What was claimed
The Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan has announced a new proposal to build 40,000 new council homes prioritised for Muslims under the Muslim housing plan and they will be built near mosques and halal shops.
Our verdict
This isn’t true. There are 40,000 new council homes pledged to be built in London by the Mayor by the end of the decade, but these homes are not specifically for Muslims, or any particular demographic.
A video which inaccurately claims that Sir Sadiq Khan has announced a proposal to build 40,000 new council homes specifically prioritised for Muslims is circulating again online.
The clip, which has been shared on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), where it has been reposted 19,000 times, features a woman who says that the Mayor of London has “just announced a new proposal to build 40,000 new council homes specifically prioritised for Muslims under the Muslim housing plan”. She adds these homes are “to be built near mosques and halal shops”.
But as we previously confirmed, a spokesperson for the Mayor of London told Full Fact: “This claim is completely false.”
While there is no source cited for the claims, they may have stemmed from an interview Sir Sadiq gave the Islam Channel, ahead of the May 2024 mayoral elections.
While the caption of the interview, 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.”
We have previously fact checked several misleading posts about this same interview, which made claims that Sir Sadiq had pledged houses as well as 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.
Full Fact fights for good, reliable information in the media, online, and in politics.
Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.