At the end of 2017, London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced he was “ripping up planning rules” in order to tackle the housing crisis in the capital. Enshrined in the new London Plan, this included the GLA asking housing developers to build out sites at much higher densities to “substantially increase capacity”.

Small sites would be in focus, and the GLA said it still wished to protect the green belt, while developing more public land. This is despite comments from many corners that building on the green belt is the taboo that needs to be broken in order to develop homes where they are needed.

And recently, Khan announced he would be spending £1bn on 11,000 new council homes for ‘social rent’, no doubt spurred by the Chancellor finally removing the cap on council borrowing, plus 3,750 further homes to help alleviate the crisis for buyers.

The big issue here, is what greater density means in practice. While it is laudable and probably essential to use sites more efficiently and even in some cases cram on far more homes than would have been seen, the results may challenge traditional homeowner expectations of what a home looks like.

Low-rise blocks could become a much more common sight in suburbs traditionally used to serried ranks of semi-detacheds, though if done properly, in the right places eg for transport links, perhaps this could be a far better model in terms of meeting all the goals. Much of western Europe uses this model for recent urban housing, and at the right quality it works well.

London’s famous Georgian town houses created urban blocks that had pretty high density levels, and a good standard of internal quality for residents. However since the 1960s high density developments have suffered from a stigma due to various factors from build quality to the resulting social issues of poorly- planned estates.

There are further challenges on density where people are living much closer together, that if the build fabric doesn’t provide adequate quality levels, with the issue of noise from neighbouring properties being one that’s far from trivial.

The question is, and it’s a widespread one, in the post-Grenfell world, are Regs robust enough? This is an even bigger issue arguably when it comes to converting houses into flats – which will need to continue if the goal is higher density – and implementing the Future High Street announced in the Budget, turning empty retail units into homes.

The London Plan includes new expectation levels on design quality, particularly on space standards, to avoid the temptation among housebuilders to see ‘higher density’ as ‘smaller’. The GLA “expects councils to refuse any applications that come forward with homes that do not meet his new standards”.

London’s population is growing by 70,000 a year, and as the results of the Letwin Review kick in we could see councils start allocating huge sites in areas of high demand. Will the quality be robustly enforced alongside the push to deliver the sort of homes these people need?