Festus Akinbusoye, is a Westminster councillor and prospective Conservative candidate for Mayor of London.

We talk about London’s housing crisis largely in terms of homes. How many were promised? How many were approved? How many were started?

But there is another cost to London’s collapse in housebuilding that receives far too little attention: the jobs, skills and opportunities that disappear when we stop building.

The numbers should embarrass the Mayor of London and City Hall. Just 5,547 private homes started construction in London in 2025, compared with 33,782 a decade earlier. That is a fall of more than 80 per cent, while the city’s population rose over the same period. In 2025 as a whole, around 33,000 homes were completed across London, against an assessed need of 88,000 a year.

Behind those huge shortfalls and missed housing targets are livelihoods.

A housing development does not simply produce homes. It employs bricklayers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, engineers, architects, surveyors, project managers and apprentices. It creates work for manufacturers, suppliers, hauliers and thousands of small businesses. Completed developments generate council tax, support shops and services, and create places where people can live close to jobs.

City Hall itself has previously estimated that every new home built supports around 1.2 direct jobs. Its analysis of the previous Affordable Homes Programme estimated that housebuilding had supported 140,000 jobs across construction and associated sectors.

So when housebuilding collapses, we should stop thinking only about the homes that were not built. We should also think about the apprentice who did not get trained, the subcontractor who did not get the work, the young Londoner who missed out on their first opportunity, and the skills that gradually disappear from the industry.

That matters enormously for social mobility. I got my first job working on one of the towers at Canary Wharf in my late teens. It gave me my first foothold in the world of work and helped set me on a path of employment thereafter.

Construction remains one of the sectors where someone without family wealth or an expensive university education can learn a trade, build expertise, start a business and eventually employ others. London’s construction industry contains more than 61,000 businesses, many of them small enterprises and contractors.

This makes London’s employment figures even more concerning. The latest ONS figures put London’s unemployment rate at 6.8 per cent, compared with 4.9 per cent across the UK. I am cautious about attributing that gap to any single industry. But at a time when London needs more jobs and opportunities, allowing one of our great job-creating industries to contract so dramatically makes little economic sense.

That is why we must change how we measure success when it comes to housing delivery. A planning consent is not a home. No one lives in a planning permission that never becomes a completed home.

Nor does a planning permission employ a bricklayer, generate council tax or give a young apprentice years of work. The economic and social benefits materialise when finance is secured, construction begins and homes are actually completed.

That is why my London ‘Yes’ Plan will put delivery and viability at the heart of housing policy.

Planning reform matters, but granting more permissions for developments that cannot viably be built will not solve London’s housing crisis. City Hall must understand the cumulative impact of planning requirements, regulation, financing costs and affordable housing obligations on whether a development can actually proceed.

My starting point is clear: brownfield first. We should be far more ambitious about unlocking the land and space already available within our city. My London ‘Yes’ Plan would prioritise brownfield development, maximise the use of public land and unlock opportunities from airspace and upward extensions, while supporting gentle urban density.

We should be making it easier to build on land that has already been developed, rather than allowing difficult brownfield sites to remain stalled while looking elsewhere for an answer.

As Mayor, I would establish a Housing Delivery Unit with a relentlessly practical mission: identify consented developments that have stalled; sit down with developers, boroughs and other relevant partners; establish what is preventing construction; and help remove barriers where City Hall or local government has the power to do so.

London desperately needs homes. But getting London building again is about much more than housing. It is also about apprenticeships, small businesses, investment, social mobility and good jobs for Londoners from every background.

It is time to say yes to building again.