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London Growth Plan progressing well, says Deputy Mayor for Business

Howard Dawber provided an upbeat defence against criticisms from Green and Conservative London Assembly members
Charles Wright

A year has passed since Sir Sadiq Khan and London Councils launched their London Growth Plan for boosting the capital’s economy and helping of  thousands of Londoners into work. How has that been going? Pretty well, according to Deputy Mayor for Business, Howard Dawber.

The indefatigable Dawber – he was banging the drum for the city this week in Cannes at the annual global property trade get-together, MIPIM – was under the spotlight twice last week at the London Assembly, taking questions about progress towards the plan’s ambitious 10-year targets, including creating 150,000 jobs and increasing both productivity and the incomes of the capital’s lowest earners by 20 per cent by 2035.

There was no shortage of optimism from him. London was the university capital of the world, with “intellectual property coming out of our ears”, the theatre and sporting capital, the “start-up” capital outside the USA, “number one” for foreign direct investment in Europe, and still “massively more productive” than any other UK city. The gap is closing, but London is still looking at 1.9 per cent growth year on year, he said.

Dawber (pictured) didn’t duck the challenges, admitting that the growth figure was “not where I would want it to be”, that many families and high street businesses were struggling, that financing business growth remained difficult, that economic inactivity and unemployment were higher than the national average, and that the housing market remained sluggish.

But 12 months in, and amid new international turmoil, the growth plan was holding up, he said, with a focus on not just “maintaining our global competitiveness, supporting the things we need to improve in terms of growth”, but also on making sure that “where there is growth, it extends to all the people of London”.

He told London Assembly members (AMs) that the first year had already seen £22 million allocated by City Hall to improve London’s high streets, procurement by the city’s anchor institutions network of major public employers boosting small and medium businesses, the launch of a pioneering AI taskforce with £20 million to equip Londoners for the challenge of technological change, and new plans to support the capital’s £139 billion night time economy.

Borough growth plans were also coming forward, and the proposed overnight visitor levy could raise some £350 million a year for the city, he added. And following the go-ahead for the Docklands Light Railway extension to Thamesmead, a comprehensive “London infrastructure framework” setting out the capital’s priority shopping list of further major schemes would be launched shortly. Discussions were “ongoing” with Whitehall over further devolution, to “allow London to raise money to deliver these things itself”, he said.

Dawber described the centrepiece of the plan as its Inclusive Talent Strategy, launched last October, with £142 million of City Hall funding, as a new approach to training and supporting Londoners into work – a wholesale “retooling” of existing skills programmes. This is the “crucial piece of glue between the people who need jobs and the jobs that need people,” Dawber said. And with its offer now coming onstream, backed by business and the boroughs, he was confident that the Mayor’s 150,000 new jobs target would be met.

Was this too optimistic given continuing pressures, including current unemployment levels, exacerbated perhaps by government policies such as the hike in the employers’ national insurance levy? That was the charge from Conservative AMs, including Alessandro Georgiou, who said those policies had “destroyed London’s economy” and driven away wealthy potential investors.

Not true, said Dawber. “I’d certainly like to see taxes on business reduced over time, when the opportunity arises to do so,” he said. “But the Chancellor inherited a dysfunctional economy. The public finances were not in a good state and the Chancellor has had to take difficult decisions.”  Meanwhile, he added, the Mayor continued to lobby for more government support for business, including a wider reform of Business Rates.

Dawber also asserted that talk of an “exodus” of high wealth individuals was “overblown”. This prompted Green AM and national party leader Zack Polanski to make his own challenge, questioning what he characterised as the Mayor’s defence of “billionaires”.

Again, there was a nuanced answer from Dawber. “We want to be a place where people with a lot of money who want to start a business or invest want to come,” he said. There’s a balance between fair taxation and the people with the broadest shoulders bearing the highest burden, which is right, and getting into a position where you are putting people off. I think we’ve got that balance about right.”

Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Watch the Assembly plenary in full here.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. If you don’t already receive it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this website.

 

Categories: News
Tags: Alessandro Georgiou, Howard Dawber, London Growth Plan

John Griffiths: Young People’s Foundations – a decade of empowering Londoners

It is a model that has done good work in many parts of the city, and must now think about what happens next
John Griffiths

The chief executive of the Mayor’s Fund for London, Jim Minton, recently wrote for OnLondon about how further devolution could deliver more for young Londoners.  “There should be a national framework and ambition,” he said. “But let the power to change rest locally and regionally.”

There are examples of this already working. Since 2016, John Lyon’s Charity, which has roots in the 16th Century, has invested in a sub-regional network of eight Young People’s Foundations (YPFs) in central and north west London, that is supported by a trust.

A recently published review of the YPFs’ development over the past decade-  conducted in partnership with Rocket Science, of which I am a founding director – examined their effectiveness as an advocate and agency for a strong and distinctive youth sector, and their potential for playing a key role in delivering the new National Youth Strategy, known as Youth Matters, at the local level.

Each of the YPFs was established with seed funding from John Lyon’s Charity and have, in their own ways, proven highly effective local champions of the youth sector and of demand-led services for young people, ranging from literacy teaching in Camden, to apprenticeships in Harrow, to filmmaking in Kensington & Chelsea to  music mentorships in Brent,

The review showed them to be effective network builders and trusted intermediaries integrating a strong youth voice and to have demonstrated a capacity to enhance rather than displace existing provision.

However, a highly favourable assessment of the YPFs’ first decade is no guarantee of their continuation and success. Youth Matters, whilst supportive of their approach, provides no guarantee of future backing for YPFs at a local level.

Existing local authority partners and other funders highlight a number of challenges the YPF Trust and the individual YPFs need to address:

  1. Consistency of research outputs – several of the YPFs are now known for producing regular needs analyses for their areas. This puts considerable pressure on the foundations to continue to produce high-quality research and analysis at the same time as enabling a diverse group of young people to shape and own it.
  2. Fragility of funding – only a guarantee of core funding will enable the YPFs to continue to work as they do. Yet few funders prioritise long-term investment in local infrastructure. Having to rely on project funding or to bid for grants, brings YPFs into greater competition with the very sector they exist to support and represent. At the same time, funders like the City Bridge Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, which have to date been reliable sources of core funding, are changing their funding priorities.
  3. Relationship with the primary funder – John Lyon’s Charity’s culture and approach as a relational funder are appreciated by the YPFs, by their members and local partners. However, after a decade of support, this is potentially under pressure as the charity reviews its approach to funding the YPFs. It is keen to preserve their integrity but, given its focus on nine London boroughs, it has to balance the wider ambition to replicate and scale the original model against its own local priorities.
  4. Capacity constraints  – The YPFs provide lean, effective infrastructure in order to enable their members to access funding, build capacity and deliver services. This facet comes under increasing pressure as the YPFs are invited by stakeholders to do more and more each year. Small staff teams are stretched, working at high speed to meet demand. The admiration of one local authority assistant director was tempered by the realisation that “whilst the [YPF CEO] would be involved in everything if she could” they need to prioritise and learn when to say no. This captures a tendency among YPFs to rely heavily on a particular type of leader. Partners comment on the CEOs’ levels of dedication, strategic thinking and interpersonal skills which enable the YPFs to establish and sustain the trust of a multitude of stakeholders.
  5. Evidencing and reporting on impact – The YPFs’ increasing profile and longevity bring an added expectation to demonstrate their value for money and quantifiable social impact, and to do so more consistently and transparently. A shared evaluation framework would enable the YPFs to report on an agreed core set of indicators of value and impact.
  6. Careful expansion and replication – Is it appropriate to try and replicate the YPF model on the assumption that, in the face of cuts to statutory services, every local authority area should have one? As no two places are the same, and the sustainability of each local foundation requires considerable and sustained core funding, it seems paradoxical to expect all areas to embrace the YPF model. Different areas may benefit from other models of provision. Instead of pursuing a universal approach, the John Lyon’s Charity and the YPF Trust might develop selection criteria for identifying “cold spots”  – in other words, those places which best lend themselves to the introduction of a YPF. These criteria could include: the extent to which there is infrastructure support already present; its effectiveness and take up by the youth sector; the levels of funding currently coming into the area for youth provision, and the extent of interest and support for a YPF model from the local authority.

John Griffiths is founder and non-executive director of Rocket Science, which was John Lyon’s Charity’s research partner for the 10-year review of the Young People’s Foundations. Photo from YPF Trust.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. If you don’t already receive it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this website.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brent, Camden, Harrow Road

On London is nine years old. Here’s what it is (and isn’t)

This is a journalism website that provides coverage of the capital of a depth and authority not often found elsewhere, so why not give it your support?
Dave Hill

On London was launched in a more rudimentary form on 1 February 2017 – exactly nine years ago today. For the the previous eight years or so I had been the Guardian’s London commentator, self-publishing from home on a freelance deal and enjoying what, up to that point, had been my best job in journalism ever.

But the paper got a new editor, there was a desire to cut budgets that could easily be cut and an attitude to London from the big departments at King’s Place that was doing bad things to my blood pressure. It was a good time to be got rid of. One year later, I launched a nerve-racking, five-week crowdfunding campaign that raised £25,000. It paid for a bespoke site design and helped me to establish what remains the smallest media empire in the world – but also, I like to think, a unique one.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of London news sites, each with their own identities and fields of interest. This has all been to the good, especially as the more established London media have been scaling back. On London‘s priority has always been on the politics, development and culture of the city, with a primary focus on the policies and influence of the Mayor.

On London is not a hobby or “a blog”. It is a journalism website whose writers are serious, knowledgeable and experienced in doing things in London – in planning, transport, housing, economic development and so on – not just writing about them. Their output provides coverage of a depth and understanding of London and how it works – and doesn’t work – not often found elsewhere. They and I are united in wanting to make London a better place for those who live, work and visit here: to recognise its many successes and to explore ways of correcting its failings. The site’s mission is summed up in its catchline – For The Good City.

The website is also, in its small way, a corrective to populist attacks on London and Londoners, from whichever direction they come. Denigrating and misrepresenting the capital has, for years, been a major preoccupation of the far-Right, both in Britain and increasingly abroad, but some on the British Left have long been in on the act, too. As a consequence, there is a void of understanding about the city’s true character and its relationship with the rest of the UK. On London strives to put that right.

I’m pleased to be able to report that during the course of the past year On London became fully financially self-sufficient through sales of my now twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. The website carries no advertising, has no paywall and doesn’t publish “sponsored links” or advertorial. Previously, I have relied on a little bit of “supported content” (retaining full editorial control) or one or two jobs on the side to keep the bank balance healthy. But On London now just about stays happily afloat without that welcome help.

That doesn’t mean I’m not still eager to boost the finances of the business and On London‘s readership. I would like to refresh the look of the site. I would like to be able to pay its writers better. So if you aren’t already a supporter of On London, please consider making its ninth birthday nicer by subscribing to On London Extra using either any “support” link on the website itself or – more conveniently for me and probably for you too – becoming a paying subscriber to my personal Substack. It costs £5 a month or £50 a year. In addition to the newsletters, you will also receive offers of free tickets to London events I am involved with.

Thanks for your time. And thanks for reading.

Dave Hill (owner, editor, publisher and writer, On London.co.uk).

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Categories: News
Tags: economy, housing, planning, The Guardian, transport

John Vane: On Chiswell Street, Sun Street and Silk Street

Centuries of London history are combined and condensed in streets where Hackney meets Islington meets the Square Mile
John Vane

A discreet exit route from Liverpool Street station, reached via an upper level corridor, takes you to Sun Street Passage and then, after a fashion, to Sun Street itself, along which Bill Sikes frogmarched Oliver Twist en route to doing some housebreaking in Chertsey. Charles Dickens also had Sikes hustling the child across Finsbury Square and on to Chiswell Street and Barbican. Knowing this adds magic to every visit to those streets. Coincidence has lately led me down them three times.

The Dickens links are just one part of its long story. Sun Street has a junction with Wilson Street, where there’s a pub, The Flying Horse, whose sign hides an older, smaller one for the defunct Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch. That local government unit was absorbed into a protective Hackney 61 years ago, but the south side of Sun Street – named after another pub, also with us no more – belongs to the City of London. And once you’ve you’ve passed Wilson Street, you’re in Islington.

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Before reaching that point, walking west, you pass on the Hackney side the adjoining and connected Sun Street Hotel and Lima Peruvian restaurant. Their frontages are resplendently retro, unlike the evolving back of Broadgate across the road. The hotel displays a union jack and a flag of Malaysia, which denotes the origins of its owner, the MTD Group. The place was opened in 2022. It’s part of MTD’s swish mixed-use One Crown Place, which Hackney approved in 2015.

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Soon, you’re on the south side of Finsbury Square, which doesn’t look its best just now. By contrast, the memorial to the 43 people killed in the Moorgate tube crash of 1975 is immaculate. Bernard Marks, the father of journalist and later TV comedy-drama writer Laurence Marks, was among those who perished. The cause of the crash remains a mystery.

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On to Chiswell Street, whose signage preserves another pre-1965 relic – the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury. Set back on your right, opening up like some temporal anomaly, are the generous grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company. Incorporated by Henry VIII, it is the British Army’s oldest regiment. What goes on there I don’t know, but through its iron gates you can see, on the far side, the company’s museum. There’s also a marquee. A sign on the gates provides a phone number to call if you’d like to go inside.

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Further on, Chiswell Street is bisected by the Islington-City boundary. A left hand turn on latter’s side offers you Milton Street, which is a remnant of what was previously called Grub Street. It is thought to have been named after a refuse ditch that ran down it in the 13th Century and it later, famously, became the dwelling place of low-rent writers. “Grub Street” lives on as a synonym (one that most certainly does not apply here…).

Next up on Chiswell, The Brewery venue offers conference facilities. You’d never guess, would you, that beer used to be produced there? That ceased in 1976, the year after the Moorgate crash. Opposite, on the Islington side of the street, find another part of the ex-Whitbread complex has become a deluxe boutique hotel. The exterior brickwork provides a heritage and history clue.

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Once past the brewery take the left at a four-way junction into Silk Street, which loops deeper into the Square Mile and leads to the main entrance of the Barbican Centre. The word “barbican” means fortified gateway, and London’s use of it stems from the area’s proximity to the Roman London Wall, completed in around the year 200. Oliver’s fictitious footsteps were yet to come.

Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist here . 

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this site. Thanks.

Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Barbican, Chiswell Street, Finsbury Square, Liverpool Street station, Silk Street, Sun Street

Charles Wright: London’s latest revival could be getting underway

The city is famed for its resilience and powers of reinvention, so keep an eye out for early signs
Charles Wright

In response to London’s travails, the argument is often made that the city has a particular resilience and ability to remake itself. It may feel beset on all sides at present, but is its next renewal already underway?

A couple of years ago, Professor Tony Travers in a Strand Group lecture highlighted events in the capital’s history from which recovery was by no means certain: the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire the following year; the Blitz of 1940-41 and the wider impact of Word War II.

He noted that the war was followed by three decades or more of decline. Manufacturing contracted and the world’s largest docks headed towards dereliction. In 1939, London’s population stood at 8.6 million. By 1985, it had fallen to 6.6 million. In 1986, city-wide government disappeared with the abolition of the Greater London Council. The direction of travel, it seemed to Travers, was “simply a road heading downwards to oblivion”.

But then, the opposite happened: population growth; Docklands towering upwards; the City of London reversing its anti-development stance; the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and the Jubilee Line extension opening up inner east London; the capital’s first directly-elected Mayor. There followed the regeneration of Kings Cross, Battersea and Stratford and, four years ago, the opening of the Elizabeth line, already the most heavily used railway in the country.

The impetus for all this remains unclear. Most likely, it stemmed from a combination of impacts, including deregulation and the “Big Bang” liberation of the City, significant public investment, the galvanising effects of the Millennium and then the Olympics, and new mayoral powers over planning and transport. But whatever the causes, the capital was again reviving.

Today, things are again not looking so good. The global financial crisis, Brexit and its aftermath, the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine have all undermined the city’s strengths. So have “levelling up” policies, high poverty rates and a decade of austerity. The housing crisis continues, while the voices of those who talk the city down keep growing louder.

Can London repeat its reinvention trick? Travers listed some of the policy changes he thought would help get London back on track: more devolution to City Hall and the boroughs, including revenue-raising powers through control over property taxes and a tourist levy; boosting investment in housing and transport, including buses; “cleaner and safer” neighbourhood initiatives; a more coordinated approach to the governance of central London.

Since then, some of those things have happened. We’ve seen more government cash for affordable housing and for transport in the form of supporting replacements for ageing Underground fleets and backing for the DLR extension to Thamesmead, which will prepare the ground for thousands of homes to be built on both sides of the river.

The Mayor is expanding the Superloop bus service as part of a new plan for improving street transport. There is emergency action to kickstart private housing development, and a tourist tax on its way.

The very shape of the city is changing too, with new planning policies for bringing denser development to the suburbs, two London New Towns and even some limited Green Belt release.

While the previous government blocked development at Cockfosters station car park with what was seen as an extreme example of Whitehall intervention, the current one reversed the ban, and a much-needed 373-home scheme is now going ahead. A similar scheme at High Barnet station is set to follow.

The London terminus of HS2, left in doubt by the previous government, will now be at Euston, demand for “grade A” office space in the capital’s commercial centre is increasing (and being met perhaps as much in refurbished stock as in soaring new-builds), Canary Wharf is back post-Covid, and the Elizabeth line is attracting investment across its route. And perhaps the highest profile indicator of confidence in London’s renewal, the Oxford Street pedestrianisation scheme, is now going ahead at pace.

There’s more to do, of course, notably on fiscal devolution – London still retains only seven per cent of the tax it generates compared to New York’s 50 per cent –  on the “cleaner and safer” agenda, and on the continuing financial pressures on London’s local authorities, nine of which would be unable to balance their budgets this year without additional government help.

There’s also the broader and perhaps perennial question, of how, in Travers’s words, to “advance the city sensitively, allowing continued economic dynamism allied to improving social outcomes for citizens”.

No room for complacency then. As Rob Anderson from the Centre for London think tank put it this week, the capital’s economic success, so vital for the UK as a whole, is not guaranteed. London’s streets are not “paved with gold”, and the government “needs to recognise this complex reality”.

It’s right that the combined forces of the city continue to make its case. But despite the doomsters, the signs are positive. Time, perhaps, for a little more optimism too.

Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. If you don’t already receive it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this website.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Elizabeth Line, Greater London Council, housing

Dave Hill: Robin Wales joining Reform UK is a surprise – but maybe not that much of one

The former Mayor of Newham has long-held, strong beliefs about community politics and integration
Dave Hill

Some early responses to former Mayor of Newham Sir Robin Wales joining Reform UK have, with the help of a raid on the liberal media archive, amounted to the jibe that he was always a right-winger, so what did you expect? For the London Left, that largely meant his embrace of regeneration, taking an “arc of opportunity” stretching from Stratford to the Royal Docks to the property marketplace. There was also his personal style, which some found belligerent and abrasive. But my first thoughts on seeing the news that he will work as Reform’s Director of London Government centred on something else – his aversion to what he called “community politics”.

By that, he meant what he saw happening in next-door Tower Hamlets, where political allegiance became increasingly aligned with ethnicity and faith, resulting in the rise, fall and rise again of his mayoral counterpart, Lutfur Rahman. The latter’s electoral successes have depended not on supposed mass voter fraud – even the court judgement that voided his win in 2014 did not reach that conclusion – but a solid base among local Muslim Londoners. For Wales, this was not progressive, not conducive to good community relations and not something he was willing to encourage.

Newham policy under his leadership reflected that stance, and his convictions on the issue shone through in his speech at this morning’s Reform press conference, where he was unveiled by Nigel Farage alongside his fellow former Newham Labour politician Clive Furness, a councillor for 21 years who, having stepped down eight years ago, will contest the mayoralty for his new party at the forthcoming borough elections.

Wales said that the Gorton & Denton by-election had illustrated a “transactional relationship between reactionary Muslims and those who want their votes” – an accusation also often levelled at Rahman. Nigel Farage, of course, claimed that so-called family voting and “sectarian” motives cost his party victory last week – an assertion that is both mathematically and intellectually questionable.

The idea that droves of Muslim women would have voted for a man like Matthew Goodwin had their husbands not intimidated them into doing something different in polling booths is laughable. And polling by More in Common has cast doubt on assertions that “sectarian” concerns such as Gaza were at the top of Muslim voters’ lists. A separate and broader case can certainly be made that the hard or far-Left in Britain (and elsewhere) has often been far too ready to form alliances with Islamists, whose values are anything but liberal. But is throwing in your lot with an outfit like Reform a good way to make it?

Wales mocked the Labour government, and he is far from alone in claiming that there has never been a chance of it hitting its national housebuilding target. His claim that NHS waiting time reductions have been done by sleight of hand was more contentious. So too his talk of a “rape gang cover-up”, a stock attack line across the far-Right. He sang from the Farage hymn book in complaining about the “brainwashing” of young people into believing “this isn’t a good country”. He praised Reform for “standing against the illiberal values that other people are bringing into our country” and for “raising issues” of concern that other parties wouldn’t. “If I thought Reform was racist, I wouldn’t be anywhere near this room,” he clarified, speaking for Furness too.

Furness himself addressed similar themes, saying his values were those of the Enlightenment and “free speech” and claiming that Labour has abandoned these, creating “a sense in which the government has surrendered to mob rule”. He seemed not to have the government’s robust 2024 response to attacks on hotels housing asylum-seekers in mind. “It’s no exaggeration to speak of the balkanisation of Britain,” he said. “That is not the land I want to live in. Labour’s response has been to appease the most reactionary parts of our society.” He added: “Labour has abandoned the working-class, who might reasonably ask, what is it there for?” It might be reasonably asked of him who fits his definition of “working-class” in high-poverty, multi-ethnic Newham.

Wales said his job for Reform will be to “work with Reform councils” in the capital – of which there could be around five after 7 May – to get spending under control and deliver services better than what he called “the old parties”. Their failures in this regard, he said, have created cynicism in the electorate.

He described himself as “a social democrat” whose priority would be drawing on his long experience at the helm of Newham – from 2002 until 2018 as its Mayor and, before that, as its leader – to help Reform councils in the capital deliver what local voters really want. In this, he echoed a core Reform message which has it that local authorities’ first priority is appeasing interest groups and pursuing pet projects rather than serving their communities.

Over the years, I have had many interesting conversations with Wales, whose task at Newham was not made any easier by the snakepit of local Labour politics. Its constituency parties have been under special measures for years, seemingly rife with factionalism and fears of entryism. The Labour-dominated council chambers under his mayoralties contained firm Wales loyalists and others devoted to arranging his downfall.

Following his deselection, he moved to Suffolk and set up a housing firm with former Tory chancellor Philip Hammond. In 2024, he stood as Labour candidate to be Suffolk’s police and crime commissioner. Lately, he’s been working for the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange. He and Furness announced last month that they had left the Labour Party.

Wales has had a remarkable career in London politics, a Kilmarnock-born chemistry graduate and former student organiser who moved to Newham in 1978 and first became a councillor four years later. He is nothing if not battle-scarred. He is nothing if not open to ideas. We can speculate about all the things that might have prompted him to join a far-Right party of the populist, nationalist variety. Whatever his full reasons for it, his conversion is a sad thing to see.

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OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. If you don’t already receive it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this website.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Newham, Reform UK, Sir Robin Wales

Dave Hill: Labour’s road to recovery runs through London

The party's defeat in Gorton & Denton shows that big losses are even more likely in the capital unless it changes its tune
Dave Hill

It may be too late for Labour to much reduce its coming losses in the borough elections. But if it values its longer-term future, it should make the effort anyway. The party’s hammering by the Greens in Gorton & Denton brought home with a mighty crash what analysis by such as the British Election Study has been showing for months – it’s not switchers to Reform UK Labour should be most worried about, but the much larger number of its erstwhile supporters turning to an array of liberal, Left and nationalist parties, together with a substantial group that have become “don’t knows”.

Labour’s harder lines on immigration and welfare have been putting people off, as has its handling of the economy and the National Health Service. For some, Gaza is an important issue and Labour’s stance has not endeared. Others have been irked by its stepping back from ambitious environmental policies.

There’s also a general sense that the party under Sir Keir Starmer has no clear direction or purpose. Instead, it has been defined by U-turns and inconsistencies, and by sending muddled messages that anger and confuse, many of them inspired by a fear of Nigel Farage.

Yet Reform’s support has mostly been coming from ex-Conservative supporters and people who don’t usually vote. The relatively few who’ve abandoned Labour might have done so anyway – part of the electorate wants to punish whoever is in power, whoever that may be. Labour will never woo them back. Why does it fixate on trying to when it alienates so many more?

The party needs to reconnect with its winning coalition. The path to such salvation looks steep, but it’s the only one available. It runs through many different places, including Scotland and Wales. But London is unquestionably one of them and matters a great deal.

Labour should remember that London provides lots of Labour MPs – 59 out of the 412 elected two years ago. Any insistence that, when it comes to the crunch, most of those seats can be taken for granted looks delusional in light of the Greens’ recent triumph.

If a once ultra-safe seat in Manchester can be conquered from the Left, how many in London are secure? Labour still leads London opinion polls, but by less than it once did. At least a dozen of its 21 councils in the capital look vulnerable. London has been one of Labour’s staunchest strongholds. If the city rejects it in a big way on 7 May, there might be no coming back.

It is no good denouncing the Greens as extreme as the PM did, even though, true enough, they have come to resemble the Jeremy Corbyn Left. Sir Sadiq Khan, writing in the Guardian at the weekend, was surely right to argue that “the vast majority” of Londoners thinking of voting Green do not fit that description and won’t appreciate being so termed. Trying to compete with Reform, the Mayor added, just makes Labour look treacherous and inauthentic.

Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, says the PM’s allies believe he is “finally asserting his own personality” and the “pragmatic centre-Left politics” that go with it. There was a hint of that in his party conference speech last autumn, though there hasn’t been much more since. A supposedly mission-led government needs to remember who handed it power, and why. In London, 43 per cent of the popular vote came Labour’s way, more than twice the share won by the Tories. The way Labour has been carrying on, most of that could go down the drain.

What is so difficult about standing up for the values that got you elected? Is it really so hard to fashion a position on immigration that recognises both the need for overseas workers in health, care, engineering and other sectors and the need to manage the system well? After all, as Peter Kellner has shown, that’s what the voters want. Might it do Labour more good than harm to firmly state that Brexit has been a failure? Again, most of the people would agree. Could it be that putting the goal of making Britain a clean energy superpower front and centre of your story for voters, instead of playing it down in deference to “Nige”, would be more welcomed than jeered?

There is no doubt that adopting more liberal, practical Left or “progressive” positions on such issues would please lots of London voters and their counterparts in other cities across the UK. A few bold steps in those directions in the coming weeks would at least give Labour’s embattled campaigners some more positive responses when faced by disillusion on London doorsteps from Camden to Lambeth and from Newham to Hackney. Labour cannot afford to lose the capital without a fight. And if it can’t see that, then losing will be what it deserves.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Apple podcasts.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. If you don’t already receive it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this website.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Green Party, Keir Starmer, Labour

Stephen Cowan: Councils in London can be architects of economic change

Hammersmith & Fulham has used its powers and resources strategically to nurture new forces of economic growth
Stephen Cowan

The government has made growth its central mission. But if we are serious about raising productivity, backing tech skills and building a more resilient economy, we need to recognise a simple truth: growth is not just delivered by Westminster or the City, it’s all around us. More precisely, in Hammersmith & Fulham, whose Labour council I lead, it’s happening in White City, on King Street, in Shepherds Bush market and along the Thames riverfront.

Sixteen years ago, when in opposition in the borough, I and my colleague Andrew Jones, a professor of economic geography and now vice-chancellor of Brunel University, began asking what our borough would need to do to prosper in a century defined by science and technology. Would we simply manage decline and inequality in a fast-changing world, or would we deliberately shape our economic future? Put another way, what should the council be for?

The current pace of technological change is unmatched in human history. Artificial intelligence, life sciences, climate technology, digital media and advanced engineering are transforming how we live and work. History shows that the places which prosper in such moments are those that build science, technology and innovation into their economic foundations. Those that don’t are left behind.

Local government in England is not designed to think about such things. It exists within one of the most centralised systems in the western world. Councils are expected to deliver statutory services efficiently, not to build global economic ecosystems. But we decided that if we wanted inclusive growth for our residents, we had to do more.

That led us, following our 2014 election victory, to pioneer what we call “entrepreneurial municipal government” – councils moving beyond passive administration to actively shaping their local economies. In simple terms, it meant using every lever a council has – planning, land, partnerships, convening powers – to that end and being bold with the powers available to us to create the conditions for growth and its benefits.

One of our earliest influences was Greg Jackson, founder of Octopus Energy, who in 2015 agreed to serve as our voluntary business commissioner. On his advice, we reformed planning policy so that 20 per cent of new office and laboratory space would be affordable and flexible, recognising that start-ups and scale-ups are the lifeblood of innovation. Since 2017, we have given planning consent for more than 190,000 square metres of commercial space.

A pivotal moment came in 2016 when we forged a strategic partnership with Imperial College London. Its incoming president, Professor Alice Gast, immediately grasped the opportunity to cluster an innovation ecosystem around Imperial’s emerging White City campus. That collaboration evolved into Upstream London, a focused industrial strategy centred on life sciences, climate tech, digital industries and advanced engineering, the sectors that will define the 21st Century.

Today the White City Innovation District is home to a dense cluster of global firms, scale-ups and research institutions working side by side. From Novartis, L’Oréal and Autolus to cutting-edge climate-tech and AI ventures, more than 800 STEM³ businesses now operate across the borough.

At its heart sits Imperial’s Deep Tech Campus and Scale Space, which we created after persuading venture builder Blenheim Chalcot to stay in the borough and help us build something more ambitious – a 200,000 square foot community, purpose-built for high-growth science and technology companies. A network of incubators, laboratories, venture builders and investors has grown around it, supported by Upstream Nexus, which connects entrepreneurs to capital, expertise and markets.

We took the same approach elsewhere. When Fulham Football Club approached us about building a multi-storey car park beneath their Riverside Stand, we suggested something more transformative: a new stand incorporating conference facilities, hospitality and specialist workspace for fintech and STEM accelerators.

The developers of Shepherds Bush market also bought into our plan, converting old trailers into on-site laboratory spaces for start-ups.

The results have been transformative. Since 2017, Upstream London has helped attract over £6 billion in high-growth investment and more than 17,000 new STEM³ jobs to Hammersmith & Fulham. Our economy has grown faster than any other borough in London and ranks among the fastest growing in the UK.

But growth figures alone were never the point. We should not countenance boroughs where world-class laboratories sit alongside estates whose young people see no way into them. Growth that excludes local people is unfair, fragile and economically wasteful. So, we embedded inclusion from the outset.

The same principle underpins our H&F Pathway Bond. Inspired by the African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” the Pathway Bond is a partnership between the council, businesses and community partners. Over 100 organisations, from global pharmaceutical firms to start-ups, now provide mentoring, apprenticeships, work placements and inspiration for local young people.

None of this happened by accident. London’s prosperity is often discussed as though it were a natural force. It is not. It is shaped by our decisions about land use, partnerships, incentives and leadership. Councils can convene developers, universities, businesses and communities. We control planning. We understand our labour markets. These powers can be used defensively or strategically, reactively or proactively. In both cases we chose the latter.

There was no ready-made blueprint. We drew lessons from global innovation clusters – developing partnerships with Milan, Barcelona, Oslo and Rzeszów  – but ultimately had to write our own playbook. The central lesson is simple. Bring the right elements together and ensure they reinforce one another – anchor institutions, entrepreneurial firms, affordable workspace, housing that supports talent and a public realm that encourages creativity and collaboration. Above all, it requires a council willing to align everything behind a long-term mission.

In our time of constrained public finances, entrepreneurial municipal government is not a luxury but a necessity. When councils act strategically, public purpose and private investment reinforce one another. If London wants sustainable, inclusive growth in a fast-changing world, it should look to the power of local leadership. Our experience in Hammersmith & Fulham shows that councils need not be spectators of economic change. They can be its architects.

Stephen Cowan is the leader of Hammersmith & Fulham Council. Follow him on Bluesky. Photo of Scale Space from Upstream London.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this site. Thanks.

Categories: Comment
Tags: economy, Hammersmith & Fulham, Labour

Julie Hamill: A London night with New Jersey royalty

The Talking Sopranos podcast has come to the London Palladium
Julie Hamill

After moving with my husband to New York in 2000, a good friend there couldn’t believe we hadn’t seen The Sopranos before. He said it was “the best TV show on the planet”. So, after he’d loaned us the first series on DVD, our Sunday night ritual of watching new episodes on HBO began and continued after we moved back to London in 2005, right up until the show’s iconic onion ring ending in 2007.

Despite knowing  episodes and lines inside out – Full Leather Jacket, “Interior Decorator”, Johnny Cakes, “Name That Pope” and so on –  if I  come across a repeat on TV I watch it anyway, immersing myself in New Jersey. I was so enamoured by it that, four years ago, I devoted an entire Boogaloo Radio show to The Sopranos, with clips, conversation and music.

Whaddya say? I’m a woman who loves mob dramas, with Goodfellas still my favourite film to this day.

Last May we found out that Michael Imperioli (who played Christopher) and Steve Schirripa (who played Bobby) were taking their Talking Sopranos podcast on a live tour. Hosted by comedian Joey Kola, the 90-minute show promised behind-the-scenes stories, clips and a Q&A. When we saw it was coming to the London Palladium, my husband, Gerard, and I booked immediately.

On arrival, the super-efficient door staff at the Palladium ushered us straight inside. There were barely any women in the crowd. On the way in, we heard one say: “I’ve never seen the show, I hope I enjoy it!” Clearly, someone’s plus one for the evening.

In the bar queue, some guys from Milton Keynes talked about their train times home then started asking each other’s ages. “I’m 31,” said one. “No way,” said the other, “I’m not even 30 yet.” I thought this was young for a Sopranos audience, until I realised that was about our age when we began watching the show.

As we took our seats, we reminisced about enjoying such an iconic series while living just across the river from New Jersey. The opening credit shot was one of the last television sequences to feature the Twin Towers, near where we lived in Manhattan. A voice with a familiar American accent came over the PA: “Turn off your cell phones. No photography.” It sounded less like a polite request than a warning about an overdue collection.

After Kola, who looked like he could have been part of the cast, had done a ten-minute skit about his life as a self-identified “fat man” – including a demonstration of the flexibility of his click belt – Talking Sopranos began with a bit of a crowd gasp as a video of James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano himself, looking cinematic on a big screen, talking in a very familiar, moving family clip about “remembering the little things”.

I could feel it bringing a lump to every throat in the room, which is quite incredible. He played a complex and evil man, yet his very presence would melt you like an ice cream. How did he do that? As explained later by our hosts, it involved a sprinkling of unique Gandolfini magic: “We all miss Jim. He really was something special.”

From there, the evening settled into an affectionate, well-rehearsed rhythm. Stories about auditions, on-set mishaps and cast dynamics flowed easily. The one heckler was handled well. “Hey fella, if I need your help I’ll ask for it, okay?” said Schirripa.

Everywhere I looked, there were wise guys proudly wearing Bada-Bing! T-shirts as if considering applying for a job. The couple to my left were from Kent, and a smiling man who let me pass him in the aisle said, “No problem luv!” in a full-English-breakfast Essex accent. A man who asked a question at the Q&A was from Watford. The place seemed to teem with people who had travelled into London to see the show. This made the experience even better, as if a New Jersey crowd had come to Manhattan for a night out.

There were a few mentions of the female cast, in particular having to be on their A-game when working in scenes with Edie Falco, who played Carmela Soprano, Tony’s wife. I would have loved to have heard more about the women in the cast. For me, the ensemble of female titans were the very gabagool of the show. I had some questions. But only one fellow wise gal managed to get a word in during the Q&A. Nevertheless, it was an excellent, moving and immersive evening in the company of New Jersey royalty.

Talking Sopranos at the London Palladium ends on 2 March. Follow Julie Hamill on Instagram.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this site. Thanks.

Categories: Culture
Tags: London Palladium

John Vane: Tube dirt attitudes

Some don't know about, don't care about it or don't even believe in it. For others, it means a never-ending battle
John Vane

Two London women, late twenties, friends, two contrasting views on personal hygiene and the London Underground. This is not about moquette preferences. It’s about something even more important. More emotive. More elemental. It’s about dirt. Tube dirt. It’s about how much of it there is, how much it matters and how to appropriately respond.

Let’s call one of the women Florence. She described taking the subterranean railway home from work, getting into her flat and immediately blowing her nose. She is horrified by what comes out. The muck! The dust! The dirt! She puts the clothes she has been wearing in the washing machine. She takes a shower. Only after every speck of Underground contaminant has been purged from her person can she relax.

Let’s call the other woman Freda. She listened to Florence in a state of wonderment, verging on awe. She too gets the Underground to and from work. She too has a routine when she gets in at the end of the day. It involves going to her bedroom and lying down. Under her duvet. In her work clothes. Tube dirt and all.

This is Freda’s way of unwinding, of shedding the strains and stresses of the day, of making the transition from work and travel mindset to one of recovery and repose. Florence’s equivalent ritual is about purification – of body, of garments and, I would deduce, anxiety. Tube dirt anxiety. Oh my God!

For Freda, the same goal is achieved though a kind of spiritual letting go, and that means not worrying about Tube dirt, not thinking about it, perhaps not even acknowledging its existence. Its presence or otherwise is simply not a post-work wellbeing factor for her.

All of this raises important questions. How dirty is the London Underground, exactly? How much is it rational or reasonable to care? Transport for London, of course, prides itself on its Tube cleaning regime, but there are variations in intensity. Where trains themselves are concerned, the Piccadilly line’s get the least attention, followed by those used on the District, Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City. Then comes the Central line, and so on.

A mayoral answer in November 2023 said stations are cleaned daily including “touchpoint” sanitation of escalator handrails (which, come to think of it, can sometimes feel a bit sticky). Go back another year and find a detailed defence of a “robust cleaning regime” across the whole of the city’s public transport network.

But what about air quality? “Multiple studies have shown that air pollution levels on the Underground are higher than those in London more broadly, and beyond the World Health Organisation’s defined limits,” said yet another study of the matter, this one from Cambridge University. Little bits of pollution are wafting everywhere, even as you stand on a quiet platform. They’re in your ears. They’re in your eyebrows. They’re in your hair.

I don’t plan to get between Florence and Freda on this one. After all, they are still friends and their discourse went on to hilariously embrace, for example, how best to get a sponge between your toes when in the shower. I will, though, observe that cities are, by their crowded, cluttered, human-infested nature, often grubby places. If you don’t like it, you have to find your own best way to live with it.

Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist here . 

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this site. Thanks.

Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Central Line, London Underground, Piccadilly Line

Tim Donovan: What’s so bad about London boroughs being under ‘no overall control’?

The prospect of many councils in the capital being run by coalitions in making people nervous, but history suggests such arrangements can work well
Tim Donovan

Some remember it as the night Frank Dobson took a swing at an opposition party activist. The late local MP was said to be wound up as tensions spilled over and control of Camden Council slipped away from Labour for the first time in 35 years. As dawn neared, there was a recount or two and then the final scores were in. The Liberal Democrats, with 20 seats, had become the largest party. Labour had won 18, the Conservatives 14, and there were a couple for the Greens.

Labour leader Raj Chada had lost his seat in Gospel Oak. One of the Tories who defeated him was a young entrepreneur called Chris Philp, now a London MP and shadow home secretary. Another unsuccessful Labour candidate was Howard Dawber, these days the capital’s deputy mayor for business. His was one of many Labour careers dashed, or at least stalled, that night as voters gave free rein to their anger at Tony Blair’s third government. In Camden it was time for a first: the Lib Dems and the Tories running the show together.

It is very likely that what happens this May will resemble – or surpass – the experience of 2006. In that year, eight councils, a quarter of those in the capital, were left with no party in overall control. There was not a uniform pattern to this municipal upheaval. Like Camden, the boroughs of Brent and Waltham Forest also came to be run by Lib Dem-Tory administrations. In Hounslow, the Conservatives governed with the help of community group councillors, and in Merton they did it by bringing independent residents’ association members onside. Southwark and Islington had been in the hands of minority Lib Dem administration since 2002, and that continued. Finally, Labour won the mayoralty in Lewisham but lost control of the council.

The then leader of Camden Lib Dems, Keith Moffitt, remembers 2006 clearly and fondly. “From quite early in the evening it looked good for us,” he says, “although we never really thought we would take complete control.” He became the leader of the council – a high point in his political career, though he is still involved locally as the agent for the party’s candidates in this year’s election. “I am certainly proud of what we achieved,” he says. “I think we did remarkably well.” So too does the then leader of the Conservatives in Camden, Andrew Marshall. “Those four years when we were in power were a lot of fun,” he tells me in a call from New York, where he works as a communications consultant.

In the days following the count, the two leaders thrashed out a deal they could put before the council’s chief executive, and then full council. It was a decision to work together and run Camden under what they were keen to call a “partnership administration”. They didn’t want to use the word “coalition”, although four years later, thanks to David Cameron and Nick Clegg, such an arrangement was to go national and mainstream under that name.

Councils being run by an executive cabinet – usually of around 10 members – was a relatively new thing, introduced in the Local Government Act 2000 to replace the traditional system of committees. It was largely untested as a model for when no party had overall control of a council. It had been Tory and Lib Dem policy to oppose the cabinet system, but in Camden they decided to make it work for them.

The two leaders negotiated over a policy programme which preserved their most cherished individual asks but found common ground in a wish to freeze Council Tax and get on top of the borough’s council housing repairs. They agreed a cabinet of six Lib Dems and four Tories. Both leaders got it in the neck from some of their own councillors over the deal, but Moffitt suggests it actually worked out better having four experienced Conservatives involved rather than newly elected novice Lib Dems.

Both former leaders feel people exaggerate the perils of so-called No Overall Control councils leading to logjam and uncertainty. Inheriting what they admit was a strongly performing local authority, led by a capable team of officers, made it easier.  There was a triangular relationship to decision-making – two parties instead of one working alongside the chief executive.

They agree that success depended on them getting on well personally, building trust and being prepared to compromise, not sticking rigidly to party philosophy. “Let’s be honest, there aren’t purely Conservative ideas on how to collect your rubbish,” says Marshall. “We were prepared to talk like grown-ups,” says Moffitt. In next door Brent, he says, the situation proved more problematic because the two leaders involved did not get on.

But how realistic are hopes that this rosy picture of civic co-operation could be replicated in current times? For a start, the fragmentation of support for parties has transformed a landscape where a main three vied for a Town Hall presence to one where there are five are in contention. It feels hard to predict what kind of political stasis might result in the weeks after May’s elections if the numbers get messy and you have five sets of players feeling they are in with a shout of a role in a coalition.

Unnamed

Who is and who isn’t prepared to do business with whom? How easy will it be to make coalitions work in cabinet? We must wait to see what happens in councils where Labour loses overall control but remains the largest party. Will it be legitimate for them to continue if their opponents cannot agree to form an alternative administration? Is it safe to assume that the Greens and Lib Dems would not work with Reform? How will Independent groupings act?

London’s councils continue to face big financial problems, spending more than £5 million a day on housing people in temporary accommodation alone. Room for manoeuvre and executing bright new promises of spending and saving is limited. That applies whether voters opt to retain a hitherto entrenched one-party fiefdom or decide to mix it up a little. But some areas of vital future growth will surely be affected by the uncertainty that comes from coalitions, not least the time they may take to settle. Regeneration and the built environment are good examples of areas that are susceptible to uncertainty and volatility.

With three months to go until the elections, public affairs and communication specialists are trying to reassure their clients they know how to navigate the political upheaval coming down the track. In chaos, there is opportunity. But such is the potential for change (and joint administrations) in many boroughs that it is difficult to map likely shifts in policy and tone, let alone identify the characters who will end up on the next planning committee.

How much more complex will the operating environment really become? At a recent housing event, the developers, planners and architects I spoke to were curious about the possible widespread changes in the capital’s town halls. What, in particular, might a Green or a Reform council mean for them? But they argued that political change was always factored in. Electoral cycles, general and local, don’t in any case align with regeneration schemes that can be long, long years in gestation. Heed was already paid to the political calendar when navigating the planning system, they told me. It’s already the case that they approach different boroughs in different ways. This will only change by degree.

After four years of the Lib Dem-Tory partnership running things in Camden, it was time for the voters to give their verdict. Marshall describes the strange sensation of campaigning at the 2010 election, when they resumed their fight against the Lib Dems, as if their partnership had not happened. Creative campaign leaflets stressed the unique part the Tories had played in the preceding four years.

It all came to nought as Labour again won a majority. Moffitt claims that this had little to do with the competence of the partnership administration. It was the local elections being held on the same day as the general election that brought out the Labour vote. “We were unlucky,” he says. “We weren’t rewarded for what we did. As we know, no good deed goes unpunished.”

Tim Donovan is the former political editor of BBC London and now a trustee of Centre for London. Follow him at LinkedIn. Image of Camden Town Hall interior from Camden Council.

OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack or follow any Support link on this site. Thanks.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Camden Council, Conservatives, Green Party, Labour, Liberal Democrats