JK Sees #2: Use it or lose it when it comes to building new homes
As I walk to and from my local supermarket, I cross through a site earmarked for thousands of new homes. London, as with much of the country, desperately needs affordable, high-quality homes to be urgently built to help address the acute housing crisis.
But when the Mayor of London allowed the developer to forgo over 90% of the affordable homes as part of their plan to build around 4,000 properties on this brownfield site – leaving just 9% of those homes as affordable across the masterplan – the system is broken.
It formed a central tenet of our local election campaign: to hold the developer to account and protect the 35% affordable homes that they had promised when seeking planning permission. Other candidates in the ward quickly followed suit, even going against their own party's decision.
Whilst we can berate the developers' extractive tactics, land grabbing, delaying for appreciation and removing less profitable units, ultimately the current system is set up in their favour.
Earlier this year, I also heard rumours of a different project in another part of London, where the developer had bought up neighbouring properties next to their scheme in order to inflate the area’s value. As they put their new-build homes on the market, they could justify a higher price tag.
One of the core arguments of the developer in my neighbourhood is that they can't afford to build the affordable homes in this economic climate. And when ‘affordable' itself means just 20% off market rate, developers – often with very deep pockets – have every incentive to keep that market rate as high as possible.
And in April, they got the green light to turn this area into another East Village, Stratford or Nine Elms, Wandsworth, with homes being built as an investment, rather than as a place to inhabit. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, the development appears to have stalled once more.
When the collective voice of a neighbourhood wants a mixed, balanced development that goes at least some way to address our housing crisis, yet those in power take the side of the developer, the system is failing the people it's meant to serve.
We need to build the right kinds of homes in the right places, not more unaffordable luxury, so how do we do this? Surely we should tax developers for sitting idle – and this isn't hypothetical.
Back in May 2025, the Starmer government announced that housebuilders would have to commit to delivery timeframes before getting planning permission, submit annual progress reports to councils, and could see their land handed to local authorities if they missed their own targets, alongside financial penalties per unbuilt home.
Housing secretary at the time, Angela Rayner, put it bluntly: "No more sites with planning permission gathering dust for decades while a generation struggle to get on the housing ladder."
And yet, by the time MPs were debating planning reform again at the end of 2025, they were still asking why government had refused to introduce tougher "use it or lose it" powers. Whilst the policy was announced, it lacked teeth.
We have to be somewhat pragmatic in the capitalist society we live in, yet properly enforcing this – not just passing legislation – would be a simple and effective way to impact the business plans of Britain's developers, making it less profitable, not more, to land grab and play the long game: therefore forcing housebuilders to actually build houses. A radical thought, right?
So how does our new government square up? Burnham has spent his first week as Prime Minister opening No.10 North, bringing decision-making to Manchester. He said: "For 40 years, power and resources have been sucked into the centre, and too many communities have felt forgotten, without the attention and investment they deserve."
Perhaps there's some optimism here, but his government inherits the same gap described above: making another announcement isn't the same as building the capacity to actually deliver.
That gap showed again this morning.
With Angela Rayner reappointed as Housing Secretary, she has just ruled out rent controls in England, despite Burnham himself calling for rent freezes when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester back in 2023. She's betting on the Renters' Rights Act, in force since May, to do the work instead.
On the 1.5 million new homes building target, she was candid too: "It was [difficult] when I made the target, but I'm going to keep the target, and I'm not going to be defeated." Perhaps an admission, wrapped in defiance, that it's slipping.
Announcement, retreat, admission: it's a pattern we’re all so used to in Britain.
We’ll have to wait to see whether Burnham follows through on his own pledge, made during his leadership bid, to deliver the "biggest programme of council house building in decades." If he's able to follow through with that, it could do more for the housing crisis than any tax on land-banking developers. Whether he can, without the capacity in local government to actually deliver it, is the open question.
Ultimately, especially prevalent since the pandemic, but behind the scenes throughout my lifetime, the British state has quietly hollowed out its own capacity, especially within local government, and prioritised centralisation and deals with conglomerates and contractors instead.
And even the last government, led by Starmer, set out to standardise local government through a reorganisation. In many cases the only outcome has been paying consultants handsomely for work that has taken power and accountability away from communities, and left newly formed authorities burdened with debt.
Even where there is no present restructure, successive governments have burdened local authorities with statutory responsibilities without the funding to balance budgets, leaving many to make difficult choices. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen local government move language away from ‘budget cuts’ to ‘cost savings’.
As the housing charity Shelter pointed out when the May 2025 reforms were announced, speeding up private housebuilding only gets you so far: the only way to end the housing emergency for good is for councils and housing associations to build social housing themselves. But without capacity and funding in local government, it’s little more than a pipe dream.
So, could this new legislation help alleviate both of these crises, housing and local government funding, if local authorities start to use it? How that looks is still yet to be seen, but it’s clear that these aren’t two separate stories: they’re intrinsically the same one.
None of this is a silver bullet. A tax on developers who sit on unbuilt land won't, on its own, solve the housing crisis, fund a council house-building programme, or fix a decade of hollowed-out local government.
But it could be the start we need, and a clear signal to housebuilders that the era of land-banking for profit while a generation waits has to end. Enforced properly, that's worth fighting for, even if it's only the first move.