London City Hall ‘should count people not units’ to solve housing crisis

Anna Clarke told the London Housing Summit too many single bedroom homes were being built to hit arbitrary targets, and it’s not necessarily helping

City Hall is too “obsessed” with encouraging the development of smaller housing to hit arbitrary targets rather than building the larger properties that Londoners need, the Mayor has been told.

Anna Clarke, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at The Housing Forum, said developers must ensure any properties being built help alleviate the city’s housing crisis, rather than accentuate it. There are around 75,000 households in London currently residing in temporary accommodation, more than double the number 15 years ago.

Speaking at the London Housing Summit, a conference held by the Centre for London last week, Ms Clarke said London’s “dire” housing situation was partly down to a focus on trying to hit targets rather than build appropriate homes for residents.

“We have one of the highest proportions in the country of social housing, but we still have the worst housing problems because there isn’t enough housing in total,” she said.

“We also need to look at how we can use existing stock better, and part of that’s around making sure that when we do build new housing, it helps as many people as possible.

“We’re rather too obsessed with counting the number of units, which pushes the pressure to build small housing. We’ve got an awful lot of overcrowded households in London.

How London has built since 2025

“When you look at why people are on the waiting list, the large majority of them are on the waiting lists because they’re often quite badly overcrowded.

“So we really need larger homes – they take more subsidy so we might build fewer of them, but every four-bedroom house we build could house eight people.

“So if we count people instead of units, we straight away can recognise that that’s making a bigger impact on more people’s lives because you’ve got more people living in it.

“And then there’s an indirect impact because that overcrowded family that moved to the four bedroom house will have released another house and you may get several different houses to re-let all getting rid of somebody’s overcrowding, making them adequately housed.

“So if we can measure that as well, it would help build an evidence base that I think would put more pressure on government and people giving out grants to recognise that they need to count the people, not the units.

Earlier this year it emerged that just three per cent of all homes built through City Hall’s Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) between 2016 and 2025 had four or more bedrooms. The vast majority – 78 per cent – were either studios, or one or two-bedroom properties.

An accompanying report from the London Assembly Housing Committee suggested that developers were not being given the appropriate grants to motivate them to build larger homes.

The G15, a group of London’s leading housing associations, told the committee’s investigation that allocating grants based on habitable rooms “rather than per unit would better reflect the cost and space requirements of different home types, supporting delivery that aligns with local need”.

It is part of a wider trend of City Hall falling short of housebuilding targets in London, whether it be affordable homes or stimulating the private market.

Last week Deputy Mayor for Housing Tom Copley told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that Londoners would see a “turnaround” in fortunes this year, thanks to emergency measures taken by City Hall and the government, as well as reforms to the Building Safety Regulator which should see fewer delays in processing applications.

The Mayor of London and the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government were contacted for comment.

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