Greater London Authority

Dear Lord Bailey,

Thank you for your letter to the National Statistician regarding the Mayor of London’s use of housing statistics in a LabourList article from March 2024. This was passed to the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), the regulatory arm of the UK Statistics Authority.

The Mayor’s comments appear to draw from the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) Affordable Housing starts and completions statistics. The statistics are broken down into house building ‘starts’ and ‘completions’. These definitions are clear and describe a real-world picture of what the statistics represent: whether a dwelling has started construction or whether construction has finished.

There were 25,658 affordable housing starts in the period April 2022 to March 2023, and 13,954 affordable housing completions during this time. The Mayor’s use of the word ‘delivered’ could be misinterpreted by the average person to mean the housing had been completed rather than started. While the Mayor would not have had access to the statistics for the equivalent period in 2023/24 at the time of writing the article, the number of affordable housing starts and completions for 2023/24 was 2,358 and 10,949 respectively. The reference to ‘within the last year’ may have been intended to reflect the latest year of statistics that were available, but this would not be clear from the statement alone.

In line with the principles of intelligent transparency, when making numerical claims, public figures should be clear what they are referring to and consider how a reasonable person would interpret the claim. To help the public understand statistical claims made during the General Election debates, the OSR has recently published a series of explainer articles including on housing supply and affordability statistics.

Yours sincerely,
Sir Robert Chote
Chair

Dear Ian,

I hope you are well.

I am writing in regards to the Mayor of London’s use of housing statistics and the possibility that these figures are materially misleading to the general public.

The Mayor has routinely claimed that he has “delivered” 25,000 affordable homes “in the last year alone”. Adverts across Transport for London’s estate, authorised by the Mayor of London, proudly suggests the capital is in a “golden era” of homebuilding.

The Greater London Authority’s own figures for 2023/24, however, show that the number of affordable home starts dropped to 3244 – the lowest level since records began in 2008. This represented an 88 percent drop compared to 2022/23, when 27,824 affordable homes were started – not completed.

We would, therefore, question whether the Mayor’s claim that 25,000 homes have been “delivered” in the “last year alone” is materially misleading. Even if referring to figures from 2022/23, an individual cannot live in a ‘start’ and a home has not been ‘delivered’ if it is still being built. In some circumstances, a ‘start’ may be counted before a single brick has been laid.

We believe this, combined with such a sharp drop in the number of new affordable homes in London actually completed, makes the Mayor’s claim that we are in a “golden era” of housebuilding highly disingenuous.

Given the real need to build more genuinely affordable homes and give Londoners the best possible chance of getting on the housing ladder, we believe the Mayor’s presentation of the figures in this way is unhelpful at best, and fundamentally misleading to the public at worst.

We would welcome your comments on whether the presentation of housing statistics in this way, including in publicly funded advertisements, could be considered as misleading.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,
Lord Bailey of Paddington AM
Londonwide Assembly Member

Letter from Sir Robert Chote to Lord Bailey of Paddington AM – housing statistics

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Lord Bailey of Paddington AM to Sir Ian Diamond – housing statistics

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