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Poll finds younger Londoners poorly informed about forthcoming mayoral election

Almost 40 per cent of Londoners under the age of 35 do not yet know that an election for their city’s Mayor is to take place on 2 May, according to new polling by Savanta for think tank Centre for London

A further 29 per cent of those aged 34-54 and 12 per cent of over-55s were similarly unaware of the upcoming vote, believing either that there will not be such an election this year or not knowing if there will.

Twenty-four per cent of the under-informed 18-34 age group said they didn’t know whether or not a mayoral election would be taking place this year and 15 per cent said they thought there won’t be one.

As well as being better-informed about the contest, the seventh since the mayoralty was created, the over-55s were significantly more likely than the under-35s – by a margin of 93 per cent to 75 per cent – to say they could name the current Mayor.

The poll findings have been released as official campaigning for the Mayor and London Assembly elections intensifies, with only five weeks remaining until the in-person ballot takes place and with the full list of candidates due to be published. Londoners can also vote by post.

This year’s London elections will be the first conducted under the national government’s new Voter ID rules, which require people to show an approved form of photographic proof of who they are before being allowed to cast their three votes – two for different sections of the Assembly ballot and one for Mayor – at polling stations.

Responding to the Savanta findings, Centre for London chief executive Antonia Jennings said the new Voter ID rules are “yet another hurdle” in the way of younger people voting. Citing an estimate by official watchdog the Electoral Commission that one third of 18-24 year-olds across the country do not know they must now have ID, she said the new rule “seems ludicrous in the UK when we have so few cases of voter fraud”.

She added: “So often, we see manifestos and policy decisions which favour those turning out to vote. It makes sense, it’s how you get elected. Yet, as younger voters are becoming disenfranchised, feeling underrepresented, overlooked and, quite frankly, ignored by our elected officials, they lose out on the opportunity to shape policy and be heard. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.”

Savanta’s political research director, Chris Hopkins, said: “It is a helpful reminder to those engaged in politics that they are in the minority. Most people do not follow politics day-to-day, and our research shows a significant proportion of younger people in particular are either under or misinformed about this year’s mayoral election.”

Last week, marking the official start of campaigning, Greater London Returning Officer Mary Harpley said, “The work of the Mayor and the London Assembly affects the everyday life of every Londoner” and directed Londoners to the London Elects website to find out how to fill out ballot papers and different ways of voting.

Only residents of London are eligible to vote and they must be 18 years-old, a British, qualifying Commonwealth or European Union citizen, and be registered by 16 April. Those not yet registered can become so using the national government website.

Savanta also found that white Londoners and those of “mixed” ethnic background were more likely to say they could name the current Mayor than Asian or black Londoners. Only one in five of all Londoners could name their London Assembly member.

Support OnLondon.co.uk and its writers for just £5 a month of £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Threads: DaveHillOnLondon. X/Twitter: On London and Dave Hill. Photo: City Hall as viewed from cable car.

Categories: News

Dave Hill: Sadiq Khan must inspire Londoners to cure a national malady

Every indicator says it’s looking grim for Susan Hall, the Conservative candidate for London Mayor who couldn’t say what the price of a bus fare is and still reckoned she’d had her pocket picked on the Tube even after her lost belongings had been returned to her by the fellow Londoner who found them.

So hopeless appears the quest of his Tory challenger to deprive Labour’s Sadiq Khan of a third term on 2 May, even the polling industry seems uninterested. The only survey we’ve had so far this year gave Khan the same 25 point lead found by the same company, YouGov, back in November, perhaps telling us that becoming better known has not helped Hall make headway.

Her most recent column for the Evening Standard drips with off-putting venom, delivered in a faux demotic style that makes you wonder if she and her scriptwriters are more worried about her losing support on her Nigel Farage, ULEZ vandal flank than they are interested in gaining it at Khan’s expense. With celebrity know-nothing Lee Anderson flouncing off to join the dangerous dreamers of Reform UK, many Tory politicians, including the Prime Minister, are thinking in that way.

Paul Scully, the erstwhile minister for London who was so foolishly excluded from the Tory candidate shortlist, has pointed out that Hall’s campaign is being run from Tory national HQ and therefore close to a national government that trails Labour in the capital by an even bigger distance that Hall is trailing Khan.

And yet the race for City Hall is not over, as Khan himself so clearly understands. The sense of apathy about the contest makes the reasons why its outcome should not be taken for granted worth repeating.

In 2021 a string of polls gave the Labour incumbent massive leads over a different, much-mocked Tory opponent, but the final result was a lot closer; the Tory government’s imposition of First Past The Post for mayoral contests helps Tory mayoral candidates (as we’ve already seen in Bedford); in London, the government’s imposition of Voter ID could do the same; the Tories’ London base may be small and still shrinking, but might be solid in its opposition to Khan; Labour’s London base is much larger, but is it as firmly in favour of four more years of Khan as the Tory equivalent is against?

That difference in scale between Labour’s general election poll lead in London and Khan’s over Hall points to an answer to that question. Labour activists point to the same one. “It’s hard work on the doorstep,” a party foot soldier tells me. “There’s no love.” Another, closer to Khan’s campaign, says the same: “It’s difficult. You’re saying to people ‘hello, it’s us again’ and some of them aren’t that thrilled.”

That latest YouGov poll, conducted for the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London, found that, despite Khan’s huge lead, around one fifth of Londoners said they hadn’t yet decided who to vote for, and their net satisfaction rating of Khan – the difference between those who think he has done well and those who don’t – was minus 18. Not great.

Those findings should be assessed in perspective. A recent Ipsos poll put Rishi Sunak at minus 46 by the same measure, and Sir Keir Starmer at minus 18 – the same as Khan, even though the Labour leader hasn’t yet been in power at all, let alone for eight often difficult years. Looked at that way, Khan’s satisfaction rating can be seen as halfway decent or at least no worse than might have been expected. Also, Lord Ashcroft’s very detailed mayoral poll in November found that, on the whole, Londoners thought Khan had done better than average in a range of policy areas.

Even so, put together all the reasons for caution about stated voting intentions and it is plain that Hall has reasonable grounds for thinking she can run Khan reasonably close and may even have a grain of hope of winning.

That is why Khan and his campaign will continue to make overtures to Liberal Democrat and Green supporters to “lend” Khan their single mayoral vote, making up for Londoners’ loss of the second preference option they have traditionally had under the Supplementary Vote system and ensuring that Hall, with her well-documented array of hard Right enthusiasms, does not enter the mayoral office at City Hall through the back door.

Revving up Londoners to cast their votes for him, even if they aren’t usually Labour supporters or if they usually are but aren’t much enthused by the thought of more Sadiq, has to be the incumbent’s top priority. He needs to fire them up and inspire them. And he does have resources for that to hand.

Speaking to Labour members in east London recently, Khan insisted he would run on his track record. That is stronger than some give him credit for and far less weak than his Conservative opponents claim: seen in the round and in the context of Brexit, the pandemic, the climate crisis, the revelations about poor standards in the Met, national government anti-London attitudes since 2019, national post-Covid recorded crime trends and the generally feeble state of the UK economy, we might ask ourselves if a theoretical Mayor Hall – or any other – would have done better.

Of course, much depends on what you’re looking for. But while we – and that includes me – might wish the Labour Mayor had done some things differently, Tory insistence that his tenure has been a huge disaster is unconvincing.

Would Hall, apparently a subscriber to the “few bad apples” school of thought about lowlife cops, have made it her business to see the Met cleaned up? Would she, so devoutly no subscriber to a transport hierarchy that puts sustainable modes first, have made more successful use of the mayoralty’s limited powers to make London a more pleasant and productive place?

Khan can also, as he already has, talk up the prospect of a Labour national government at last replacing the ragged Tory one that seems willing to sink to any level to cling on to control of an equally ragged United Kingdom. He is helped in that regard by Hall’s conspicuous failure to speak out against Anderson’s inflammatory “Islamists” smearing of him, demonstrating by her silence how adjacent she is to her national party’s line on everything.

In that, she makes herself an electoral asset for Khan – a London inversion of Tory national attempts to chalk up points in the “red wall” by attacking the Labour Mayor, of which Anderson’s outburst was such a foul example.

Khan should exploit that advantage to the full, and not only for London’s sake. Should Hall be vanquished by only low single figures, it will be seized on by the advancing radical Right of her party as vindicating proof that even in “woke” Remainer London, with its many immigrants and “metropolitan elite”, a so-called “common sense” Tory can give Labour a fright.

Our weary, afflicted, malfunctioning nation does not need such politicians to be emboldened. They are bad for its health. And Hall is such a politician. Sadiq Khan is a Briton, London-born, who has already made history by becoming the first Muslim Mayor of the capital city. He hopes to make some more by becoming the first person to win three elections for London Mayor. I hope he does it. His country needs him.

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Categories: Comment

How to support OnLondon.co.uk

I brought this website into existence in a simpler form on 1 February 2017 with the goal of continuing and expanding on the writing about London I had been doing elsewhere since the 2008 election for Mayor.

Since then, boosted by an epic five-week crowdfunding campaign I launched on its first birthday, On London has kept going and growing, adding to the sum of high-quality journalism about the UK capital and carving out a small but unique and influential space for serious news, analysis and commentary about a city that is, all at the same time, truly fantastic, deeply troubled, frequently misrepresented and often misunderstood.

On London strives to reflect all of that and also to illuminate the key themes and issues, providing an antidote to the harmful populism that is infecting too much of British life, including its media. It is a very big job for a very small organisation. I run all aspects of On London from one room in my home in Hackney and rely heavily on a marvellous group of fellow writers to provide their own insights and expertise.

I don’t want any other day job. But doing it takes up a great deal of time and also requires money, not least in order to pay those contributors to the site who rely on writing to make a living, and also to enable me to pay my share of the household bills as well as those of the company.

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There are, of course, many other media organisations and individual journalists seeking your financial support. All I can say is that there really is no other website like On London, and everyone who writes for it cares deeply for the city it documents.

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Categories: Culture

London: The Levelling Down Monitor

In his Introduction to the Conservative Party’s 2019 general election manifesto Boris Johnson said his government had already mapped out a programme to “level up, spreading opportunity across the whole United Kingdom”. The document said this meant “not just investing in our great towns and cities, as well as our rural and coastal areas, but giving them far more control of how that investment is made”. It continued: “In the 21st century, we need to get away from the idea that ‘Whitehall knows best’ and that all growth must inevitably start in London.”

Many would agree with those manifesto objectives, including plenty in London who recognise that it is unhealthy for the UK economy to be so heavily dependent on that of its capital city – London generates nearly a quarter of the nation’s economic output and around one third of its taxes – while other big cities lag far behind, and who would like to see far greater devolution to regional and local government across the nation.

And yet much of what the Johnson government has done in the name of “levelling up” seems to have nakedly electoral goals, concerned less with enabling cities and regions outside of London to enjoy greater autonomy and control over their own affairs than with making a public performance of depriving London of resources and pulling rank over the London Mayor to impose its own priorities on the capital, most notably in the key areas of transport and strategic planning.

This is damaging not only to London but also, precisely because the rest of the UK is so reliant on its capital city, to everywhere else – you will not “level up” the country by levelling London down. At the same time, serious progress towards the goal of closing the economic productivity gap between London and most of the rest of the country – one pursued with little success by successive national governments since the war – has yet to be made.

Just as the populist untruth that London and Londoners, many of whom struggle daily with poverty, prosper at the expense of fellow Britons goes largely unchallenged, the government’s policy discrimination against London and its top-down interventions in City Hall affairs go largely unreported.

On London is an exception to that failing and this page is dedicated to gathering all examples of anti-London policy into one place. As well as being compiled here in the Levelling Down Monitor, new examples will be reported separately on the website. Input to the project comes from a wide range of London-focused individuals and organisations, to whom gratitude is extended. The most recent examples of levelling down London appear at the top of the list.

Last updated, 5 January 2024.

*****

December 2023 – The government gives TfL about half of the funding for capital spending it had been asking for for months. A letter from transport secretary Mark Harper to Sadiq Khan includes a lecture about his responsibilities.

December 2023 – Michael Gove again attacks Sadiq Khan’s housing record and announces “a review” of the Mayor’s London Plan. This is to be conducted by a panel of four experts. One of them is a non-London Tory councillor and another is a Gove appointee to his design panel. Their work is to be produced by mid-January – hand for the mayoral election campaign.

August 2023 – Institute for Fiscal Studies report on public spending allocations reveals that parts of London have done all right in recent years, but areas outside it – and in Tory-voting non-urban areas in general – have done better. On London coverage by Richard Brown.

July 2023 – Michael Gove comes to King’s Cross to make a big speech about housing in which he describes London as “a national asset beyond price”. This sudden recognition was in some ways welcome. However, it was largely motivated by a desire to attack London’s Labour Mayor, threaten to (yet again) override his devolved powers, and to send a message to the capital’s Tory voters that he won’t let their suburban quiet be disturbed by building work. And his big “Docklands 2.0” idea was very old news.

December 2022 – The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill goes out for public consultation. Much of it is concerned with reforming the planning system and it includes the proposition that “this document will empower local leaders and give them more tools to level up their communities, build the beautiful homes that will give young people a secure path to home ownership, and boost pride in place”. It reiterates that “levelling up is the central objective of this government”.

December 2022 – Labour publishes proposals for renewing Britain’s democracy, which include a number of ideas for devolving powers to regions and local authorities. It mentions London nearly 100 times but largely recycles arguments that the capital has for too long received unfair favourable treatment.

November 2022 – The government’s anticipated Arts Council England funding cuts are announced. More than 60 small organisations in London were given grants for the  first time, but some larger ones must deal with cuts and English National Opera was among the institutions deprived of grants entirely although, like some others, it was offered money to move out of the capital.

November 2022 – New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s first budget, intended to limit the damage caused by the brief premiership of Truss, protects previous “levelling up” spending, though by not increasing it in line with inflation effectively cuts it.

October 2022 – Liz Truss resigns as Prime Minister after just 44 days in office and is succeeded by Rishi Sunak, who reappoints Michael Gove as Secretary of State for Levelling up.

September 2022 – Government figures show that by the end of March 2022 only £3 million of the £65 million awarded to London projects in the first round of Levelling Up Fund allocations the previous October had actually been distributed.

August 2022 – Tory leadership contest favourite Liz Truss tells a party membership hustings in Wembley that “We are not going to succeed as a nation without a successful London…and in order to level up the United Kingdom we need a successful London”.

August 2022 – It emerges that while campaigning to be Boris Johnson’s successor as Prime Minister, former Chancellor Rishi Sunak told Conservative Party members in Tunbridge Wells that he had “managed to start changing the funding formulas” in government so that “areas like this” rather than “deprived urban areas” are “getting the funding they deserve”. The ensuing furore proceeds on the basis that “deprived urban areas” is shorthand for the north of England.

August 2022 – Campaigning to be Boris Johnson’s successor as Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss hurriedly backtracks on a pledge to link public sector pay to local living costs, in order to save money, a move which would result in civil servants (and possibly others) outside of London earning less money than before – the very opposite of “levelling up”.

July 2022 – Transport secretary Grant Shapps provides Transport for London with what he calls “our final offer” on funding, saying it “supports £3.6 billion worth of [capital] projects” yet is “fair” to UK taxpayers. He later described TfL as repeatedly “coming out with the begging bowl“. Prior to the pandemic London’s economy, which depends heavily on its public transport networks, was providing up to £40 billion a year in taxes spent elsewhere in the country.

July 2022 – The prospectus for the second round of Levelling Up fund bids is published. Transport for London and the GLA together seek £29.5 million from the £2.1 billion to pay for improvements to Colindale and Leyton stations.

July 2022 – Boris Johnson resigns as Prime Minister following a series of scandals.

June 2022 – Government “levelling up” adviser Andy Haldane confirms during an event for Centre For London that government “re-tilting” against London is underway, though he also argues that “levelling up” is not an “anti-London agenda”.

June 2022 – Arts Council chief Paul Bristow tells London Assembly members that the capital’s culture sector will face government-decreed grant cuts in the autumn.

June 2022 – Senior London Tory MP Bob Neill says in the House of Commons that “levelling up” policies in other parts of the country should not be pursued “at the expense of London” and that doing so would “damage everybody in the long run”.

May 2022 – Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly tells outgoing chief inspector of constabulary Tom Winsor that the review of the Met he is leading should consider cutting the powers of the London Mayor over the service.

May 2022 – An outstandingly ignorant Spectator comment piece proclaims that London doesn’t need a Mayor.

May 2022 – The Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill is introduced into Parliament, with the government claiming it will “put the foundations in place” for “ensuring all part of the country share equally in our nation’s success”. Exploring the detail, Centre for London director Nick Bowes raises concerns that provisions of the future law could “chip away at the Mayor’s powers on the London Plan and give the government “more sway”, eroding the powers of London government still further.

May 2022 – In a report about Covid’s impacts on the capital and government measures to address them, the Legatum Institute think tank says London continues to have the highest poverty rate in the country with one million Londoners coping with what it calls “deep poverty”, defined as more than 50% below the poverty line.

March 2022 – Home Secretary Priti Patel reportedly orders formal “probe” into Sadiq Khan’s handling of the departure of Cressida dick as Met commissioner.

March 2022 – An opinion poll finds that most Londoners are unmoved by the “levelling up” agenda.

March 2022 – The Arts Council, obeying instructions from culture secretary Nadine Dorries, confirms that £75 million will be cut from the capital’s arts funding over the next three years.

February 2022 – Michael Gove’s compendious levelling up white paper is finally published. Writing for On London, Richard Brown describes it as a mixture of the laudable, the aspirational and the spiteful and notes that the government’s intention to divert funding for housing away from London is not very helpful.

January 2022 –  The Times reports that a survey conducted for think tank More In Common has found that “a majority of voters think London and the south have to become less wealthy and prosperous in order to achieve Boris Johnson’s flagship goal of levelling up Britain”.

January 2022 – Grant Shapps announces a further extension of the “funding settlement” for TfL imposed in June 2021  to 4 February 2022 (it had previously been extended to 17 December) while he thinks about proposals from Sadiq Khan for raising additional incomes of between £500 million and £1 billion. In a statement Shapps says: “The government is committed to supporting London and the transport network on which it depends, whilst balancing that with supporting the national transport network as a whole.” Don’t worry voters elsewhere, London won’t be given more than you think it deserves.

December 2021 – Responding to Sunday Times coverage of a letter to Rishi Sunak from London business leaders imploring him to fund Transport for London properly, a spokesperson for the Treasury says “any support” for TfL, whose latest short-term funding support arrangement was to expire on 11 December, would be provided “in a way that is fair to taxpayers across the country”. Government figures show that up to £40 billion of taxes raised in London are spent in other parts of the country every year.

November 2021 – Secretary of State for Levelling Up Michael Gove tells MPs that he intends to discuss with Homes England “how we can invest in proper urban regeneration projects outside London and the south east” and that it is “very much something that is in my mind” to redistribute funding to help local authorities in the North of England.

November 2021 – London receives only £1.9 million of the £203.3 million awarded by the government from its UK Community Renewal Fund, representing a 30 per cent success rate for London-based schemes bidding for the money compared with 36.8 per cent rate for England as a whole and a 42 per cent rate for bids from Wales.

October 2021 – In his budget speech on 27 of the month, Chancellor Sunak announces funding for a string of towns, cities and regions but mentions London only twice (three times if you count a passing reference to the British Museum). One mention praises the city for being named the “best place in the world for green finance” but the other is to “London-style transport settlements” for other city regions, the effect being to reinforce the populist untruth that London has been spoiled at the expense of the rest of the country. The budget and spending review “red book” detail contains further use of the “London-style” formula along with a repeated emphasis on what proportion of national spending on particular things was being deployed “outside London”, adding to the impression of the UK’s capital quite properly being cut down to size. There is a surreal sense of a separate quasi state of Outside London effectively being formed. London also receives the smallest amount of money from the first round of allocations from the Levelling Up Fund in the whole Britain – £65 million for six projects out of £1.7 billion, equating to four per cent. The only bit of real cheer for London’s economy is a business rates discount for the struggling hospitality sector.

October 2021 – In advance of the budget and spending review, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces £6.9 billion of transport funding for English cities. He laters admits that only a fraction of it hadn’t been announced before, but even so London is pointedly excluded.

October 2021 – At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Boris Johnson’s speech contains crowd-pleasing jibes about “north London dinner parties” and “lefty Islington lawyers” amid signals that his priority is maintaining his new-found support in the North of England. London Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive Richard Burge complained that Johnson’s presents London “almost as a villain” in his “levelling up” narrative. Prior to the conference, the former Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry had written an article denouncing “southern privilege”. London Tory MPS at the conference were unhappy with Berry’s remarks, and AM Andrew Boff told a fringe event that problems his party is having with road schemes in the capital stem from Johnson’s transport adviser Andrew Gilligan.

July 2021 – PM’s transport adviser Andrew Gilligan blocks funding to London councils which, in his view have “prematurely” ended active travel schemes he wants kept going, having pressured the Mayor’s cycling and walking commissioner and Transport for London to take a more aggressive approach to “backsliding councils“.

July 2021 – Bids by seven groups of London colleges and businesses for government “skills accelerator” schemes are all unsuccessful. Eighteen bids from other parts of England receive all the money. London weighting for Higher Education is officially removed.

June 2021 – TfL emergency funding extended until 11 December with Grant Shapps stating that the arrangement is “fair to the national taxpayer” and that “the government will continue to review passenger demand” in the capital. The package requires more savings and sources of income, a review of TfL’s pension scheme and a programme for additional Tube automation. Shapps claims the deal combines helping the capital with “continuing to spend money on vital infrastructure projects to level up the national transport network outside of London”. A campaign led by London TravelWatch is later launched to prevent further bus service cuts.

March 2021 – Government publishes prospectus for its £4.8 billion Levelling Up Fund, announced in the November 2020 spending review. Analysis by Financial Times reveals clear bias towards Tory areas, some of them affluent, with only two London local authorities, Newham and Barking & Dagenham, eligible for a scheme that “could have been designed to exclude the capital,” as Richard Brown put it.

January 2021 – Education secretary Gavin Williamson decides to remove the “London weighting” element from the government’s Higher Education teaching grant, designed to recognise higher costs in the capital, saying “the levelling-up agenda is key to this government, and we think it is inconsistent with this to invest additional money in London providers.” A plea by Sadiq Khan to reconsider had no effect.

January 2021 – Government launches £3.6 billion Towns Fund, describing it as “part of the government’s plans to level up our regions. Robert Jenrick says it is designed to help “rebalance the national economy and level up our regions through the Northern Powerhouse, Midlands Engine and Oxford-Cambridge Arc. London town centres are excluded.

January 2021 – TfL submits its suggestions for becoming financially sustainable by 2023, as ordered to by Shapps. These include introducing a Greater London Boundary charge to be paid by non-London motorists entering the capital and retaining the share of Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) currently paid by Londoners but almost entirely spent elsewhere in the country. By the end of the month, Shapps appeared to publicly dismissed the idea for devolving VED and in February he publicly rubbished the boundary charge suggestion, which he would be able to block.

November 2020 – National Infrastructure Strategy is published, saying (page 15) “the government is investing in national transport and pivoting investment away from London, ensuring every region has great connectivity”.

October/November 2020 – A second short-term funding deal for TfL is provided, this time for £1 billion (including £95 million of further borrowing). Shapps instructs the Mayor to impose above inflation fare increases from January and to maintain the new, increased congestion charge levels and operating hours, along with the changes to concessionary fares for over-60s and under 18s, adding that if the Mayor and TfL wish to re-introduce the latter “they will meet these costs themselves”. He also orders TfL to “co-operate” with a “government-led review of driverless trains” and says a new “government-led working-level oversight group will be created”. TfL is further told to “produce a single, comprehensive management plan” for achieving “financial sustainability by 2023”) by January 2021.

September 2020 – City Hall releases documents showing that various attempts to secure government funding to repair Hammersmith Bridge had been rebuffed. Grant Shapps had previously claimed that “a failure of leadership” in London was to blame for the bridge’s poor condition.

September 2020 – Government officials argue that VAT refunds on purchases made in the UK by overseas visitors should be scrapped, because the scheme “does not benefit the whole of the UK equally” and is “largely centred on London“.

May 2020 – After Covid safety measures shatter TfL’s finances due to collapse of income from fares, government emergency funding of £1.6 billion is provided (including £505 million of additional borrowing), with a string of conditions attached, including the “temporary” suspension of free peak time travel for over-60s and all free travel for under-18s, instructions to increase the level and operating hours of the congestion charge and the implementation of “active travel” schemes and “detailed monitoring” of “operational performance” under government supervision. Two, “special representatives” of government are to attend all TfL board meetings with powers to “request additional information” and report to transport Secretary Grant Shapps. One  of them is the Prime Minister’s special adviser on transport, his erstwhile media support Andrew Gilligan.

March 2020 – Communities secretary Robert Jenrick writes to London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising his “intend to publish” draft London Plan, the master blueprint for the capital’s spatial development, and directing him to make changes to key policies.

December 2019Conservative Party general election manifesto commits to “devolving power to people and places across the UK” with “full devolution across England…so that every part of our country has the power to shape its own destiny”. It adds: “We must get away from the idea that “all growth must inevitably start in London.” (The Labour manifesto also mentions “levelling up” and says a “national transformation fund unit” will be located in the north of England).

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Categories: Analysis

Business group manifesto calls for Green Belt reform and careers service from next London Mayor

One of the capital’s leading business groups has urged the next Mayor of London to review Green Belt land for possible development, launch a new service to help Londoners into jobs and collaborate on an economic growth strategy, along with striking a better Transport for London funding deal and arguing for greater devolution.

In a 16-page manifesto, BusinessLDN, formerly London First, which represents many of the city’s largest businesses and educational institutions, says the coming mayoral and general elections “represent a moment for reset, creating the opportunity to build a new partnership between all levels of government and business to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities facing our city”.

Subtitled “building a capital fit for the future”, the document says London has “bounced back following the pandemic” but that it also endures the highest housing costs in the country and one of the highest poverty rates, as well as having to cope with the cost of living crisis, industrial action and the effects of “geopolitical tensions”, all of which hinder “getting London’s businesses firing on all cylinders” to help Britain break out of “a cycle of decline”.

The manifesto describes devolution as the starting point for change, enabling London government to “tailor spending priorities to meet local needs” and “boost growth” and points out that despite providing the Treasury with a “tax surplus” – the difference between the amount of tax raised in London and the amount spent there – of £38 billion in the financial year 2021/22, the city is “continuously dependent on grants from the Treasury, often dispensed through opaque process with short-time horizons”.

It urges the next Mayor to “develop a new economic strategy that builds on the capital’s economic strengths” working closely with the private sector and government to bring in investment, and recommends a more streamlined London Plan – the Mayor’s master bluerpitn for the city’s spatial development – to “make it more concise, strategic and flexible in nature” along with championing public-private partnerships to deliver public realm improvements to places such as Charing Cross Road and Marble Arch.

On Green Belt, the manifesto asks for “poor quality parts close to existing or future transport nodes that are appropriate for sustainable residential development” to be identified, saying that brownfield development alone cannot meet the scale of London’s housing need. It adds that the Mayor should establish a “City Hall Developer” focussed on “unlocking more public land for development”.

Transport and other infrastructure are also addressed, as are the linked themes of immigration and skills. “One of the biggest barriers to getting more people into the jobs businesses are creating is London’s fragmented and underfunded careers system,” the manifesto says, advocating the launch of a cohesive London Careers Service and the Mayor collaborating to implement the London Local Skills Improvement Plan put together by BusinessLDN and other business bodies.

There are also proposals for addressing climate change and those types of crime which have increased in the capital of late. Read the manifesto in full HERE.

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Categories: News

Zoë Garbett launches Green campaign for Mayor pledging ‘more affordable’ London

London’s Green Party mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett has officially launched her campaign with a pledge to make the city “more affordable” for all – coupled with flagship policies on transport, school meals and housing.

Flanked by her party’s London Assembly candidates at a canalside community centre in Bethnal Green, Garbett said the city had become “far too expensive” for too many people after a “decade or more” of Tory austerity.

Some 2.2 million Londoners now were living in poverty, she said, let down as well by the Labour Mayor “failing to get to grips” with the city’s crisis of affordability. “Our city desperately needs a new direction. We have to do better – and we can.”

In City Hall she would immediately extend free bus travel to all under 22 year-olds and asylum-seekers, and reinstate free travel across the network before 9am for all Londoners aged 60 or over, she pledged. “A Green Mayor will make transport affordable for all. Freezing fares isn’t enough.”

She would also extend Sadiq Khan’s primary school free meals pledge to include all secondary schools, a big ticket item estimated to cost some £180 million in its first year of operation.

A rent commission would be established to work up plans to freeze and “ultimately” bring private rents down, and London’s councils would be further funded to buy up existing housing to provide more social homes, a programme which had first been promoted by Green Assembly members, she added.

Speaking to reporters at the launch, Garbett said her school meals plan could be funded through City Hall’s Business Rates income, which was growing at some five per cent a year, while the cost of extending free travel for older people, estimated at £40 million, could be found within existing transport budgets.

Axing Khan’s “off-peak Friday” fare reduction currently being trialled would be one option, she said, since it was not helping “those who needed cheaper travel the most”. All her manifesto commitments, she added, would be fully costed.

On possible “pay per mile” road user charging schemes, she argued that the congestion charge was now outdated, and that the flat rate ULEZ charge has “unfairness” built in. Any new scheme would be “co-designed” with residents, and it would be “up to Londoners” to decide whether changes should be made or not.

More house-building as well as council acquisition of existing homes was part of the answer to London’s housing crisis, but not on the Green Belt, she told On London. A Green Mayor would also require more affordable housing on private developments, as well as pressing the government for more funding.

And spending commitments based on increased Business Rates income did not mean support for economic growth at any cost, she confirmed. “I’m all about fair growth, focused on what people need and want,” she said.

Garbett also suggested that candidates for the mayoralty should be attending hustings – yesterday she was the sole candidate at an Age UK London event, and was joined only by Liberal Democrat candidate Rob Blackie at an event hosted by the countryside charity CPRE’s London branch, with other contenders sending representatives instead. “It’s a really important part of the campaign. People want to see the candidates,” she said.

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Categories: News

Dave Hill: Susan Hall says she’s listening to Londoners. But which ones?

First, let’s cut through the comedy, the confusion and the Donald Trump variety of truth. Conservative candidate Susan Hall launched her campaign to become Mayor of London in Uxbridge on Sunday, posing for photos in what looked like a car park. I know of no London politics journalist being invited. The Evening Standard mustered coverage based on a press release.

Labour’s Sadiq Khan, the Liberal Democrats’ Rob Blackie and the Greens’ Zoë Garbett have encouraged maximum media interest in their campaigns getting underway. Such occasions guarantee publicity for eager candidates. But Hall, representing the party of national government and seeking to lead the government of the UK capital, deliberately kept the media away. It is unorthodox. It’s also telling.

On Monday, a surreally dishonest campaign video appeared, in which it was claimed as a “fact” that London is a “crime capital of the world”. Security guards Transport for London has had to hire to protect vans monitoring streets for high-polluting vehicles were described as “terrorising communities at the beck and call of their Labour Mayor master”. A scene of subterranean panic turned out to be footage not of a London Underground station, but a New York subway. Khan was characterised as having “seized power” when, of course, the reason he is Mayor of London is that he’s won elections.

The kindest thing that can be said about this pathetic effort – which has since had the most clueless bits removed – is that it aspired to parody. A truer description would be ineptly disguised misinformation. The Hall campaign has said it wasn’t its work but that of Conservative Party national HQ. Yet that is where the Hall campaign is based and its message about London was no different from what Hall has been spreading – that, because of Khan, the capital is in the helpless grip of crime. It makes both her and her party look devious and absurd. What do they think they’re doing?

One conclusion is extremely tempting: the Uxbridge car park gathering shows that Hall wants to keep media scrutiny at bay. Given her succession of uncomfortable appearances on the radio show of Nick Ferrari, a host with whom she shares much common ground politically, it isn’t hard to imagine her handlers wanting to keep her well away from all but the very tamest journalists and any questions Hall might mess up answering.

It is also tempting to suspect that there are crossed wires in the Tory propaganda machine. Another weekend development was Hall’s online output being rebranded. Previous True Blue livery was expunged and the candidate’s association with the Conservative Party was mentioned only in the small print. Perhaps with the tradition of London Mayors being known by their forenames in mind, she is now being promoted through those channels as just “Susan”.

On the face of it, this is an attempt to distance Hall from her party. If so, it might be a wise move, given that the Conservatives are deeply unpopular in London. Yet it has now been undermined by the Tories’ latest attempt from national level to portray London as an undeserving fallen hellhole. Is it helpful to Hall if she is seen as being complicit in the denigration of the city she claims to love and aspires to lead? Certainly, Khan has been quick to take advantage.

Perhaps I’m over-thinking. Perhaps what will matter most between now and 2 May is Hall’s latest campaign slogan – that she is “listening” to Londoners, portraying herself as being alive to their concerns and Khan as arrogantly indifferent to them. But which Londoners is she listening to?

For 15 years Conservatism has been withering in the capital, losing ground at election after election and only breaking even in 2019 as Tories romped to general election victory across the rest of England. Throughout, a few London Tory voices have argued that their party cannot recover unless it gets better attuned to the priorities and values of most Londoners. Yet Hall herself and her campaign appear deaf to the London mainstream. Instead, they are closely resembling a branch of the Tory pre-general election national operation in a part of the nation that rejects it.

This is typified by Hall’s denouncing the so-called “war on motorists” that Rishi Sunak invented last autumn. Figures Hall herself has brandished show that as far back as 2022 only quite a small minority of car-owning London households would be adversely affected. Over 40 per cent of London households don’t have a car at all. Yet a significant feature of anti-ULEZ protests has been the adoption of the issue by the populist right, notably Reform UK mayoral candidate Howard Cox. He, in line with Reform national strategy, is scornfully attacking Hall. The Londoners Hall is listening to most are Cox’s fellow dwellers on the Farage fringe.

The same selective hearing applies with crime. Reform and its media allies have, for years, been depicting the capital as Khan’s uniquely “lawless London”, never mind that the reality is different. Hall’s London Assembly colleagues are now chanting the same slogan on her behalf. Hall’s ears are most attuned to voices echoing such claims. They belong to voters she’s afraid of losing and with them any chance of profiting from disillusion with Khan. Liberal Democrat candidate Rob Blackie, who will hope to gain from it, has detected that anxiety. And for all the now familiar caveats, the Labour Mayor looks well set for winning a third term. The way Hall has started her campaign suggests his prospects are becoming better still.

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Categories: Comment

London Mayor 2024: Zoë Garbett pledges to bring back free morning peak travel for over-60s

An “Elders’ Champion” holding City Hall to account on policies for older Londoners, a commission to control rents and a “Loo Tsar” to boost public toilet provision across the capital were among Green Party mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett’s pledges at the first hustings of the 2024 campaign for London Mayor, organised by Age UK London.

Garbett, a Hackney councillor who is also standing for the London Assembly, took centre stage as the only mayoral candidate attending. Labour’s Sadiq Khan was represented by his statutory deputy Joanne McCartney, Conservative Susan Hall by Assembly candidate Nick McLean, a Merton councillor, and Liberal Democrat hopeful Rob Blackie by Assembly member Hina Bokhari.

The Green candidate and her rivals’ stand-ins faced an audience of some 200 older Londoners and questions focused on Age UK’s manifesto for the mayoral election, which ranged from transport to housing, from digital exclusion to toilet provision, and from the cost of living to the increasing nuisance caused by e-bikes and scooters.

A first dividing line emerged as a key Age UK demand, the restoration of free early morning travel on the Transport for London network for over-60s, was backed by Garbett along with the Lib Dem and Tory speakers, though not by McCartney.

The concession was restricted during the pandemic in line with government funding conditions so that it ceased to apply before 9am, a change made made permanent last year.

“The system is too expensive across the board,” said Garbett. “It’s about priorities, and this is the right priority.” The reinstatement could be paid for by “cutting waste” at City Hall, McLean added.

“We would like to reinstate free morning travel, but we are not in a position to do that,” said McCartney. TfL had been left heavily reliant on fare income by the government and Khan had already found the money needed to retain the over-60 concession as a whole, she said, after the government had refused to fund it and suggested it should be withdrawn completely – a proposal which, she said, had not been opposed by the Conservative candidate.

McCartney pointed positively to Khan’s action plan for an “age-friendly” London, published last November, and his targeted support, including benefit take-up campaigns generating £4.8 million in previously unclaimed support, cost-of-living advice services, the Get Online London digital skills programme and more money “year on year” for toilets on the TfL network.

But both Garbett and Bokhari said TfL was still not moving fast enough on extra toilet provision. Bokhari said Khan and central government should be providing more funding, and Garbett said she would invest more. “It is a basic public need and it is a travesty we are still having to talk about it,” she said.

There was greater agreement about the need to regulate e-bikes and scooters more rigorously, and less for McLean’s suggestion that Khan was “waging war” on motorists. Even so, his confirmation of Hall’s commitment to scrapping Khan’s expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone beyond the North and South Circulars to cover all of Greater London “on day one” won some applause from the audience.

On housing, Garbett focused on renters and McCartney pointed to Khan’s pledge to complete the building of 40,000 new council homes by 2030. McLean highlighted Hall’s pledge to review the London Plan, the Mayor’s development blueprint for the city, to get more housebuilding underway. That could include changes to Khan’s requirement for 35 per cent of homes in major schemes to be affordable, he said: “Ten per cent of something is better than 100 per cent of nothing.”

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Categories: News

Charles Wright: The Mayor’s London Plan is an election issue. Who will grasp the Green Belt nettle?

Could the row between the government and Sadiq Khan over the detail of the Labour Mayor’s London Plan, the development blueprint for the capital, be a game-changer for the forthcoming City Hall election? Michael Gove certainly seemed to think it was worth timing his latest intervention on the Plan to coincide with the launch of Khan’s re-election campaign.

While Khan was pledging to deliver 40,000 more council homes, the Conservative minister was ordering him to review parts of the Plan, which he claimed were contributing to “chronic under-delivery” of new housing. Policies for protecting industrial land and regenerating “Opportunity Areas” were thwarting development, he said.

Gove’s review call came soon after his previous assault on the London Plan, a probe by a team of experts he had appointed into getting more homes on previously-developed “brownfield” land. It seems that initiative failed to hit its target in the way the minister wanted, making generalised recommendations only. But with a six-month deadline and a wider City Hall review of the Plan underway in any event, this latest move isn’t going to shift the dial on housing delivery any time soon either.

Its timing therefore gives weight to Khan’s verdict that it is more of an election stunt than a serious attempt to unpick a Plan that hasn’t stopped him meeting Whitehall requirements for 116,000 affordable homes to be started between 2016 and 2023 – including, he argues, the largest number of council homes since the 1970s – while government performance outside London has fallen short. There’s some irony too in Gove singling out the London Plan for criticism as his wider planning policy changes see councils across the country cutting back on development.

But the Plan, and how mayoral candidates might change it, deserves attention. It is perhaps the main weapon in a Mayor’s arsenal when it comes to influencing what actually gets built in the capital, and where. The boroughs’ own development plans must be in conformity with it, and its policies must be taken into account when decisions are taken by boroughs on individual planning applications.

Khan’s 2021 Plan, like those of his predecessors, sought to respond to the continued increase in London’s population and encourage growth and  – not growth at any costs, but “good growth”, defined as socially and economically inclusive and environmentally sustainable, and “rebalancing” development towards “more genuinely affordable homes for working Londoners to buy and rent”.

It’s been groundbreaking, he told the London Assembly earlier this month; embedding environmental policies, “raising the bar” on housing design quality, doubling affordable housing quotas on major schemes to 41 per cent compared with 22 per cent when he came to power in 2016, preserving the Green Belt and protecting vital industrial land.

London is still failing to deliver enough homes though, as Khan acknowledged. “While many of the reasons for this are beyond the Mayor’s control, it will be important for any London Plan review to look again at how housing delivery and particularly affordable housing provision can be increased,” he said.

So what needs to change? Gove’s expert panel reported “persuasive evidence” that the current Plan’s plethora of requirements, on design, on safeguarding industrial land and not least on requiring 35 per cent of new homes to be affordable, was frustrating brownfield development. Those “good growth” policies, it said, were effectively costing would-be developers too much in current economic circumstances.

On cue, Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall is pledging to “reopen” the London Plan, to remove “unnecessary red tape” and get more high density but low-rise family homes built on brownfield sites, “homes that people want to live in, which do not disrupt existing communities or the Green Belt”. And Liberal Democrat contender Rob Blackie promises to be a “YIMBY champion”.

The London Plan is due a refresh whoever wins, and more details will no doubt come as manifestos are unveiled. But big questions remain for the candidates. On brownfield, for example, expert analysis is now pretty much unanimous, that there’s simply not enough of it.

And the “opportunity areas” Gove is targeting include precisely those brownfield sites which present the biggest challenges. Developing them is complex and costly, with affordable housing quotas at risk if the financial numbers are to add up. Will those “good growth” standards be sacrificed and affordable quotas cut back? How else will the candidates square that circle?

The capital’s growing population needs its industrial sites too, being important for the city’s economy. After two decades of depletion, London “cannot afford to lose any more”, a high level commission convened by the Centre for London think tank concluded recently. Will the candidates nevertheless advocate moving that economic activity – and the jobs it provides – out of the city?

Above all, perhaps, can we expect some acknowledgement of what Matthew Spry, London director of planning and development consultancy Lichfields, concluded last month was the “inescapable conclusion” from these debates, that “in the real world our housing needs can only be met through a mix of brownfield and greenfield land”? Will any mayoral candidate grasp that Green Belt nettle?

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Categories: Analysis

Khan launches attack ad as Hall rebrand pretends she’s not a Tory

The frontrunners in the race for City Hall have taken different approaches to seeking Londoners’ votes early this week, with Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan releasing a poster claiming Conservative candidate Susan Hall would cancel some of his flagship policies, and Hall conducting a low-profile weekend “launch” and a rebrand of campaign materials which barely mention that she’s a Tory.

A Labour “AdVan” will tour London from today alleging that Hall would end Khan’s freeze of Transport for London (TfL) public transport fares, his funding for free school meals for primary school children, his clean air policies and the programme he supports for reforming the Metropolitan Police.

Labour is also highlighting Hall’s past social media activity, which includes expressing enthusiasm for Donald Trump, to say she is “out of touch with Londoners”.

Prior to her selection as Conservative candidate Hall said she would retain Khan’s free school meals funding “for as long as the cost of living situation requires it”, though her campaign plan does not mention the issue.

Her plan does, however, pledge “zero tolerance for toxic or corrupt officers and those who protect them” and commits to increasing greater use of electric vehicles.

Advan graphic

A gathering described on X/Twitter by Conservative London Assembly candidate Julie Redmond as a “campaign launch for Susan Hall” took place yesterday at an outdoor location in Uxbridge, where the Tories hung on to the local parliamentary seat at a by-election last July despite a large swing to Labour.

Claire Coutinho, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero and MP for East Surrey was present and some of Hall’s fellow Tory London Assembly candidates were also pictured.

On London was not invited to the launch and understands that larger media organisations weren’t either. The Evening Standard reported that Hall’s message to Londoners was to “vote for change” and quoted her claiming that crime has “spiralled out of control”, criticising Khan’s record on “affordable family homes” and repeating her opposition to his second expansion of London’s Ultra-Low Emissions Zone.

However, the paper’s reporter was not present at the Uxbridge gathering, which appears from Redmond’s social media feed have taken place on a road or in a car park (see top photograph). The approach contrasts strongly with Khan’s high-profile central London launch a week ago alongside Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer.

On London, which understands that a press release about the launch was sent to selected media organisations only, has asked the Hall campaign to confirm that the gathering was the formal beginning of Hall’s campaign and if any journalists were present or invited.

Yesterday, the Hall campaign website, Facebook page and X/Twitter feed changed their appearance to promote Hall as “A Mayor who listens” and urging Londoners to “Vote Susan”. The online materials barely mention the fact that she is the Conservative candidate, or her surname.

Screenshot 2024 03 25 at 09.49.50

It has also emerged that Hall will not take part in today’s hustings organised by the charity Age UK London, which campaigns for older Londoners, despite pledging last week to end the restriction on people over the age of 60 who hold concessionary travelcards using public transport free before 9am.

Khan, who leads Hall by 24 percentage points according to the most recent opinion poll, and Liberal Democrat candidate Rob Blackie will not be present either. On London understands that Hall told the organisers last week that she would not be attending, following Khan declining his invitation four weeks ago and Blackie, having previously confirmed he would be there, then withdrawing. Khan, Blackie and Hall will be represented by other people. Green Party candidate Zoë Garbett will be there, however.

The restriction on older Londoner’s free travel concession dates from May 2020 as part of a deal Transport for London struck with the Conservative government to provide emergency financial support during the pandemic.

It was made permanent in January 2023 after the then transport minister, Grant Shapps, told TfL that the current funding settlement, made in August 2022, would not cover the cost of travel concessions “above those typically available in England” such as for the over-60s.

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Categories: News

Richard Brown: Has London’s Olympic Park produced inclusive regeneration?

“Gentrification” is always front and centre of debates about the impact on east London of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Legacy sceptics claim the “regeneration” of the Lower Lea Valley has resulted only in long-established working-class communities being driven out of their own neighbourhoods by more affluent incomers. Its champions take a different view, pointing to new amenities, a better environment, more jobs and homes, and rising educational attainment.

Yet Census and other data suggest that neither of these sharply opposed positions reflects the complex realities of rapid demographic and social change in this part of the capital.

To declare my interest, I worked on the project – mainly the “legacy” elements of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, as it was renamed – from around 2004 to 2014. What interested me at the time was the idea of the project achieving the “regeneration of the area for the direct benefit of everyone that lives there”, in the wording of the aims agreed between the government, the Mayor of London and the event organisers.

Some commentators consider that promise to have been comprehensively betrayed. They argue that Park facilities have done nothing for local communities, with homes, workplaces and leisure centres being built for middle-class newcomers, while accelerating the displacement and victimisation of locals.

But there is a potentially positive story to be told too. In 2009, the four boroughs around the Olympic Park – Tower Hamlets, Newham, Waltham Forest and Hackney, plus Greenwich and, at a later stage Barking & Dagenham, set out a plan for “convergence”. Their aim was that on a range of indicators – from school attainment to employment to crime – these six “growth boroughs” would stop underperforming the London average.

Achieving this deceptively modest-sounding goal would be a big deal. It would involve disrupting patterns of migration that have operated for decades, if not centuries. As successive waves of new arrivals have moved into east London, its population has changed. But when newcomers prospered, they tended to move on and out, often further east, meaning that patterns of disadvantage persisted. East London saw displacement, but without gentrification.

Could this be reversed? Could the area around the Olympic Park experience a more inclusive process of change that enabled local people to stay and succeed – “gentrification from within”, as I glibly termed it when working for the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC)?

There has certainly been change. As OnLondon has previously reported, many of the 2020 convergence targets were met well ahead of schedule. Surprisingly, beyond saying the Growth Borough Partnership was “put into hibernation” in 2018, the website is quiet about this progress. This is unusual, as it is normally when targets are likely to be missed that they are quietly dropped by government bodies, rather that when they are on course to being achieved.

Perhaps one reason “convergence” has been sidelined is that it is too blunt-edged a metric, measured at too wide a scale. Lower unemployment, for example, could be achieved by displacing and replacing communities, instead of by helping them flourish. Nor does convergence distinguish between the impact of the London 2012 Games and other grand projects, including the London Overground extension and the completion of Crossrail, let alone wider socio-economic changes such as the impact of austerity across London.

The 2021 Census makes a more granular exploration of change possible. It has flaws, not least because it took place when many Londoners were temporarily out of town as a result of the pandemic. Furthermore, the data only captures aggregate rather than individual outcomes, and does not look back to 2001-11, when anticipation of and preparations for the 2012 Games were already having an impact. However, datasets comparing the 2021 results with those from 2011 do allow us to look in a greater level of detail at how the area round the Olympic Park has changed (the comparison datasets are collected here).

What follows first looks at the extent of population change around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and then explores what we can infer about the components of that change – and specifically whether it represents a displacement of or an addition to existing communities. The “Olympic Park and Fringe” is defined by the following “middle-layer super output areas” (census tracts with a population of 2,000-6,000 people):

 

Screenshot 2024 03 24 at 18.47.55

*Not included in some comparisons as no 2011 data available.

 

A decade of population growth and churn

The sheer pace of population change is striking. Between 2011 and 2021, London’s population grew by around eight per cent (though many inner London areas saw a fall, largely attributable to the temporary impact of the pandemic). Growth in the Olympic Park and Fringe was around 25 per cent, concentrated in Bromley-by-Bow and Fish Island to the west (34 and 36 per cent), in Stratford New Town and Carpenters, and in Mills Meads to the east and south (71 and 73 per cent).

The Census figures only show net change – the combined impact of myriad arrivals and departures over a ten-year period. Another data source, the Residential Mobility Index, which draws on sources such as electoral registers and land registry, estimates population “churn” – the proportion of households that have changed over a period of time. For the average London borough, around 50 per cent of households changed between 2011 and 2023. Hackney and Newham saw similar levels, while Tower Hamlets had a 76 per cent change and Waltham Forest a 43 per cent change.

But the areas immediately around the Olympic Park experienced more dramatic change, with over 90 per cent churn around Fish Island, East Village and Carpenters. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given the comprehensive redevelopment of these areas during and since the 2012 Games. As you move further east in Waltham Forest and Newham, and further west in Hackney, the degree of churn falls quite sharply: areas such as Leytonstone, Maryland, West Ham, Clapton Park and Homerton saw churn at or below the London average. Tower Hamlets is a notable exception: there was extensive population churn across the borough, with rates of 70 per cent or more all along Mile End Road and even higher around Whitechapel and Bethnal Green.

So, population growth has been intense in the immediate hinterland of the Olympic Park, though not that much higher than in other “regeneration” areas, such as Elephant and Castle, Kings Cross and Wembley. However, both growth and churn have been much more limited as you move further away from the park.

Qualifications and occupations

The harder question to answer is whether population growth and churn represent a replacement of or an addition to existing communities, in particular a displacement of working-class people and communities by more middle-class ones. Census data doesn’t really address class, but we can try to paint a picture using some proxy indicators, and by looking at the actual changes in numbers of people with particular characteristics, rather than the change in the mix. Has growth in one community been accompanied by another becoming smaller, both in itself and in comparison to trends across London?

The first proxy indicator is qualification levels. The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the proportion of Londoners who have degrees or other higher education qualifications. This has risen from 38 to 47 per cent of the 16+ population across the city, and from 34 to 49 per cent in the Olympic Park and Fringe. The number of higher-qualified residents in these areas increased by 85 per cent and doubled around Stratford High Street, Stratford Town Centre, Bromley-by-Bow and Fish Island.

However the number of people without any qualifications has also increased, suggesting that in this case the change has been one of addition rather than substitution. Even if low-qualified people have moved out, other low-qualified people have moved in. The exceptions are the areas to the west of the Park – Bow, Fish Island, Hackney Wick and Hackney Marshes – where the number of low qualified people has fallen over time, suggesting a more permanent displacement.

Screenshot 2024 03 24 at 17.58.01

A similar analysis has been undertaken by Duncan Smith at CityGeographics, looking at changes in occupational mix. He finds that the Lower (and Upper) Lea Valley has been at the forefront of change: the proportion of workers in managerial, professional and associate professional jobs in Waltham Forest rose from 40 to 51 per cent between 2011 and 2021, the most rapid change in England, and in Newham from 32 to 42 per cent. Analysis of numbers rather than proportions is not available by borough, but across London the number of people working in lower status occupations has not changed, suggesting that changes are additional not substitutional.

Housing tenure

Housing is another proxy: do tenure changes indicate gentrification and displacement? The Olympic Park and Fringe bucks London trends on housing tenure, with a sharp rise in owner-occupation (mortgaged and owned outright) particularly concentrated in Mill Meads, Stratford New Town and Carpenters, Bow and Fish Island, where new construction has been intense. So far, so gentrifying.

However, perhaps counter-intuitively, the number of households in social rented accommodation has also grown in the Olympic Park and Fringe, and at a faster than the London or local borough average. If social tenants around the Park have been displaced – and estate redevelopment projects in locations such as the Carpenters Estate have been highly controversial – they have also been replaced with more social tenants. Meanwhile, private renting has grown as it has across London. It is now the most widespread tenure in the Olympic Park and Fringe.

Screenshot 2024 03 24 at 18.26.21

Ethnic diversity and employment

Another lens for examining change in and around the Olympic Park is ethnicity, which has a strong overlap with poverty and intersects with class disadvantage. The areas around the Olympic Park have always been some of London’s most diverse, with a non-white population of around 57 per cent in 2021, compared to 46 per cent across the capital.

As the table below shows, compared to London as a whole the Olympic Park boroughs and the Olympic Park and Fringe areas saw faster growth in their white and mixed-race populations, slightly slower growth in their Asian population and almost no net change in their black population. Black and Asian populations fell in Waltham Forest’s fringe areas, and all populations grew fastest in Tower Hamlets’ fringes, along Stratford High Street and into the Town Centre. This suggests that even if rapid growth in white and mixed-race populations around the Park did not actually lead directly to displacement of people from Asian and black populations, it may have constrained growth in those populations to lower levels than in other parts of London.

Screenshot 2024 03 24 at 18.29.52

Another perspective on ethnicity can be seen in employment rates. In the Olympic Park boroughs these rose from 59 to 62 per cent of people aged 16+ over the decade, bringing them above the London average. The rise has been sharper still in the Olympic Park and Fringe, with rates rising from 60 to 65 per cent of the population. But, while employment rates have improved for all groups relative to the London average, employment has risen fastest for white people, while it changed much less for black and Asian people, widening the employment gap between these communities.

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Unfinished evolution

Taken together, these figures suggest that the London 2012 programme has had varying and complex impacts on the local area. While there have been some signs of displacement of existing populations, particularly to the west where legacy has butted up against “Hoxtonisation”, the more widespread pattern seems to have been one of densification enabling the arrival of new and different communities. These demographic changes, along with the programmes run by the Olympic Park boroughs and LLDC, have driven convergence in employment rates, in tenure, and in occupational and educational profile.

That said, the differences in improvement in employment rates, alongside recent depressing news about falling life expectancy, suggests that structural disadvantage continues to hit some east London communities hard. Twenty years after London was awarded the Games and as the boroughs, the Mayor of London and the LLDC develop inclusive economy plans, London 2012’s legacy is an unfinished evolution.

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Categories: Analysis