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@Christopher - to be fair to Islington, they are looking at their own underdeveloped sites, for example building new council flats on the site of disused garages on estates. And they've been looking to use their pension fund to invest to bring forward additional housing development as recommended by RIBA's Future Homes Commission.

The context is that Islington - I think uniquely in London - have rejected the "affordable rent" funding stream for new social housing, because the local people who need it can't remotely afford anything like the 80% of market rents that it charges. So they're casting around for anything that can get them some money to develop housing at social rents.

I think their main beef with this PD scheme is that it's outside the planning system so they don't have the mechanism to capture a chunk of the land value for social housing.

Whether the current system of S106/CIL taxes on development is an appropriate way of funding social housing etc is outwith LBI's control; but the councillors will spend a lot of time on casework dealing with people thrown into destitution by the benefit changes and who desperately need genuinely affordable housing and it's good that they're trying to represent these residents' interests.

Some of LBI's policies - like their £50k per unit charge on developments too small for S106 - do look like they cross over into something that will strangle the total supply of new housing, but getting affordable housing from schemes like this will more likely just change the tenure mix so that more of the units meet local people's need for housing they can afford.