Westminster Labour is proud to announce that Westminster City Council has been recognised by Inside Housing as the 5ᵗʰ biggest council house-builder in the country. This follows our strong performance last year, when Westminster also ranked among the top ten nationally.
In one of the most challenging places to build new homes in the UK, this is a major achievement. Inside Housing’s analysis highlights that Westminster faces barriers few councils confront: exceptionally high land values, complex planning constraints, and some of the highest building costs in the country. Despite these pressures, Westminster Labour has managed to deliver at a scale that places the borough among the top five council housebuilders nationwide.
This achievement is the direct result of our truly affordable housing strategy, introduced after Labour took control of the council in 2022. An early decision under this strategy was to change the tenure of 353 homes to social rent within the existing pipeline. This has ensured that hundreds of families now have access to high-quality, sustainable social housing in the heart of London.
Our delivery has also been strengthened by our successful relationship with the GLA, where we have secured £120 million in funding since 2022 to deliver social rent homes. Much of this funding was unlocked by successful resident ballots at Church Street and Ebury.
This success comes at a timely moment, as Westminster launches public consultation on its new Housing Strategy. The strategy will bake in the long-term priority of building genuinely affordable homes and prioritising social rent, ensuring that council housebuilding remains central to Westminster’s mission for years to come.
And we remain ambitious about the future: we are actively exploring new sites across the city to expand our housebuilding programme and looking forward to working with the GLA to deliver more homes through their London Social and Affordable Homes Programme.
But this progress is not guaranteed. All of this would be put at risk if the Conservatives took back control of the Council in 2026. The Conservatives have consistently prioritised homes for private sale, allowed private developers to avoid their affordable house building obligations, and turned down funding from the Mayor of London to build genuinely affordable homes.
Councillor Ellie Ormsby, Cabinet Member for Regeneration and Rents, said: Don’t let Labour’s progress be jeopardised – the 6,800 families on the Council’s housing waiting list are depending on it. We are showing that even in central London, councils can build at scale, and can build for those most in need — while delivering high-quality, sustainable homes that residents deserve.
