcome to the show we're gonna get straight into it um we're gonna hash it out um we're gonna try and give you some insights to make sense of what's going on in the world out there and on the docket today we have three stories uh over the summer things have got a little bit of drift but three big stories i think the draft london plan which we will no doubt come back to regularly over the next few months.

Prologis' acquisition of Segro, another UK business being bought by an American company.

And of course, Angie is back in the government and she's back and she's bolder than ever.

So without further ado, let's get into it.

Draft London plan.

So 16th of July this year, Sadiq Khan published his draft of the London Plan, the new 20-year blueprint this time for the capital.

And it's nearly half the length of the outgoing 2021 version.

We hear the rhetoric, but rhetoric and delivery are two entirely different things.

We also have reservations about about the changes in planning policies, what that means for our boroughs, housing targets, the London Plan coming through, how we want to deliver more housing, we want to deliver more infrastructure, and the constant changes in planning policies is sometimes unhelpful, gets a headline for the government, but doesn't actually address some of the structural or market challenges that are around delivery.

And, of course, we have concerns about the future of social care.

Andy Burnham has made quite a strong statement very strong views on this.