London delivered less than 6% of its target for 88,000 new homes in 2025. Some of the issues impacting delivery are completely beyond local control – interest rates, supply chain inflation, global economic uncertainty and so on.

But increasingly there are sources saying the regulatory burden on new home building is even more significant. Emergency measures (fiddling while Rome burns?) reducing such requirements have been proposed to address this calamity. Maybe the almost total collapse of the system justifies some more fundamental questions.