Khan's "new era for housebuilding" is really a £100m bailout

Hot on the heels of his misleading announcement about fare evasion, Mayor Khan has today announced that he’s stepping in to unblock “stalled” development sites and get housing built in London.

The problem: he already owns and controls every site in his announcement. Worse, there are serious financial irregularities, with City Hall auditors warning 18 months ago that taxpayer bailouts may be needed. Today, the Mayor announced he’s putting in another £100m.

Is that the real story behind today’s “Mayor stepping in” announcement - a bailout to cover his own failure?

The Mayor directly owns and controls vast areas of London via GLA Land and Property Ltd (GLAP), which was set up in 2012 under Mayor Johnson. It brought together various parcels of publicly-owned brownfield land in a plan to build over 63,000 homes, with a £300 million loan from the GLA to get them started. Keep your eye on that loan.

When the government talks about New Towns, they normally mean 10,000 new homes in one place, so GLAP gives the mayor 6 or 7 new towns worth of land. The plan was to build it out over 25 years, but over the decade since Mayor Khan took office, very little progress has been made.

At the current rate of progress, they will not finish this century.

Here’s the complete list of all the GLAP sites, taken from their latest Annual Report - note that the total has since increased to 68,000 as Barking Riverside gained permission for an extra 5,000.

Several of these sites are visible from City Hall, one is right outside his window. When I challenged him to take responsibility for a decade of slow progress, he had no real answers.

Back in December 2024, City Hall’s auditors found serious failings at GLAP. The loan repayments were supposed to begin in 2018 yet 6 years later they had not started, but it gets worse.

• Auditors were not given sufficient explanation for the repeated failure to meet the loan deadline, across 6 years, and

• No minutes of meetings nor of directors’ decisions were kept to explain when or why those decisions were made not to repay the loan.

So who are these directors? They are all GLA officials, including the Mayor’s highly vocal Deputy Mayor for Housing Tom Copley, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, and several senior officials in his housing team. These are all senior public officials making decisions about a £300m loan and £billions of public assets, yet the auditors were told no one thought to keep minutes of these meetings or decisions.

You can read more about this total failure of public governance in press reports at the time.

I think the clue is in that headline from 2024:

Internal auditor’s report suggests London mayor’s housing fund could require bailout

As the Mayor himself says today:

“I’m proud to be investing £100 million, one of the largest investments made by any mayor of London, to help build and deliver thousands of new, high-quality and affordable homes at Silvertown.”

So today’s announcement is that he’s putting an extra £100 million of taxpayer money into the same sites that the previous £300 million was already supposed to deliver, but failed.

Some people might call that a taxpayer bailout. So what happens next?

I chair the London Assembly Budget & Performance Committee and we have dedicated our 9th July 2026 meeting to investigating GLAP. Tune in to see what they say. In the run up to that, we have started pulling together details of GLAP’s finances, and asking the Mayor’s officials to provide further background information on performance.

I wonder whether today’s fanfare was designed to bamboozle the committee with a flashy new announcement, to distract from their dismal record to date. If so, it hasn’t worked.