Pretty much every dial on the dashboard is flashing red in London’s residential development sector. It is well known that completions of new homes have been dropping for the past three years – Greater London Authority data shows numbers sliding from a high of nearly 40,000 in 2021/22 to just over 33,000 in 2024/25, against a government target that 88,000 homes should be built in the capital every year.

But it is the data on starts that is particularly alarming. GLA figures suggest that work on just 3,447 homes began in the first half of the current financial year. This compares to 27,210 starts for the full year in 2024/25 – itself already a 15-year low.

Government data, based on information from warranty providers, supports these startingly low numbers, suggesting that just 4,010 starts were made in the year to June 2025. While the government admits this dataset does not pick up every single start, it is used to identify trends.