Cllr Ainslie spoke at Lambeth’s Cabinet meeting on 30 June, 2025 to criticise Labour’s Growth Strategy. Read his speech below or watch the proceedings and review the agenda by following this link.
“Some of the highlighted projects in this Growth Plan have been around for over 20 years:
- The Spine root – consultations began a decade ago
- Vauxhall gyratory – Council consulted on removal 15 years ago
- Vauxhall island – vacant since the 1980s, approvals since 2012, along with Vauxhall Square
- Waterloo Station redevelopment was first proposed 2007
- Waterloo undercrofts were first proposed 2005
- Royal St – sites vacant since the war! Various permissions, including 650 key worker flats in 2007
- The Bakerloo line extension – proposed 2010, cancelled in 2020 and this new Labour government refused funding in the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR)
Or even the most repeated mission ambition: to build 10,000 new homes over 10 years, 1,000 each year… that’s fewer than our current target of 1,335 each year!!
Permissions have been granted for over 1,000 homes and the equivalent of 6 Shards of office space which remain stubbornly undeveloped in Waterloo alone.
Lambeth is a borough of great promise – but also enormous and growing inequality, with a council frequently at odds with its own communities and businesses – who are extremely resilient in fighting back and getting on with it.
The major driver of inequality is unaffordable housing – it’s too expensive to purchase or rent, and there is a desperate shortage of social homes – which worsening inequalities, and knock-on effects, such as the impact on local community schools of falling rolls and closing.
In fact we have overshot our targets on market housing, but significantly undershot on social homes.
More market homes won’t reduce prices or rents significantly (admits the OBR, the Mayor’s Towards a New London Plan, countless academic studies) – but, in the face of this the Growth Plan claims it will “reduce the negative impacts of housing costs on people and families, through securing 10,000 new homes” (pg 37). Does the administration know something which the OBR and the Mayor doesn’t?
This growth plan seeks to suck in international finance to enable the speculative house building model which has exacerbated problems for 25 years. We don’t need more market homes. There isn’t a shortage – in fact, according to a developer’s own recent viability assessment, there is a glut of 1 and 2 bed market homes in Vauxhall. No, we need more homes with social rent and we need rent regulation in the private rented sector.
Why aren’t we getting those? Because this government – this new Labour government – won’t fund a major programme of social housebuilding. The £3.9bn promised in the CSR is similar to the previous Tory government. The Labour London Mayor is fuming – no additional funding for Bakerloo nor social housing – and you can’t blame a Tory government any more!
But the most galling thing about this ‘Growth Strategy’ is that it’s all about what you (the Council) is going to do to the residents and communities and businesses of Lambeth – not what you are going to do with them.
Not once does it propose working with residents or local businesses to improve things – it’s all about getting in investment etc “attract and enable investment”, “investible opportunities” or working with some of the world’s most profitable real estate outfits like Mitsibushi and Berkeley Homes.
Why not work with Coin St Community Builders to deliver the approved 300 homes and a new leisure centre, or the new nursing home they’ve been proposing for decades?
Why not work with the local community trust at Jubilee Gardens – blade for blade London’s most visited green open space – and with Braeburn Estates to deliver an extension to JG promised 50 years ago over central London’s last open-air car park?
Why not work with the Friends of Brockwell Park to deliver some real sustainable cultural events in the park, such as the Land Justice Fair taking place in Myatt’s Fields later this month?
Why not work with residents desperate to improve their estates, but threatened with demolition and sale to international finance at MIPIM?
Lambeth is a carbon factory, enabling the unnecessary emission of millions of tonnes of carbon by the demolition of solid young buildings and approval of dozens of carbon-busting skyscrapers. This growth plan is doing nothing about this.
It mentions 72 Upper Ground more than any other site: but this is demolishing a building less than 50 years old which could have provided 220 homes, and will emit 103,000 tonnes of carbon in building it’s uber-concrete bunker, the equivalent of every one of its 4,000 workers to drive in from Surrey every day for 20 years.
This isn’t sustainable growth, it’s the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.“