Lewisham council, in southeast London, is developing ambitious plans to transfer public land to community groups in an attempt to get new social housing built in the borough. According to papers tabled at Wednesday’s council cabinet meeting, the local authority is devising a new housing strategy, which includes giving packages of public land worth up to £2m each to community-led organisations such as housing co-operatives, on the condition that they build social housing.
The Green-controlled council is further considering placing any land it gives away through the programme into community land trusts, legal instruments that lock in permanent affordability. They may also provide low-interest loans to help developments get started, and pre-approve planning permission to speed up construction. It is hoped that the proposals will take effect within a year. Together, they form the most radical suite of solutions to the housing crisis any local authority is currently putting forward. If adopted elsewhere, the approach could transform the construction of social housing not just in Lewisham, but across the entire country.
Today three in four new British homes are built by for-profit property developers. The rest are erected predominantly by housing associations, with just a paltry few built by local authorities. Unlike in comparable European economies, almost no new UK homes are being built by community organisations. To get new social housing built in their area, therefore, councils are reliant on private developers building a proportion of homes for social rent as part of larger master plans. But developers frequently use their strong bargaining position to haggle down the amount of social housing they actually deliver.
“There’s a limit to how much social housing we can realistically get private property developers to build,” says Daniel Dream, cabinet member for inclusive regeneration, planning and housing delivery in Lewisham. “We’ve got to get more creative about how to deliver social housing.” Dream, a key architect of Lewisham’s evolving new strategy, says the current system of councils haggling with developers is broken and will never produce enough social housing to meet need. Instead, he hopes to use public land to empower community-led organisations to build essential housing for themselves, or as he puts it: “enabling community to deliver community”.
Selling off public land is a fraught business even for well-meaning councils. Under a 1972 law, public bodies are obliged to accept the highest price they are offered, regardless of the buyer’s intentions. Wealthy property developers can therefore typically swoop in and outbid community groups for land, even when the community groups have far more interesting, sustainable and socially valuable ambitions. In September, for example, Somerset council voted to sell a site in Frome to the London-based investment firm Newcore Capital rather than to local community developers who had plans to build homes, workspaces, a riverside park and a lido.
However, the 1972 law has a loophole. If a local authority is selling a site worth £2m or less, the council can choose to sell it to whomever it likes, and at whatever price it pleases, even giving it away for free, provided doing so provides positive benefits for the area.
The new strategy could be especially useful in helping support more ambitious housebuilding on tricky small sites. In London a “small site” is defined as a piece of land that is under 2,500 sq metres, about the size of nine tennis courts. These plots are too modest for major developers to take an interest in, so often just sit empty. However, the potential to better use vacant small sites is enormous. The architecture practice RCKa estimates there is enough land stuck in small sites to build 850,000 new homes in the capital alone. It recently conducted a survey of Lewisham identifying space for up to 9,700 new homes across more than 3,000 potential small sites.
Improved use of small sites can also create better homes. As the research project Small Sites London shows, modest developments are generally more likely to produce high-quality housing that makes a positive contribution to its local neighbourhood than the swathes of anodyne towers put up by mainstream developers on larger sites.
Lewisham has a long history of successful projects proving the potential of community participation in housing. Beginning in the late 1970s, families on the council housing waiting list were offered the opportunity to build their own homes using an innovative construction system devised by the German architect Walter Segal. In 1997, London’s first black housing co-operative finished building Nubia Way. In 2024 a community land trust completed Church Grove, a block of 36 permanently affordable homes. But more recently the borough’s reputation for housing leadership has waned. In June, The Filigree, a major new residential and commercial development in central Lewisham, was announced joint winner of the Carbuncle Cup, an award for Britain’s worst new building. These plans to revive ambitious community-led housing could not come sooner.
Lewisham’s housing target is 30,376 homes over 15 years. Community-led development won’t be able to meet that target alone, but it marks a clear break with the failing system of squeezing piecemeal benefits from major speculative developments. If successful, the approach could better empower the council and its constituents – and if introduced nationwide, it could catalyse a genuine revolution in social housing construction everywhere.
Phineas Harper is a writer and curator
