The Mayor of London’s latest consultation Towards a New London Plan is many things: bold, overdue, and above all, honest. It opens the door, at last, to a discussion that to date has not been confronted head-on: that the city cannot meet its housing needs without looking again at the Green Belt and other potential sources of delivery including Metropolitan Open Land (MOL).

According to the draft London Plan (Section 2.10), “The Mayor will continue to give protection to MOL given its vital role for Londoners and providing a liveable city as London grows. However, some areas of MOL, such as certain golf courses are not accessible to the wider public and have limited biodiversity value. This undermines the purpose of the designation. These areas could be assessed to understand whether they should be released from MOL. They may be able to help to meet London’s housing and accessible open space provision (for example opening up strategic new open spaces accessible to Londoners alongside new homes).”

While the consultation is only the start of a long process, it is nonetheless a milestone. It signals that the mayor is beginning to look positively at this issue and is an approach that is consistent with national planning policy, as set out in the new NPPF published in December 2024. It accepts that London needs a more strategic approach to land use and cannot rely solely on brownfield land alone. If followed through, it could allow London to address its chronic under-supply of housing for the first time in decades. As the consultation document explains, over the ten-year period housing need in London is 880,000 new homes – but this would require an annual rate of growth that has not been achieved since the boom of the 1930s.