The New London Plan is expected to deliver 88,000 new homes each year, representing 22,000 new homes per quarter. However, in the second quarter of 2025, the NHBC revealed that just 904 new homes were registered in London: a staggering 21,096 fewer and down 59% from the same period the previous year.

The persistent failure to deliver enough homes in London led the government, together with the Mayor of London, to produce the Homes for London policy paper which identified ‘emergency measures’ designed to improve viability and kick-start housing delivery. The most eye-catching of these are the proposed time-limited reduction in affordable housing requirements from 35% to 20% and CIL relief for qualifying schemes, but the measures also include the relaxation of specific London Plan policies and guidance.

While to-date the spotlight has focused on the dramatic collapse in housebuilding within London, it would be wrong to assume housebuilding is on track across the rest of England. The planning and development sector is also struggling to deliver sufficient housing outside London, leading many to wonder whether a similar package of ‘emergency measures’ might also be needed to kick-start housing delivery across England as a whole.

So there was some hope when, in January, Matthew Pennycook told the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee that the government’s target for 40% affordable housing in new towns is ‘an aspiration’ and ‘there will be a role for viability and viability will bite on different sites in different ways’.

This is the closest the government has come to recognising that London’s viability challenges also impact development elsewhere, and in this case specifically, the government’s proposals for 12 new towns.

Homes for London

However, while the time-limited reduction in affordable housing requirements and potential CIL relief caught the eye, those ‘emergency measures’ announced for London were founded on the broader conclusion that the planning system has become too inflexible and the rigid application of planning policies and guidance has become an underlying issue impacting the viability of schemes -alongside higher build costs, higher finance costs, and heavier regulatory requirements.

In addition to the temporary CIL relief on qualifying brownfield schemes and time-limited reduction in affordable housing requirements, the ‘emergency measures’ include relaxations to specific London Plan policies and guidance that are considered to negatively impact viability.

The intention is to reintroduce flexibility into a system that has become accustomed to the binary application of policy and guidance and has lost sight of the overarching role of the planning system to balance impacts and benefits.

The professional judgement of planning officers to interpret and apply policy and guidance should be at the heart of the planning system, but too often it is not. Flexibility in interpreting policy and guidance is not the same as deregulation: it is about mitigating the impact of development, sometimes through trade-offs. It is about accepting that a scheme can deliver benefits even if it does not deliver the full affordable housing requirement or includes single aspect units. What we have experienced in London is that where policies and guidance are applied absolutely, otherwise high quality developments become unviable.

The Homes for London package is a welcome step and should herald a return of professional judgement and the acknowledgement that flexibility must sometimes trump guidance. However, there is no justification for this stopping at the M25. Just as if London is to deliver 88,000 homes pa, flexibility will be key if we are to deliver 300,000 homes pa across England.

National implementation?

So I advocate for the roll-out of something akin to the Homes for London package across England. Only then will the planning system be able to acknowledge and respond to the current realities of development viability.

In my view, an important step in addressing the viability challenge starts with a recognition that guidance is only guidance, and policy must be flexible to adapt to changing circumstances. While that may sound obvious, it is not how many schemes have been treated in practice.

The difficultly outside London is how flexibility can be delivered. While in London the Mayor can remove or alter policy and guidance impacting 33 local planning authorities, across much of England planning policy and guidance remains the preserve of over 300 local planning authorities.

Government must therefore drive this change, with National Development Management Policies being an obvious vehicle through which flexibility can be cascaded down to planning decisions. The government must ensure that flexibility is at the heart of NDMPs and LPAs are encouraged to apply professional judgement when the application of NDMPs and guidance has a direct impact on viability.

Conclusion

Nowhere is immune from viability challenges such as those that have ushered in the collapse in housebuilding in London in recent years. It is therefore critical that measures to ensure the planning system is able to respond to such challenges are not confined to within the M25.

The government must embrace greater flexibility within the planning system and encourage a return of professional judgement when apply policies and guidance by building on the emergency measures set out in the Homes for London proposals across the country.

James Cogan, director, Boyer (London).