Nearly 200,000 Londoners are living in temporary accommodation tonight. Millions more are
spending a third, a half, sometimes more of their income on rent, in homes that are cold,
damp, costly to heat, and built to standards that no one has ever gone back to measure. A
child born in Newham today can expect twelve fewer healthy years than one born in
Richmond. That gap is not fate. It is the accumulated consequence of decades of housing
policy that has treated homes as financial assets first, and as places where human lives are
lived second.

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Since Right to Buy dismantled the social housing programme in 1980, successive
governments have worked within the same narrow logic: stimulate demand, subsidise
ownership, and trust the market to build its way to sufficiency. It has not worked. The tools
have changed. The underlying question has not.

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We are asking a different question.

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What would it mean for every Londoner regardless of tenure, postcode, or income to
live in a home that is genuinely safe, affordable to run, ecologically sound, and
embedded within a neighbourhood that supports their health and their belonging?
‍Not as an aspiration for some distant future. But as the practical, measurable standard we hold
ourselves to now.

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That is the Regenerative Homes Earthshot.
Regenerative means more than low carbon. It means homes and neighbourhoods that
replenish what has been depleted; the health of communities, the resilience of households,
the ecological integrity of the city, and the dignity of people who have for too long been
excluded from the decisions that shape their lives. It means retrofit before demolition.
Circular materials before virgin extraction. Post-occupancy accountability before short-term
viability. And fiscal systems, starting with VAT that reward repair over replacement.
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LDEC does not come to this as campaigners. We come as convenors.‍
We know that no single organisation, profession, or political party holds the answer to
London's housing challenge. The Mayor and the boroughs hold planning powers.
Government holds the fiscal levers. Architects, engineers, and developers hold the technical
capacity. Housing associations and community land trusts hold the relationships on the
ground. Residents hold the lived knowledge that no dataset can fully capture. And
researchers, universities, and civil society hold the evidence that should be shaping every
decision.

We use the Doughnut Economics framework not as ideology but as a practical instrument: a
way of asking, for every home and every neighbourhood, whether we are meeting the needs
of people within the means of the planet. It gives us a common language across professions
and politics. It gives us metrics that go beyond unit counts and carbon ratings to ask whether
people are actually living well.
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What we are calling for is specific.
1. Borough-level regenerative homes targets embedded in the next London Plan
review.
2. A dedicated Retrofit Finance Facility that directs capital toward the communities that
need it most.
3. The abolition of VAT on domestic refurbishment and retrofit, ending the perverse
fiscal incentive that makes it cheaper to demolish than to repair.
4. A London Homes Health Standard that mandates post-occupancy evaluation and
links housing investment directly to healthy life expectancy outcomes across all 33
boroughs.
5. Adoption of Lifemap, the UK's postcode-level map of healthy years as a tool that
ensures no borough can invest in housing and ignore the health consequences of
doing so.

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These are not radical demands. They are the logical next steps for a city that already has the
knowledge, the talent, and the moral clarity to act. What London has lacked is a framework
that holds all of this together, and a coalition with the credibility and the relationships to make
it move.

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That is what LDEC is building. And we are inviting everyone who shares this ambition
to help build it with us.

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