On Tuesday the 21st, Sir James Cleverly MP gave a Keynote Speech at the London Housing Summit, setting out the Conservatives plan to tackle London's housing crisis and to build beautiful buildings in our capital.
You can read his full speech below:
What kind of city do we want London to be? A city where ownership is normal again. Where renting works. Where investment is welcomed. Where beauty matters. Where growth is planned, trusted and sustained. OR A city where the next generation looks at home ownership and thinks: maybe, but only if I am lucky. That is where too many Londoners are now. Owning your own home should not be a luxury. It should not be a prize for the fortunate few. It should be a realistic ambition for people who work hard, save, and play by the rules.
That used to be understood in this country. Conservatives cleared the slums in the 1930s. Harold Macmillan drove housebuilding in the 1950s. Margaret Thatcher extended ownership to millions through Right to Buy. And more recently, from 2010 onwards, Conservative governments delivered 2.5 million homes across England. That is what good government does. It delivers. Today, that sense of progress has faded. And in London, we see this clearly. The Mayor of London’s affordable homes target was cut and then cut again. Delivery is still falling far short of what is needed. That is before you get to the wider market. Molior London reported in January that just 5,500 private homes were started in London across the whole of 2025.
That is nowhere near the level needed to meet the Government’s ambitions. Just last month, the Housing Secretary and Mayor of London announced an emergency package for housebuilding in the capital, explicitly citing viability pressures and the fact that more than a third of London boroughs recorded zero starts in the first quarter. But it is this government that is increasing the costs that put viability at risk. Increasing the cost of employing workers, green taxes on energy which feeds straight into the cost of materials, delay and bureaucracy tying up development capital. You know the numbers better than me. And let’s talk about another number. 1.5 million. The number of homes Labour committed to build. That commitment is now described as a stretching ambition and a goal. That shift in language matters. It tells you they know delivery is slipping away. And it is slipping away for reasons that were always obvious to anyone in
this room.
You cannot hit a major housing target without the workforce to build it. The Construction Industry Training Board says the industry needs more than 48,000 new entrants every year just to meet demand. We are nowhere near that. And materials. Government figures published this month showed brick deliveries down 18 per cent year on year in February, with concrete block deliveries down 17 per cent. Those are not the signals of a market gearing up for a housebuilding boom. They are warning lights on the dashboard. And when viability is under strain, rhetoric is not enough. That is why the answer cannot simply be: announce a bigger target, invent a new planning phrase, and hope the market does the rest. Take “grey belt”. I would scrap the term. Because most people hear it for what it is: political cover for building on green belt land.
Labour’s revised National Planning Policy Framework makes clear that where targets are not met, councils will be pushed to review green belt boundaries and identify socalled “grey belt” land. That is a major policy shift. But changing the language does not change the reality. This is building on the green belt by another name. And once that land is released, it is gone. London needs more homes. Britain needs more homes. But the right policy starts with the right sequence. First, use the land we have already used better. Second, make building easier, cheaper and more predictable. Third, build places people actually want to live in. That means brownfield first. Real regeneration. Real certainty. Less negotiation by attrition. And we have to make it significantly cheaper to build on brownfield land. Fewer layers of well-intentioned but stifling and counterproductive regulation that drive up costs and drive down delivery. And it means being honest about quality. We have made this mistake before. In the post-war period, too much was built in a rush, and too much of it aged badly. Some of it literally crumbling. Short-term sticking plasters became long-term scars. We should not repeat that error.
I reject the false choice between low-rise sprawl and soulless towers. London does not need more bad housing. It needs better neighbourhoods. Beauty matters. Beauty builds attachment. Attachment builds stewardship. Stewardship builds longevity. If people think development will make their area worse,
they will resist it. If they think it will make their area better, they will support it. There is a real trust problem around development. Too many people assume it will make their area worse, not better. But support rises when homes are well designed and well built. That should tell us something important. Beauty is not a luxury added at the end. It is how you win consent at the start.
So the task is not just to build more. It is to build better. That means gentle density where it works. More mansion blocks. More terraces. More mid-rise homes near transport links. More regeneration that repairs the grain of a place instead of fighting it. It also means having the confidence to say that some sites and some schemes have not stood the test of time. And it means being honest about what comes next. We should not be afraid to rip down low-quality, low-density housing where it has failed. Be bold enough to build something better in its place. Something beautiful. Something people want to live in. Because beauty and density are not in conflict. They are how you build places that last. Change should leave places stronger, more coherent, and more liveable than before.
And while we are talking about making the market work better, we also need to talk about Stamp Duty. Stamp Duty is a bad tax. It punishes movement, It gums up the market. It traps families in homes that no longer fit and keeps others out of homes that do. Last year, the higher Stamp Duty thresholds were scrapped.
The first-time buyer threshold fell from £425,000 to £300,000. I asked Chat GPT what £300,000 will buy in London. The first line said, £300,000 is right at the very bottom end in the London market. This is a tax on almost every buyer in London. Thousands more people paying tax just to get on the ladder. Under this Labour Government, aspiration is taxed. That is why the next Conservative Government will scrap it for family homes. Because it is not just first-time buyers. It is the whole chain. The young are told to wait. Older owners are told to stay put. Growing families are told to make do. That is not a dynamic market.
It is a stuck market. There needs to be a mindset change in government. Not just pointing at the problem. Solving it. Not just setting a headline. Building the conditions beneath it. Not just picking a fight over the green belt for political effect while ducking the harder work of brownfield regeneration,
viability reform, skills, tax and design. Because London does not need more slogans. It needs delivery. A plan to get homes built, to make ownership a reality again, to make renting work, and to build places that last.
That is the Conservative task.And it brings me back to the question I started with. What kind of city do we want London to be? A city where targets are lowered and still missed. Where building is slowing, not accelerating. Where policy is announced with confidence and delivered with caveats. Where housing becomes another press release from this Labour Government. Or a city where hard work is rewarded. Where investment is unlocked. Where communities are strengthened. And where home ownership becomes part of ordinary life again. That second city can be built. And that is what the next Conservative Government will deliver.
