London gets ‘up to 30%’ of fund for affordable homes. Does it have the workforce to build them?

The government's allocation recognises the capital's housing emergency, but labour shortages need tackling too

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The government has announced that £11.7 billion of the £39 billion it plans to spend on social and affordable homebuilding over the next 10 years will be used to "support housing delivery from the Greater London Authority in the capital".

As a national total, that is a big increase on the £11.5 billion, five-year programme launched by the Tories in 2021. And London getting "up to 30 per cent" of it is good in the sense that £11.7 billion over ten years is, per year, a lot more than the £4 billion over five years the city received last time, if arguably disappointing in being a smaller proportion of the national total.

In March, the government told City Hall that London would be getting 20 per cent of a £2 billion "downpayment" ahead of a longer-term investment to follow later in the year, so by that measure things have improved since the spring.

Sir Sadiq Khan has welcomed the funding settlement as "the biggest and longest the capital has ever received" and thanked Angela Rayner, the minister responsible for it. The same sentiment was expressed by Grace Williams, executive member for housing and regeneration of London Councils, and also leader of Waltham Forest.

The Mayor added that he will "continue to work closely with the government" to secure further housing support, including "investment in transport infrastructure, which would unlock thousands of new homes in the capital" - surely a reference to the proposed extension of the Docklands Light Railway extension into Thamesmead.

The new cash is vital, but only part of the solution to the capital's multifarious housing emergency. Money for housing goes less far in London than it does anywhere else in the UK because everything in London costs more.

Also, housing delivery in the city has been horribly hampered by the same things that have slowed down the construction sector as a whole everywhere, notably inflation, the financial problems of housing associations, the slow-moving Building Safety Act regulatory system - see my recent piece about Woodberry Down in Hackney - and labour shortages.

That last issue was the main subject of the latest Talk About London podcast, a joint endeavour of On London and The London Society, co-hosted by me and London Society chair, Leanne Tritton.

Our guests were Amos Simbo, managing director of consultancy Winway and founder of Black Professional in Construction, and Dave Rogers, deputy editor of Building magazine. Why don't we have more of the skilled workers we need? Watch and listen below.

Fair play to the government, it has been making an effort. in March, it invested in training, and last week it launched a construction skills mission board to push things along.

There's still a long way to go, though. A long, long way.