London’s new Green councils: What can we expect?
14 May 2026 | Khayer Chowdhury
| Last week’s local elections brought dramatic gains for the Green Party across parts of London, with huge Labour majorities wiped out in their former strongholds of Hackney, Haringey, Lewisham, Lambeth, and Waltham Forest. With council AGMs just around the corner, we take a look at what the new Green administrations could mean for the development sector. 1. Council-led development, not private-developer-led. Every single Green manifesto opposes what it characterises as the Labour model of relying on private developers to provide affordable homes. The language varies from “prioritise people not profit” (Waltham Forest), “building directly rather than relying entirely on private developers” (Lambeth), “close developer loopholes” (Waltham Forest), “planning approaches that only benefit private developers” (Hackney) – but the direction is identical. This is arguably the most consequential common theme for the development industry. 2. Pause or end estate demolitions. Lambeth Greens explicitly pledge to pause estate demolitions. Hackney, Haringey and Lewisham all prioritise retrofit and improvement of existing stock. This is a direct challenge to the dominant model of the 2010s and early 2020s where Labour councils used demolition and rebuild (often with private partners) as the main vehicle for estate renewal. 3. Community Land Trusts and co-operative housing. Waltham Forest, Lewisham, and Hackney Greens all specifically mention CLTs and co-operatives as alternatives to private development. This reflects national Green Party policy and represents a genuine alternative tenure model, but one that operates very slowly and at small scale. 4. Viability assessment reform. Waltham Forest’s manifesto is the most explicit, but the scepticism of viability assessments, the mechanism developers use to assess Section 106 affordable housing contributions, is implicit across all five borough parties. This is the single technical planning issue most likely to generate conflict with major developers. 5. Affordable housing definition. All five boroughs contest the current definition of affordable housing, particularly shared ownership. The consistent position is that social rent (i.e. at roughly 40–50% of market rate) is the only genuinely affordable tenure, and that any development falling short of this is inadequate. 6. Land ownership transparency. Hackney’s pledge to audit who owns land and buildings in the borough is distinctive, but Lambeth’s “open the books” pledge and Waltham Forest’s commitment to keep public land in community ownership reflect the same underlying concern that public assets have been quietly transferred to private interests. 7. Resident participation before planning decisions. All five manifestos emphasise bringing communities into planning processes earlier. Waltham Forest explicitly promises participatory budgeting using Community Infrastructure Levy receipts. The will be a big expectation on developers to conduct and deliver robust pre-app consultation with local communities. The message from the Greens is unambiguous, in their view: the era of negotiating planning consents with Labour planning committees willing to accept 30–35% affordable housing in exchange for viability arguments is likely over in these boroughs. The new Green administrations will try to use planning policy more aggressively as a tool of redistribution, are more likely to refuse applications that don’t meet affordable housing targets, and are ideologically hostile to the private-developer-led regeneration model that defined inner London planning in the 2010s. Such an ideological approach is sure to put these Green councils on collision course with the Labour Mayor of London. The Mayor however, is also likely to be more aggressive with his call-in powers as he would not be clashing with Labour councils. |