How do we provide the homes Londoners Need?

London is responsible for over half the homeless families in England over 70,000 families and 90,000 children. According to the Mayor,

1 child in every 21 in London is currently homeless and in Temporary accommodation (when our report for this project was written it was 1 in 23, according to the Mayor; like most of the statistics in that report things have just got worse since; with vacancy rising in lockstep with homelessness and poverty).

And here’s the thing, in the decade we studied, London added over 322,000 housing units, more than most areas of England, and statistics for that period suggest we added less than half that number of households (around 150,000).

Even updating the data after this period still shows a significant difference (between 130,000 and 180,000) between the figures for additional homes and additional households.

So if we are adding more homes than households why has homelessness increased?

And what do London’s hundreds of thousands of empty homes tell us about this?

How many empty homes in London?

For the record, the official figure in 2026 is now around 161,000 empties, though another ‘official figure’, from the most recent census, gives us almost twice as many, around 300,000.

London’s vacant homes also include a striking third of the national total of empty council homes – around 11,000 empty London council homes – many emptied to allow for demolition and replacement by new homes in ‘estate regeneration’ schemes which regularly fail to deliver any additional social rent housing.

Every year we sell off or demolish more social homes than we build, largely as a result of Right To Buy sales but with estate regeneration schemes also a factor in London.

Crisis of supply, Crisis of Quality and Crisis of Affordability ..but above all Affordability

We used to say that London had three housing crises.

Grenfell grimly confirmed the quality crisis. We now see this escalating to almost every hi-rise building built in the boom years that fuelled London’s housing crisis and priced low-income families out of huge swathes of London housing.

Towers of largely unaffordable homes sprouted across our skyline.

Meanwhile the limited affordable schemes built or refurbed by housing associations and councils during this period are now frequently condemned as potential death traps after post-Grenfell building safety evaluations.

Many have now been wrapped in scaffolding or subject to expensive ‘waking watches’ for years.

So if there is a supply crisis it is not about numbers but about what we have built and that links to our real crisis – the lack of affordable homes which fuels London’s poverty levels and which pushes a million more Londoners into poverty who wouldn’t be there if it were not for housing costs.

In London, poverty rates increase significantly when housing costs are accounted for, increasing the poverty rate from 14% to 24%.

Which brings us to the core of London’s housing crisis – Affordability…

We are building the wrong housing

The homes needed to house those homeless families are social or council homes. Homes with rents that are genuinely affordable, and are controlled. Homes with the security of lifetime tenure, not 6-month contracts that can be terminated at will by landlords who want to push up the rent, or switch the use of these homes to the lucrative short let or Airbnb market… so they aren’t in fact homes to anybody at all any more.

So shouldn’t we stop building the wrong housing?

And stop the housing that is built being used in ways that don’t house anyone?

The Empty Homes Opportunity… time to use the homes we have to house the families that need them?

Since 2018, with the support of Trust for London Action on Empty Homes has been investigating how building more homes in London has apparently worsened our housing crisis.

Now we believe that a wide range of public policy experts, community representatives and political decision-makers have understood the argument we have been making.

Housing targets and newbuild completions are meaningless if what we build is sold only to those who can afford to buy off plan at overseas property fairs, or those who already have severa;l homes and just want an investment property to rent out on Airbnb.

‘First dibs’ on homes you can’t afford is about as meaningful as telling those visiting food banks about a cracking offer on smoked salmon in Fortnum and Masons. It isn’t just pointless, its insulting and socially divisive.

This is why we have collaborated with every conceivable partner in the housing space to illustrate what is going wrong.

We have worked with organisations such as Crisis and Shelter to show how homes currently languishing unused could be brought into use to meet social needs.

While after productive work with the London Assembly and London Housing Panel (of which we are a member organisation), we have welcomed the success of the Mayor of London’s Right To Buy Back scheme now expanded with Homes England support as the Council Housing Acquisition Programme

The Latest news is not good

The trouble is, things still aren’t improving for Londoners. Rents are up. Homelessness is up. Households in temporary accommodation are up - and many of these are now shipped out of London.

Even the Mayor of London’s latest ‘Housing in London 2025’ report couldn’t really find much to say that is positive as a recent article by housing journalist Pete Apps published in January 2026, explains.

46% of homeless London families (nearly 34,000 households) are now housed outside London and Action on Empty Homes has also been working with contacts around the country to see what that means in practice - and it isn’t good. In the worst cases this involves sending people a very long way away to communities that are already blighted by poverty.

Coordinated action by campaigners, MPs and investigative journalists in London and the North East has resulted in Government questioning both the legality of the way this has been carried out and the scale of such activity, creating ever-deeper poverty in the areas to which families have been moved, while resolving none of the issues in London.

Meanwhile Government is proposing measures to reduce developers contributions to affordable housing construction and community infrastructure in London, so they can carry on building the wrong housing for Londoners. The Government and Mayor say that a smaller percentage of something is better than a bigger percentage of nothing but all we see is more empty homes and more homeless Londoners.

We hope that they will eventually understand that things are getting worse not better and start investing in solving the problem through increased access to rent-controlled social and genuinely affordable housing but for the London families bringing up their children in over-crowded, insecure housing miles away from the London boroughs they used to call home, it may all be too little too late.

You can help them by spreading this message and supporting our work to show that we are building the wrong housing for Londoners