City Hall’s own land and property company may struggle to hit their own housing ambitions due to “difficult” circumstances, officials have admitted.
By Kumail Jaffer, Local Democracy Reporter
City Hall’s own land and property company may struggle to hit their own housing ambitions due to “difficult” circumstances, officials have admitted.
GLA Land and Property Limited (GLAP) was established in 2012 by former Mayor Boris Johnson as the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) wholly owned land and property company, and handed a £300 million loan from the GLA the following year.
It manages around 645 hectares of land across London – equivalent to 819 full-sized football pitches – including sites such as the Royal Docks and Greenwich Peninsula.
Despite a goal of delivering 68,000 homes by 2041, GLAP reported that just 29,156 homes had been delivered or were on site between 2016 and 2025, representing around 43 per cent of the forecast. Of these, only 15,135 properties have been completed, equivalent to 22 per cent of the goal.
Last year saw just 382 starts and 1,675 completions on GLA land.
Earlier today (Thursday June 9) officials admitted they were “not satisfied” with current progress but suggested results would “oscillate” in coming years depending on the state of the market.
David Bellamy, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, told the London Assembly Budget and Performance Committee: “GLAP is not immune to the wider pressures facing the market – it’s probably worse for us due to the infrastructure needs on our brownfield sites.
“It is the nature of property developments that the numbers will oscillate.”
He added: “What’s changed was, frankly, the housing market got a lot more difficult. Looking back at the housing market a decade ago in London, it probably felt challenging at the time, but, you know, it’s like playing a computer game on easy level compared to where where we are now, where it’s just so incredibly difficult.”
Tim Steer, Executive Director, Housing and Land at the GLA, added: “We’d love to be doing more with GLAP to contribute to London’s housing need.
“The conditions are incredibly difficult in the wider housing market – our job is to maximise what is available.
“Like all housing development in London, it’s difficult and that is what is affecting the number of starts.”
Following the meeting, Budget and Performance Committee chair Neil Garratt told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS): “We’ve just been through a golden period for property development in London over the last 10 years. There’ve been cranes everywhere in the city, but during that period, [GLAP] development has been pretty sluggish.
“At the current rate they’re going, they’re not going to get them built this century and it looks like some of the early ones will be getting pulled down for being derelict and too old by the time the final lot get built.
“We just need to go faster, and I haven’t heard anything today that explains how we’re gonna do that.
“All of the problems we’ve heard are real – the frustrating thing is that they didn’t pull their finger out when every other property developer in London was going gangbusters.
“And so now, we’re really stuck in the slow lane, and we’ve now got all the problems that everybody else has.”
Debt Concerns
Aside from delivery, concerns were also raised over the slow progress of the repayment of the £300 million loan from the GLA. GLAP only made its first repayment in 2024 and repeatedly missed payment deadlines on the loan in the preceding six years, according to internal City Hall documents.
This is primarily down to GLAP’s cashflow consisting primarily of the proceeds from land disposals, which depends on agreements with development partners.
“The timing of these is often contingent on the timing of procurement, statutory authority consents, construction programmes and market forces and therefore highly variable and not entirely within the control of GLAP or its partners,” Sir Sadiq Khan said last year.
“In 2018, an operational decision was made to reprofile an element of the loan for cashflow management. Over the years there has been continuous work to assess and adjust cashflow forecasts, however these are long term and complex projects and adjustments need to be made from time to time.”
However, officials told the London Assembly yesterday that current forecasts suggest GLAP will be making “surpluses and will be able to meet its loan repayment obligations” for the next five years.
