IN Brief:
- Berkeley Group says London apartment schemes now take at least eight years to deliver, compared with around five years a decade ago.
- The housebuilder is calling for planning, tax, and regulatory reform to improve viability and attract investment into the capital’s housing market.
- The warning adds further pressure to the debate over how the UK turns housing targets into deliverable construction programmes.
Berkeley Group has warned that the time needed to deliver apartment buildings in London has stretched to at least eight years, with planning complexity, tax costs, regulatory requirements, and weak viability slowing the capital’s housing pipeline.
The London-focused housebuilder said apartment delivery times have risen from around five years a decade ago, adding pressure to a market already struggling to produce enough new homes. Higher borrowing costs, reduced investor appetite, development levies, building safety requirements, and the cost of preparing complex brownfield sites are all weighing on schemes before construction can begin.
The warning came alongside the group’s latest full-year results, which showed pre-tax profit falling to around £451m. Berkeley has maintained its medium-term profit guidance, but its comments point to a market where even established developers with specialist urban landbanks are finding it harder to move projects from consent to completion.
London remains the centre of the challenge because its housing need is concentrated, its land supply is constrained, and many of its viable sites require dense, apartment-led development. Tall buildings, second stair requirements, remediation obligations, infrastructure contributions, affordable housing negotiations, transport impacts, utilities constraints, and building safety gateways all add cost and time before a contractor can establish properly on site.
Berkeley has argued that planning reform will not be enough without changes to tax and regulation. The group has pointed to stamp duty and additional surcharges as factors suppressing demand, reducing liquidity, and weakening the investment case for new homes in the capital.
Those concerns sit within a wider delivery problem. National housing targets depend not only on planning permissions, but on land being cleared, funded, serviced, and built. The same pressure can be seen in the growing focus on strategic demolition and the reuse of existing urban land, where construction activity often begins long before the first housing block becomes visible.
Long preconstruction periods create direct consequences across the supply chain. Contractors cannot plan labour, plant, procurement, or specialist packages around schemes that remain uncertain for years, while consultants, manufacturers, and subcontractors face the same difficulty. A project listed in the pipeline may not become dependable workload until design, funding, planning conditions, regulatory gateways, and commercial agreements are aligned.
Apartment-led regeneration is especially exposed to that lag. These schemes require early investment in planning, surveys, legal work, utilities coordination, affordable housing negotiation, design development, resident engagement, and financing. If viability changes during that process, developers may redesign, phase, defer, or pause schemes, creating a stop-start pattern that weakens confidence across delivery teams.
Building safety reform has also changed the sequence of residential development. Higher standards and clearer accountability are necessary, but they bring a heavier evidence burden. Developers must demonstrate design intent, competence, and compliance with greater precision, while contractors are expected to manage more detailed documentation and assurance during delivery.
Regulation is not the only cause of delay. London apartment construction has always been shaped by market cycles, political negotiation, infrastructure capacity, land value assumptions, and design complexity. The difference now is the accumulation of those pressures while sales rates, affordability, finance costs, and institutional demand remain less forgiving than during the previous growth cycle.
The risk is that housing output becomes increasingly dependent on a smaller pool of major developers able to carry long lead times, absorb planning risk, and manage complex compliance requirements. That would not automatically create a faster or more resilient market, particularly where smaller developers, housing associations, and partnerships are needed to unlock difficult sites.
Berkeley’s warning points to a delivery system that requires planning reform, tax policy, funding, regulation, and construction capacity to move together. Without that alignment, London’s apartment pipeline may continue to look substantial on paper while taking longer to reach site, longer to build, and longer to turn into occupied homes.
