London Housing Delivery Crisis: GLA Announces Emergency Viability Measures

These changes are intended to remove bottlenecks, reduce risk, and restore confidence in the pipeline.

This decline in delivery is not a temporary blip. It reflects deeper pressures. Rising building costs, inflation in materials and labour, regulatory burdens, and falling sales have all squeezed viability. Development margins are under strain. The risk profile for developers has worsened. Whether these emergency measures will reverse the crash is another matter. Brownfield land and flatted development alone can not meet housing need and the delivery of Grey Belt sites needs to be accelerated to also help plug the gap. They are very much a step in the right direction.

The focus now is shifting more toward enabling delivery rather than maximising affordable housing percentages or securing uplift at every opportunity. Flexibility is becoming the priority, because without it, targets (both London’s and the national ones) look increasingly out of reach.