Draft London Plan sets out Green Belt homes and taller towers across London

Public consultation on Sadiq Khan’s draft London Plan, the blueprint that will steer development in the capital for the next decade, closes in under six weeks. The document sets a 10 year target of 558,000 new homes, with City Hall allocating every borough a share of that figure.

The Green Belt is the flashpoint. Ten “broad locations” are named where 56,100 homes could go on land protected until now, across Barnet, Enfield, Redbridge, Havering, Croydon, Hillingdon, Harrow plus Barking and Dagenham. Nine greenfield areas are flagged for possible industrial use.

Denser building near stations and 17 areas for tall towers

An “optimisation framework” runs through the draft, mandating higher density close to transport hubs. In practice that means mid-rise blocks of perhaps nine storeys in many more parts of London, alongside a push for building on small sites. Seventeen areas are marked out for towers above 100 metres: Elephant and Castle, the Square Mile, Canary Wharf, Stratford, Vauxhall, the Greenwich peninsula, West Ham, North Acton, Old Kent Road, plus land next to the Millwall football stadium.

Borough housing targets have been shuffled too, with growth pushed further out and away from Tower Hamlets, Newham plus Barking and Dagenham, which carried much of it under the current plan.

What changes for affordable housing

The affordable housing threshold incentives, which spare compliant developers from drawn out viability assessments, are being redrawn. Twelve boroughs, mostly in inner London, keep theirs at 35 per cent. A middle ring of eight drops to 25 per cent, while the rest of outer London falls to 20 per cent. Separate figures apply on Green Belt land, at 50 per cent, and on publicly owned land, at 40 per cent.

The draft is also more top-down than the version it replaces. Councils can no longer judge density purely from their own local perspective, which leaves less room to refuse schemes. Engagement so far has come mainly from the development industry and its advisers rather than the wider public. Green Party assembly member Benali Hamdache made that point last week, saying most Londoners “have no idea we are discussing a really important document”.

Once the responses have been read, the mayor will produce a further version of the plan.