35 Percent Affordable Becomes 10 Percent Through Consultant Modelling Nobody Can Challenge
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat contribute reporting from somewhere off Old Street roundabout.
The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, which sits on the southern boundary of Shoreditch where Hackney meets Tower Hamlets, has been an active development question for the better part of fifteen years. The original 48-storey luxury proposal, advanced by Hammerson and Ballymore, was eventually scaled back after sustained opposition led by then-Hackney Mayor Jules Pipe. The current state of the site, in 2026, remains an unresolved compromise.
What The Original Proposal Wanted
The original Hammerson and Ballymore proposal, advanced in 2015, included two towers approximately as tall as One Canada Place at Canary Wharf. The development would have, on the council’s own analysis, cast significant shadows across surrounding residential areas and the Tech City cluster of small design and technology firms that had, by then, become a meaningful part of the local economy.
The affordable-housing offer was originally pitched at 35 percent. The developers subsequently argued that the project was viable only at approximately 10 percent affordable. This is the standard developer negotiating sequence, and it is worth understanding why it works.
The Viability Trick
“Viability” assessments are produced by developers using their own consultants, with their own assumptions about land cost, construction cost, and target return. The councils typically lack the in-house expertise to fully challenge these assessments. The result, across London, is a pattern in which initial 35-percent affordable offers are revised downward to 10-15 percent on viability grounds, with the planning system structurally unable to push back effectively.
Hackney has, in the past several years, begun to hire its own viability consultants and to challenge developer figures more aggressively. This is real progress, and according to Hackney’s planning reports, has produced higher affordable-housing percentages on subsequent applications. It is also slow, expensive work that the council has to fund out of constrained budgets.
The Empty-Flats Problem
The other concern flagged by Pipe in 2015, that many of the luxury flats would be sold to overseas investors and left empty while they appreciated in value, has, over the intervening decade, been confirmed by serious quantitative research. According to multiple London property studies, somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of new-build luxury flats in central London are estimated to be functionally empty for most of the year, occupied only briefly or held purely as appreciating assets.
This is, in straightforward terms, a misuse of housing land in a city with an acute housing crisis. The relevant policy levers, including overseas-investor stamp duty surcharges and empty-homes premium rates, exist but are not currently calibrated to be punitive enough to change behaviour.
What The Council Should Do
What the council should do, on the Bishopsgate Goodsyard site and on the broader pattern, is continue to push the affordable-housing percentage upward, continue to challenge viability assessments, and lobby central government for stronger empty-homes penalties. Hackney has been doing the first two. The third requires Westminster, which is, as ever, the bottleneck.
The site itself, as of 2026, remains the most visible unresolved tension between the version of Shoreditch the developers want and the version the residents are still here to argue for. Both versions are, on the current planning trajectory, going to coexist uncomfortably for the next twenty years.
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