What was claimed
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, under the Muslim housing plan, is building 40,000 new homes for Muslims only, to be near mosques and halal shops.
Our verdict
This is inaccurate. The Mayor of London has pledged to build 40,000 new council homes by the end of the decade, but these are not earmarked for a specific demographic.
A false claim that the Mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, is building 40,000 new homes “for Muslims only, to be near mosques and halal shops” under “the Muslim housing plan” is circulating online.
We have previously fact checked a very similarly worded claim that Sir Sadiq has “announced a new proposal to build 40,000 new council homes specifically prioritised for Muslims under the Muslim housing plan”. A spokesperson for the Mayor of London told Full Fact earlier this year: “This claim is completely false.”
There is no source cited for the claims, but they may have stemmed from an interview Sir Sadiq gave to the Islam Channel, ahead of the May 2024 London mayoral election.
While the caption of the video, published in April 2024, asks how his manifesto was “going to affect the Muslim community”, at no point does he pledge any homes exclusively for Muslims.
He actually said: “The other big issue facing Londoners, particularly Londoners of Islamic faith, is the issue of housing. And so we need to build far more homes in our city because you know often people from minority communities want to live near a mosque, near halal food, near places where there are other people like them for a variety of obvious reasons, and they’re priced out because there’s not enough housing. So we’re going to build at least 40,000 council homes, at least 6,000 rent control homes.”
Sir Sadiq’s 2024 election manifesto, on which he was elected for a third consecutive term, included a policy of building 40,000 new council homes “by the end of the decade”.
It also promised to build 6,000 ‘Rent Control Homes’, for which rents are capped and linked to the income of key workers. However, neither of these pledges mention houses being prioritised for a certain demographic.
A search for a so-called “Muslim housing plan” also does not bring up any evidence that this is a real policy of the Mayor of London.
We have previously fact checked other misleading posts about Sir Sadiq’s interview with Islam Channel, which similarly claimed that he’d pledged to provide houses and free education exclusively for Muslims.
Before sharing claims about politicians online, first consider whether the information could be designed to mislead, and whether it comes from a trusted and verifiable source. Our toolkit gives you advice on how to navigate bad information online.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because this is not a real policy of the Mayor of London.
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