During today’s Mayor’s Question Time (MQT), Zoë Garbett, Green Party London Assembly Member, raised concerns about the Mayor’s London Growth Plan – published last month – specifically highlighting his heavy reliance on overseas investment to address the city’s housing crisis. Zoë told the Mayor that this would only continue to exacerbate the issue of housing inequality in the city.
In response, the Mayor defended his position, saying, “we do want foreign investment for the simple reason that there has not been enough investment from the Government.”
Reflecting on the Mayor’s response, Zoë Garbett AM says:
London’s housing market is broken. It’s designed for the wealthy to profit while Londoners suffer. Overseas investment is not a solution to the housing crisis – in fact, it’s made the situation worse.
It’s telling that the Mayor has admitted he’s forced to rely on overseas investment while the Labour government refuses to provide essential public funds for housing. What kind of message does that send about priorities? Londoners deserve better than to be left at the mercy of speculative overseas money.
With 40% of Londoners’ wages going to rent, 60,000 families stuck in temporary accommodation, social housing waiting lists at a ten year high and 300,000 homes approved but not built, it’s clear the current system is not working.
Sky-high rents and the cost of living crisis are leaving schools struggling to stay open and driving families out of the city they call home.
Without a meaningful shift in government policy and funding, London’s housing market will continue to serve the interests of a wealthy few.
4 comments:
Yes I totally agree that there are too many private tower blocks being built in Greater London purely for profit.
Zoë Garbett is moving like she doesn’t understand how power and investment work. The Greens never have a problem with foreign money unless it challenges their narrow, performative worldview. When Sian Berry went on TV casually admitting she had taken cocaine, no one in their party was questioning South American investment then. But now, when Sadiq Khan is forced to seek overseas funding to build homes because the government refuses to do its job… they suddenly find their moral compass? The hypocrisy is shameless.
Let’s be clear. The Greens are perfectly happy with foreign involvement when it is European workers, international NGOs, or anything that aligns with their own privileged, middle-class activism. But when the same foreign money could actually be used to solve London’s housing crisis, they start preaching from their soapbox. They would rather sit in comfortable outrage than engage with real-world economics.
Labour is not relying on overseas investment out of choice. It is because a Tory government obsessed with starving public services has abandoned London. If Garbett really cared about priorities, she would be directing her outrage at the Conservatives, who have defunded social housing, allowed property developers to hoard empty homes, and kept working-class Londoners locked in poverty. Labour is in power trying to fix the problem. What are the Greens doing? Waving banners, making noise, and offering nothing in return.
It is easy to sit on the sidelines and perform politics. Delivering real change takes power, strategy, and action. Labour is doing the work. The Greens are just talking.
Dear Labour Party hack aka 'anonymous'
Labour is not trying to fix the problem. They haven't even begun to engage with the problem. They're not doing the work. That is the problem.
Labour was hijacked by the housebuilding lobby in 2023, swallowing wholesale a specious Centre for Cities report that millions of homes had not been built over decades since 1947 due to planning constraints. Labour now pretends - with it's adopted noveau neoliberal economic voodoo - that the cause of the housing affordability crisis is due to a lack of supply. It ignores the fact that we've built more homes than the increase in population over the past 25 years; that there are 1.5m homes kept empty by landowners; that there are 500,000 homes permitted but not built out by the housebuilding oligopoly because it is in their interests to restrict supply. And of course that we've lost 2m council homes through RTB over 40 years, many of which have joined the private rented sector market of cash dispensers underwritten by govt to the tune of £30bn annually. Labour's 'solution' is to attract overseas investment (and ensuring that London remains the crook's favourite laundromat), promising these 'investors' that they will get guaranteed returns due to predicted increases of 22% on house sales and 16% on rents. Therefore Labour are deliberately contributing to the housing affordability crisis. Atop that they are threatening hundreds of thousands of council tenants with estate demolitions and the sale of public land and their scattering to the winds, without reasonable right of return.
Delivering real change requires analysis: without that your talk of "power, strategy and action" is mere macho posturing.
"Private sector property investors are not altruists. Backers may be persuaded to support major developments, with councils promising to smooth the process of securing planning permission, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When investors put their money into real estate, whether they’re building housing, retail or commercial skyscrapers, they are always hoping to pump up the local land value, pushing up rents to make chunkier profits.
But when property prices grow faster than local wages, inequality shoots up too, straining poorer communities and displacing businesses. Poorer families spend more of their income on housing than rich ones, and the higher that development raises prices, the more extreme the disparity becomes. We see this when longstanding affordable cafes shut in the shadow of a shiny new tower because they can no longer afford the inflated lease, or our kids can’t afford to live where they grew up despite there being more new homes in the area than ever.
And while big developments can generate local construction jobs, not all that investment goes into the local economy. Britain runs a trade deficit of more than £14bn on building materials, for example, meaning a significant proportion of the price of a new tower block is often immediately going out of the country on importing foreign steel and timber. When the original investors are based overseas, as is the case with our big build-to-rent developers – the majority of which are owned by foreign private equity firms – their profits also leave the UK."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/26/cannes-english-councils-property-developers-housing
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