When the “king of the north” called London “the world’s greatest capital city” this week, it didn’t reassure those who fear that Andy Burnham represents that old national grievance, the north-south divide. The right warned southerners that he was coming to tax their extravagant properties until the pips squeaked.
The idea that London is reviled as a swelling boil or a vampire sucking life from the provinces long pre-dates William Cobbett. Go north of Watford, go east or south-west, and populists can always raise a hiss against the capital. Envy and loathing come in many political shapes: for the right, London is the citadel of left-leaning elitism and also the multicultural crime-ridden swamp of Trump-Vance fabrication. Who doesn’t resent the gilded greed of City bankers – takers, not makers. And Burnham’s popularity is built on northernness.
But in his talk of moving part of No 10’s team north, he takes care to stress it is not about escaping the capital but the clutches of Westminster and Whitehall. He knows the real London is in a growing crisis. Its wonderment draws ambition and talent, but many people are forced to reluctantly leave their home towns for the chance of a job with a future. Universities around the country should spread graduates everywhere, but London forces them south. Burnham said he wants people to find good careers where they are. Can it be done? What a good time for The Political Quarterly to run a special edition on London and its housing crisis.
Far from its streets being paved with gold, the capital has the highest poverty rate in England. Its higher pay doesn’t compensate for astronomical housing costs, says the Resolution Foundation, making average Londoners considerably worse off than the average elsewhere. Private renters spend about 40% of their income on housing, against a national average of 36%. In 2025, London house prices were 10.6 times average earnings: in the north-east they were five times. On average, Londoners have the longest commutes. Only the richest or the oldest people who bought decades ago escape London’s highest cost-of-living trap.
Don’t imagine the current fall in London house prices eases the strain. Instead, it has brought housebuilding to a halt, says the London School of Economics’s Prof Tony Travers: 300,000 homes with planning permission stay unbuilt due to rising construction costs, high interest rates, a lack of construction workers and post-Grenfell regulations requiring second staircases in high-rises. The obligation on developers to make 35% of homes affordable dramatically slowed building, so London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, reduced that to 20%. Seven London councils are taking him to judicial review, but he says 20% of something is better than 35% of nothing.
Those councils feel the crippling cost of homeless families in temporary accommodation, made worse by the government’s freeze on local housing allowance, the benefit that covers private rents: that’s causing evictions for those who can’t pay rising rents for often squalid conditions. But then, why should the state subsidise private landlords? The loss of nearly 2m council homes through Margaret Thatcher’s reckless right-to-buy scheme was never more keenly felt. Calls for rent controls, capping rises at no more than inflation, are backed by 71% of people in England.
No London mayor ever met their housing targets, but in 2022/23, Khan’s City Hall started work on twice as many council homes as the rest of England did in the previous year. Burnham has called for the whole £39bn housing budget to go on social housing. How much is that? It will build 200,000 council homes nationally, Travers calculates: that means private developers need to build the rest to reach anywhere near Labour’s 1.5m target.
Not all efforts to shift London’s dynamism northwards have worked well. A 1960s ban on new office buildings made sky-high profits for existing office property owners in the capital: bucking market forces is hard. What did work was building new towns in the decades after the second world war: London’s population fell as people moved out. That’s the great hope now, with seven new towns planned, all likely to be contested locally. Enfield has become the first test, with 21,000 homes due for Crews Hill and a chunk of green belt, inevitably meeting strong resistance from the new Conservative-led council. They will need to be overridden by a new development corporation run by the London mayor: localism can only be allowed to go so far. Regional power is with mayors, not nimbys.
New towns always were resisted as socialist urbanisation. The farming town of Stevenage rebelled against the postwar Labour planning minister Lewis Silkin, vandalising his car and renaming the railway station “Silkingrad”. But there is no solution to the London crisis without using greenbelt land, say the Political Quarterly authors, and many others. Travers suggests rolling the belt a mile further out, reclaiming it from the far side. Greenbelt land, he says, takes up one and a half times the space used by all cities and towns, little of it accessible to those it’s supposed to benefit.
The Liberal Democrat MP for Surrey Heath, Al Pinkerton, inadvertently offered a good reminder of the choices to be faced. He complained at PMQs this week that a new hospital he had been lobbying for was now going to be built on “the last remaining fragment of the ancient Frimley Common”. The prime minister criticised him, describing his approach as having been “on the one hand to demand a new hospital – and then oppose actually building it. He’s urged his constituents to oppose it because, quote: ‘If the hospital goes ahead, there will be no golf course.’” Ah, golf courses! There are 94 around London: the 43 that are publicly owned would provide enough homes for 300,000 people. The rest could be compulsorily purchased: only golfers would regard them as anything but environmental blights.
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The London conundrum mirrors so many national dysfunctions, north and south. There are solutions, but as always it needs the political daring to put the public good above private interest, the public purse above the private pocket. We wait to see if Burnham has the nerve to take on all obstacles.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
