Sadiq Khan yesterday re-heated his counter-productive campaign for rent-controls in London. His policy announcements and broadcast rounds conveniently took the media spotlight just as new GLA figures highlighted the Mayor’s failure to meet his homebuilding targets.

The figures show Sadiq has started work on just 2,415 new affordable homes. He promised to build 116,000. To give him some credit, this was up from the astonishingly meagre 764 starts in the previous quarter. If the Mayor was to meet his own targets, he would need to start 21,821 homes in the next six months. One can only hope…

To make matters worse, Khan has been given £5 billion in public funding to deliver on his promises. Instead of trying to give taxpayers some value for money, he’s convening emergency rent summits and parroting the same policy platforms that have failed wherever they’ve been tried. If only there were an easy way to increase housing supply. 

Andrew Boff, the GLA Conservatives housing spokesman, said:

“Rent controls would wreck the market, causing a mass shortage of homes. The only way to solve this crisis is to build more homes, and yet Sadiq Khan is failing to spend the billions he received from the government and has fallen far behind on his house building targets. What Londoners need from this Mayor is not more meetings, but more action.”

A Labour politician failing to spend taxpayer money, now there’s a first…