Berkeley has called for “necessary policy changes and strong political leadership” to address the challenges facing housing delivery in London.
The statement came as the housebuilder released its audited financial results for the year ending 30 April 2026, where the Group reported a pre-tax profit of £451.4million, down 14.7% on the previous year. Berkeley also saw its operating margin fall from 20.1% in 2025 to 18.7% in 2026.
During the period, Berkeley delivered 4,076 new homes, largely level with the previous year’s output, with 90% delivered on brownfield land.
Rob Perrins, executive chair of Berkeley Group, said that the “robust performance, which is in line with guidance, reflects the focused execution of our Berkeley 2035 strategy, disciplined cost control and our agile response to extremely challenging macro-economic and regulatory conditions.”
In the trading update, Perrins praised the government’s work to stimulate economic growth by restoring the fundamentals of housing policy, and acknowledged the government’s attempt to address the viability challenge with the Homes for London package, which he said “can make a huge difference if implemented constructively and with urgency”.
However, Perrins is calling for “more decisive intervention” to improve the situation, with London currently delivering less than 10% of its MHCLG annual target.
Perrins said: “It now takes at least eight years to complete an apartment building in the capital from the point of acquisition, through planning, agreement of Section 106 requirements, consultation with statutory consultees, clearance of pre-commencement conditions, detailed design, Building Safety Regulator (BSR) approval and construction. Ten years ago, it took five years. A further 18 months is required for an appeal or call-in. There is no certainty that a planning consent will be secured at the end of this process, as our recent experience at Peckham demonstrates, where the Inspectorate determined that the Peckham Rye conservation area would suffer too much harm from new housing on the site of a run-down shopping centre. This after ten years of engagement on a site allocated for housing in the local plan.”
“Every part of the system needs to work to reduce the time taken to get buildings into development and allow homebuilders to make a return commensurate with the risk that can attract the necessary investment capital. Currently, more homes are being lost to other uses than being built. This can be addressed with the necessary policy changes and strong political leadership.”
Perrins continued to say that the demand for and supply of new homes have been hit by over ten years of continual SDLT increases and new surcharges, which have curtailed the early investment in new homes since interest rates began to normalise at the end of 2022. Perrins believes that it is this early investment that provides the necessary certainty for brownfield sites with their considerable upfront costs to come forward, thereby providing London with the new affordable homes and homes for rent it so desperately needs.
As a solution, the Berkeley executive chair said that: “SDLT should be reduced on all new homes to a maximum of 3% (zero for first-time-buyers) and the SDLT surcharges that deter the vital investment in new build homes so damagingly should be removed. These changes will be fiscally neutral or better due to the considerable increase in tax revenues generated from greater transactional activity and by stimulating additional homebuilding which drives corporation tax (which is 29% on all residential property developers’ profits) and payroll taxes (direct and throughout the supply chain).”
Berkeley is calling for a number of changes that would increase housing delivery in the capital, specifically:
- The Homes for London package should be fully implemented forthwith and remain in place until London’s housing numbers are restored.
- The time taken to deliver new apartment buildings needs to reduce from eight to five years, which it was ten years ago. This requires recognition of the appropriate required development return, with equitable review mechanisms that incentivise development. In addition, Section 106 mechanisms should be objectively assessed in a timely fashion with competing policy requirements and layering removed.
- The excessive tax burden, that was introduced in a different economic paradigm, must be reduced to unlock demand and attract the essential investment without which regeneration schemes cannot proceed.
- All regulators, including the BSR, need to be appropriately resourced to meet targeted statutory deadlines.
Berkeley says that, if these measures are introduced, London can meet its housing targets, tax revenues will grow and national GDP will increase by 1%.
