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Westminster: Council’s North Paddington programme to begin next phase

Just over half way through its first ever term in charge of the central London local authority, the Labour administration is pressing on with a key local regeneration initiative
Dave Hill

North Paddington illustrates well why the City of Westminster, as a local authority area, is not all about the Houses of Parliament, the West End and enclaves of phenomenal wealth. Its Harrow Road, Queens Park and Westbourne wards in the north west of the borough are among those marked by high levels of disadvantage.

Addressing these has been a priority of Westminster City Council since, in May 2022, it came under Labour control for the first time in its history. The administration’s North Paddington Programme is a group of initiatives designed to help people living in the three wards. Its latest phase has just been approved by councillors. What is the programme and why does it matter?

A total of £20 million has been allocated to it, and the council is stressing that it has been devised in close collaboration with local residents, businesses, charities and the police to help with employment, housing, health and reducing crime.

A partnership board, chaired by Neale Coleman, once a Westminster Labour councillor and more recently a senior figure in the administrations of London Mayors, has brought together housing, arts and youth work specialists and overseen community engagement efforts.

The council says that during its first year, the programme funded the £300,000 overhaul of a basketball court at the Avenues Youth Project, the retrofitting for energy efficiency of 300 social rent homes, the installation of solar panels on the Warwick housing estate and projects ranging from a soup kitchen to digital mentoring (with help from Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs and others) and breakfast clubs.

The next phase, backed by £10 million over a three-year period, has earmarked £4.5 million of that sum for local organisations to apply for to fund building projects.

It has already committed £1.5 million for two community hubs – the Bayswater Children’s Centre on Shrewsbury Road and at Ernest Harris House, a Notting Hill Housing Trust property on Elgin Avenue – plus £300,000 for additional community gardens in the three wards, over £200,000 to provide jobs and training for young people and over £400,000 in all to revitalise Maida Hill market and put on events in the public space there.

Westminster leader Adam Hug says the council’s investment in North Paddington “represents a major change in the way this council works to improve our communities – not making decisions behind closed doors, but sitting down with people to discuss problems, and more importantly come up with solutions”. He calls it a “place-based approach” which will be the model for all of the council’s future regeneration schemes. It also forms part of the Labour administration’s wider “fairer city” ambitions.

Making a success of such a project requires forms of cooperation and degrees of co-ordination that can take patience and persistence to achieve and may be novel for local authority bureaucracies. Adam Hug and his colleagues will hope Westminster’s “place-based approach” pays welcome dividends for local people and becomes an example other councils will want to learn from.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Threads: DaveHillOnLondon. X/Twitter: On London and Dave Hill. Photo from Westminster’s 2021 vision for Maida Hill market document.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: employment, Harrow Road, health, poverty, Queen's Park, Westminster Council

Sadiq Khan approves Green Belt housing scheme

The Mayor has made an exception to his usual London Plan policy to allow a project backed by Hounslow Council to go ahead
Noah Vickers, Local Democracy Reporter

Sadiq Khan has granted permission for 300 new homes to be built on London’s Green Belt, arguing that the project will deliver a “clear public benefit”.

The scheme, off Forest Road in Feltham, will also involve the restoration of the dilapidated 222-year-old Hanworth Park House, with the new homes built on surrounding woodland.

Ordinarily, building of new properties on Green Belt land would be refused by the Mayor, as his London Plan stresses the need to “protect and enhance” the capital’s open spaces. It states that all proposals that would “harm” the Green Belt should be rejected “except where very special circumstances exist”.

But in exclusive comments to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Khan said the project’s benefits would outweigh any harm.

In a report presented to him, City Hall officers had pointed out that the scheme would deliver much needed affordable housing, as 120 of the properties will be marketed at a social rent.

Hanworth Park House, a Grade II-listed building which has been derelict for several years, will not only be restored as part of the project, but extended and converted to become a community hub – including a museum, education centre, cafe, exhibition space and artisan studios.

The Mayor said: “London’s housing crisis needs urgent action and I’m determined to do everything in my power to help. “I’ll always prioritise brownfield land for new housing development, but there are circumstances where on balance there will be a clear public benefit case for building new homes on sites designated as Green Belt. In this case the plans will enhance local green spaces and protect local heritage assets.

“I’ll never shy away from the difficult decisions needed to get homes built in our city, as part of my plan to build a fairer, more prosperous London for all.”

The scheme had already received near-unanimous approval from Hounslow Council’s planning committee last year, along with the support of the local Labour MP, Seema Malhotra.

The news came as the new national government prepared for the King’s Speech, which is expected to include reforms to England’s planning system. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said she wants to make it easier for homes to be built, including on poor quality areas of the Green Belt, which Labour calls “grey belt” land.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Threads: DaveHillOnLondon. X/Twitter: On London and Dave Hill. Image of Hanworth Park House and future housing from 5Plus Architects.

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Dave Hill: Shoplifting isn’t just theft, it is a symptom of a wider decline of London street life

Witnessing a group helping itself from a local shop added to feelings of pessimism and dismay about the social condition of the public realm
Dave Hill

My wife is better than I am at spotting them, stuffing packs of cheese, ham and whatever else inside their coats at our local Tesco Express and making off without paying. But this morning, I witnessed a shoplifting crew at work close up.

It was just before nine when I strolled into an aisle and saw a young male crouched down, shovelling snacks into a Sports Direct hold-all. He looked up and looked at me, looking at him.

In that eye contact moment I said something ineffectual like, “what are you doing?” As a sales assistant approached from behind, the kid got up and fled past me to the door.

Another male scarpered with him and it turned out there was a third. Staff members were dismayed, yet resigned: this kind of thing has become routine; they object, but daren’t risk trying to apprehend the thieves, fearing a violent response; they often don’t bother informing the police, because nothing is ever done. The shoplifters, in no great hurry, made off on bikes.

The increase in shoplifting, much of it, as on Lower Clapton Road E5 this morning, of the brazen grab-and-go variety, is a national phenomenon, affecting large chains and small shopkeepers alike. Keir Starmer highlighted the issue during the general election campaign, saying the Conservatives had deprioritised “low value” shoplifting in the context of ongoing police funding cuts. Wednesday’s King’s Speech, setting out the new government’s programme of legislation, is expected to address retail crime, including making assaults on shop workers a specific offence.

I hope good will come of this, and for a number of reasons. The cost to retail businesses is one of them, perhaps especially small independents less able than supermarket chains to absorb the financial losses – we don’t want prices rising still higher and corner shops going out of business.

My heart really goes out to shop workers. Those on the scene at Tesco Express, some of them familiar faces, were despairing and galled. The goods stolen weren’t theirs, their monetary value wasn’t taken from their pockets. But the young woman among them who showed me the shelves that had been emptied and the fridge pilfered for booze was vexed and exasperated. Previous raiders had kicked and shoved her. No one should face such dangers in their place of work.

And then there are the wider implications. The sense that shoplifting has become a quite casual form of criminality, something so much to be expected that it is in danger of becoming accepted too, is alarming and depressing. That includes the subtler forms. In another of my local shops, a popular mini-market, a woman was recently caught on in-house CCTV slipping bottles of wine into the folds of her clothing. Sharing the footage on a neighbourhood app, the proprietor revealed that she was a known and frequent customer.

The prevalence of such offending is, it seems to me, a particular manifestation of a larger malaise afflicting high street life. Other symptoms range from long-empty premises, to pavement clutter, to antisocial cycling to uncollected rubbish, to seeing the same people, day in, day out, begging for spare change, their continuing presence suggesting nothing much is being done to help them.

I don’t feel in any danger when on my local streets, though I know others, often the young, do. But each incident, such as today’s, and every fresh piece of evidence that things aren’t as they should be contributes to a demoralising sense of decline and decay, sapping the spirit and feeding fears about the future.

Shopping at my local Tesco is revealing in lots of ways: the mix of customers, the blend of stock, the items kept out of reach or security tagged. There is often a little queue of customers who, as others self-serve with bank cards, wait to pay for their few items with cash – inequality and poverty in action.

Legislation may be part of the cure for endemic shoplifting, as might more money for the Met and for London’s boroughs, struggling alike to meet demands on their time and resources. And the phenomenon can also be seen as a related product of a pernicious erosion of social solidarity, of civic care and consideration. This too needs to be restored and revived if capital and country are to be repaired.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Threads: DaveHillOnLondon. X/Twitter: On London and Dave Hill.

Categories: Comment
Tags: crime, Keir Starmer, Lower Clapton Road

Julie Hamill: Neighbours

You can make friends with fellow Londoners who live down your way, but try not to overdo it
Julie Hamill

I was walking back from the local shop when I saw an elderly lady outside her front door. She was holding a large watering can, which I could tell was full and heavy because her hand was shaking. She was trying to water the colourful selection of plant pots dotted around her paved porch. I noticed her leg swinging as she struggled to get down the high step.

 

“Do you need help?” I asked.

 

“Yes please,” she replied. “I can’t get down this step. Could you water these plants for me?”

 

Her Irish accent flew joy to my heart. My much-missed mother-in-law, Bridget, was Irish too, and for her I had both the highest regard and the softest spot.

 

“Of course!”

 

I put my shopping down and rushed to take the can from her.  I was suddenly keen to do the best job possible, as she put me so much in mind of Bridget, who would have been around the same age, had she lived longer.

 

“My daughter usually does it for me but she couldn’t come,” lady said.  

 

“That’s okay,” I replied as I watered lots of pots. Then the can ran out.

 

“Just go inside,” she said. “You see that tap down there in the kitchen? Fill it up there.”

 

She had such authority I did everything but bow as I passed her. An elderly Irish matriarch is a boss I want to please. I turned on the tap in her ‘80s-decor, brown-tiled kitchen and re-filled the can.

 

“You’re a good girl,” she said, out of the blue, which crushed me. “You’ve done your good deed for the day, ha ha!”

 

She laughed at the end of her sentence, just like Bridget used to, because when you’re Irish, there isn’t a better joke than your own.

 

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

 

“I’m Eileen,” she said. “What’s yours?”

 

“I’m Julie.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“JULIE.”

 

“Ah, right then Julie. Make sure you finish off out the front. Do you live round here? What street do you live on?”

 

I told her my street, to which she replied, 

 

“Do you know Pat O’Rourke? He lives on your street.”

 

“I don’t I’m afraid. I don’t really know my neighbours. You know what London’s like.”

 

“Oh, I do. I’ve lived in this house since 1981. All the Irish have moved away now. I don’t know who’s on one side of me or who’s on the other.’

 

I asked her if she knew Bridget, who lived a few streets away in the other direction. I told her she was Irish too.

 

“Where in Ireland was she from?”

 

“Athea,” I said.

 

“No. I’m from the north. I wouldn’t have known or talked to her. Anyway, it was nice to meet you, Julie, and thank you for doing that for me. I’m going to have a lie down in that little room now. I don’t do much.”

 

“It’s a pleasure,” I said. Then, I thought she might be lonely. Maybe I should offer to water her pots, make her a cup of tea, say hello from time to time. So I bravely added my afterthought on the way out.

 

“Eileen, I walk around here all the time. How would you like me to stop and ring the bell and water the plants for you?”

 

“No,” she said bluntly. “Only if you see me out the front you can stop. Don’t come to the door. But if you see me out the front you can come and give me a hand. You can go now, you’ve done your good deed for the day, ha ha. You have a good day now, Julie!”

 

Ushered out, I had to laugh. Fifty-two and a good girl – until I got overly neighbourly.

 

I like Eileen. She hates do-gooders.

Julie Hamill is a novelist, a radio presenter and more. Follow her on X/Twitter. Support OnLondon.co.uk and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE.

Categories: Culture
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Barking & Dagenham Council leader to stand down after ten years

Darren Rodwell joined Labour to help resist the British National Party's rise in his home borough and went on to become one of the capital's most admired exponents of housing and regeneration policies
Dave Hill

The leader of Barking & Dagenham Council is to step down in September after more than ten years at the head of the east London borough.

In an email giving his fellow Labour councillors the news, Darren Rodwell said he plans to “change direction”, consider “the many opportunities that have been offered to me” to work outside politics and devote more time to his family.

He told council cabinet members on Friday that he would be relinquishing the leadership, though he plans to stay on as a ward councillor.

Rodwell’s decision follows his standing down as his party’s candidate for the safe local parliamentary seat of Barking early last month after a complaint of sexual misconduct was made against him a few days before his nomination was due to be confirmed.

On Monday, he said in a statement that Labour has now dismissed the complaint, but described himself as “incredibly hurt” by what happened, adding that “an incredibly stressful time” had been “particularly upsetting for my family who are still living with the consequences”.

His departure from London politics will be greeted with dismay by many in the capital’s housing and development circles, who regard him as an effective and innovative champion for housing delivery and regeneration in Barking & Dagenham and across the capital.

Under Rodwell’s leadership, Barking & Dagenham set up its own regeneration vehicle, Be First, and Reside, a wholly-owned company for building homes for rent below market rates. The most recent London Plan annual monitoring report shows that housing application approvals in Barking & Dagenham were among London’s highest over a five-year period.

He has also stewarded the founding of London’s largest film and TV production centre, Eastbrook Studios, a local higher education centre run by Coventry University, a Women’s Museum, and the City of London’s plans to relocate its historic wholesale markets, Smithfield, Billingsgate and New Spitalfields, to a new site at Dagenham Dock.

Rodwell has been executive member for housing, regeneration and planning at the cross-party London Councils group and, with London Councils vice chair Elizabeth Campbell, leader of Conservative-run Kensington & Chelsea, a leading light of Opportunity London, a campaign backed by Sadiq Khan and promotional body London & Partners, to attract private investment to the capital.

Born and raised in the borough, Rodwell joined Labour in the early 2000s in order to help fight the rise of the British National Party, which won 12 Barking & Dagenham council seats in the May 2006 elections. Four years later, Labour won all 51 council seats and the party has maintained that record under Rodwell’s leadership in 2014, 2018 and 2022.

Two years ago Rodwell drew media coverage and criticism after it emerged he had made a “suntan” joke while speaking at a Black History Month event. However, he has been an upfront supporter of his borough’s increasingly ethnically-varied demographic, for example making a St George’s day speech outside Barking Town Hall in April 2023 (pictured) in which he described the English national flag as representing “our diversity, our inclusion” and “a borough I’m proud of”.

In his email to fellow councillors he expresses pride in “building the most diverse council chamber in the country, putting equality front and centre within the council and the community” as well as his record for bringing investment to an area with high levels of poverty. On London understands he was approached by figures from local mosques to contest Barking as an independent, but chose not to.

Rodwell, who has led Barking & Dagenham since June 2014, was selected in October 2022 to succeed Margaret Hodge as Labour candidate for Barking, despite efforts to prevent it by activists from Momentum, the campaign group formed to back the now former Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership of the party.

In his statement about being cleared of the allegations against him, Rodwell said he did not believe the timing of the complaint “was a coincidence but a deliberate attempt to besmirch my name and reputation ahead of the nominations”. He strongly denied the misconduct charge at the time it was made.

Rodwell was replaced as candidate for the Barking by Enfield Council leader Nesil Caliskan, who went on to win the seat at the general election on 4 July.

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Categories: News
Tags: Barking & Dagenham Council, Darren Rodwell, Labour, London Councils

London affordable housing sector needs more skilled workers, says report

A group of leading housing associations and others in the sector have quantified the shortfall and suggested solutions
Dave Hill

A shortage of skilled construction sector labour is putting the maintenance, upgrading and supply of social and other affordable homes in the capital at risk, according to a new report.

The London Homes Coalition, a partnership of seven leading housing associations, building contractors and other industry specialists, says that in the coming five years its members could be short of around 2,600 of the people they need to look after existing properties, retrofit them to meet safety and environmental standards, and build new homes.

The report, entitled Building Skills for the Future, says the coalition’s members will need around 10,000 men and women working on “asset management commitments” each year and up to 31,000 “to deliver on new build investments”. The housing delivery pipelines of the coalition’s members account for about 10 per cent of the capital’s overall construction workforce.

The current workforce is ageing and retiring, the report says, a situation “exacerbated by insufficient training programmes and limited awareness of career opportunities”.

There are particular concerns about roofers and surveyors, with current trends suggesting coalition members will have only, respectively, 85 per cent and 78 per cent of the personnel required in those two areas.

Housing associations have faced additional demands in recent years, arising from the need to implement post-Grenfell building safety rules and to improve properties so that they meet Net Zero environmental standards.

This has come at the same time as what the report calls “the legacy of Covid-19 and Brexit” having “a severe impact on workforce availability”, creating heightened competition for workers within the construction sector as a whole, including large commercial house-builders nationwide.

An average of around 413,000 people are forecast to be employed in construction work in London over the 2024-2028 period, many of them self-employed, which can add to recruitment and training difficulties. It is estimated that over 26,000 more will need to be recruited during the next five years.

The Building Skills for the Future report says there is scope for increasing recruitment from statistically under-represented population groups, noting that the percentages of ethnic minority and female workers in the sector fall below those in other areas of employment.

It estimates that adding to the supply and quality of social and other affordable homes in the capital could save social care services more than £3.5 billion a year and the National Health Service £600 million a year, along with boosting the economy.

The report also says the opportunities and benefits of working in social housing should be promoted at national level, “barriers to apprenticeships and skills development” should be removed and funding more consistently provided in order to reduce the shortages.

The coalition, whos housing association members are Peabody, L&Q, the Guinness Partnership,  Metropolitan Thames Valley, Notting Hill Genesis, Hyde Housing and Sovereign Network Group, sees collaboration with London’s boroughs, City Hall and national government departments as “critical to achieving our objectives”.

The newly-elected Labour government has pledged to increase house building across the country, setting a goal of 1.5 million new homes being built nationwide over the course of this Parliament and saying it will reimpose local housing delivery targets and reform the planning system, though no additional public money has been pledged.

Read the Building Skills for the Future report HERE. OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support it for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details HERE. Threads: DaveHillOnLondon. X/Twitter: On London and Dave Hill. Photo from L&Q website.

Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, housing, L&Q, Peabody, skills

Sadiq Khan London Plan is inhibiting housing supply, Assembly hears

Development industry thinks its policies too demanding, though labour shortages, land and materials costs and public sector underfunding are serious problems too
Charles Wright

Before the mayoral election, the then housing secretary Michael Gove targeted Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, the blueprint for development in the capital, as the main cause of what he called the Mayor’s “chronic under-delivery” on his housing targets.

A government review reported “persuasive evidence” that the plan’s plethora of detailed 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, effectively piling too much cost on would-be developers.

The government may have changed, bringing a new focus on house-building in those previously-developed “grey belt” sites in the Green Belt in particular. But developers remain unhappy with the plan, the London Assembly’s planning and regeneration committee heard yesterday.

Faced with a complex, lengthy and expensive planning application process for large sites with uncertain outcomes, investors were increasingly looking for easier returns, the committee heard. “It’s harder now to develop housing than other uses,” said James Wickham from property consultants Gerald Eve. With fierce competition for development sites, City Hall should make the need for housing more explicit, added Syreeta Robinson-Gayle, from Barratt Homes.

Wickham also suggest the plan offered too much protection for “secondary” office space outside the centre and for industrial land. “If housing is the overarching priority it needs to say that,” he said. And affordable housing requirements were also creating disincentives to develop, the committee was told, in a system substantially reliant on private developers to provide affordable homes, usually secured through Section 106 agreements as part of the planning process.

Robinson-Gayle described City Hall’s attempt to streamline a process being often characterised by “horse-trading” over  a scheme’s viability, generally focused on how many affordable homes it could provide, by offering a “fast-track” planning process to developments offering 35 per cent affordable homes or more. But that process was breaking down, she said: “What happens is that if you come forward with a 35 per cent scheme you are often made to go back through the viability assessment process.”

Wickham said review mechanisms attached to viability assessments also disincentivised developers by capping profits. “This disadvantages housing compared to other uses,” he said, suggesting that developers should be rewarded for completing schemes quickly, even with lower proportions of affordable housing, by not having to face challenges over profit levels. “You get a slightly lower outcome, but that scheme actually gets delivered and you have the affordable housing, rather than lots of permissions granted but not started.”

Robinson-Gayle also warned that hard-up housing associations were no longer coming forward to take up the affordable homes developers supplied. “The section 106 system is creaking at the seams,” she said. “There is a lack of capacity from registered providers to take the number of affordable homes that are currently in planning. We could be in a position where developers will be building out affordable homes and there will be no one to take them.”

The continuing shortfall in new house-building in London – delivering just under 37,000 new homes annually over the last few years against a London Plan target of 52,000 a year, itself generally held to be an underestimate of need – was not all caused by planning rules, the committee heard.

Shortages of construction workers as well as planners, land costs, materials cost inflation and financing problems had all taken their toll, Assembly members heard. New safety regulations also had an impact, while small builders were squeezed out of the market and the supply of sites was constrained by Green Belt restrictions.

And crucially the system needed more money, speakers agreed. Robinson-Gayle (pictured) pointed out that private developers were broadly maintaining their rate of new building, while public sector house-building had slumped. “The challenge is not to disincentivise people that are doing something but to encourage others to do more,” she said.

That meant more funding – and longer-term funding certainty – for the capital’s councils and housing associations, currently struggling with broader economic constraints, the increasing cost of maintaining and improving existing stock and a £1 billion a year temporary housing bill for homeless families, said Joanne Drew from the London Housing Directors’ Group of London Councils .

There’s urgency needed all round. Government funding for affordable housing in the capital is due for renewal in 2026, but an emergency injection of some £2 billion is needed before then, according to Khan. The economic costs of delay are mounting up in the capital, where new homes are most needed.

How far will the new Chancellor Rachel Reeves go on providing more certainty to developers, on putting her promised taskforce to work on stalled sites in London, perhaps with Khan’s promised new mayoral development corporations, and on funding affordable homes too? So far house-builders, experts and politicians have praised Reeves’s pledges. But the devil, it seems, will be in the detail, at London level as well as nationally.

Watch the London Assembly planning and regeneration committee meeting in full here. X/Twitter: Charles Wright and OnLondon. Support OnLondon.co.uk  for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money too. Details here.

Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, Green Belt, housing, The London Plan

New York British consulate told under Tories ‘not to support businesses from London’, deputy mayor reveals

Howard Dawber discloses in speech that the trade team based in US global city had been told to deprioritise the capital under the last government's 'levelling up' agenda
Dave Hill

British government officials in New York were told to give preferential treatment to non-London businesses and areas outside the capital when facilitating investment links between the UK and US under the Conservative government, the Deputy Mayor for Business and Growth said today.

Speaking at the Hub Victoria launch of the London Property Alliance (LPA) Good Growth in Central London report, Howard Dawber described as “pretty galling” being told during a visit to New York, from which he has just returned, that the consulate trade team had been “told in the last few years not to support businesses from London” and that UK businesses based outside the capital looking to expand into the US should be prioritised for help.

Similarly, US firms looking to establish themselves in the UK were told they would receive consulate assistance “only if you’re looking for a non-London location,” Dawber said.

“I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked,” he admitted, because “we kind of new that was the case because of the government very much supported a ‘levelling up’ agenda,” yet it was still jarring to hear it said directly.

As new Prime Minister Keir Starmer met England’s regional Mayors, including Sadiq Khan, at Downing Street, Dawber expressed a hope that under the newly-elected national Labour administration central government would “stop doing that sort of thing” and “treating London like a pariah”, becoming instead “a little bit more collaborative”.

He added: “A more stable, reliable, dare I say it, a little bit boring, a little bit predictable, a little bit more dependable government is going to make a fantastic difference to London.”

Dawber highlighted the high level of agreement between London business groups, including the LPA, the capital’s local authorities, trade unions and others about “what some of the challenges are and what the opportunities for London might be” and revealed that a “direction of travel document” compiled in collaboration with cross-party group London Councils has already been supplied to the new government.

Work is also underway on a Growth Plan for London, which, Dawber said, “has a target of cresting 150,000 new good jobs for the capital and improving the living standards of Londoners”.

Emphasising the ambition of the capital’s growth plan, Dawber said there was an opportunity to establish London long-term as “the number one city on Planet Earth” and that he wanted it to be the leading location for sustainability, “not just sticking to our New Zero targets but we’ll make a feature of London being the place that does the transition where people will come to find the products and the services and the businesses to help them transition to Net Zero as well”.

The LPA report, which Dawber wrote the Foreword to, examines potential economic scenarios for the capital’s Central Activities Zone (CAZ) and the northern part of the Isle of Dogs, location of the Canary Wharf business and financial district.

Compiled by Arup, it calculates that the two areas together, termed the CAZ+, produce nearly half of Greater London’s economic output and provide 41 per cent of its jobs within just 2.2 per cent of its land area. Speaking at the launch, Matthew Dillon, Arup’s global economics skills leader, said the report pointed the way toward “a more prosperous, a fairer and a greener CAZ”

“A growing CAZ does mean a growing UK,” he stressed, and advanced the case for a “balanced growth” scenario, which could generate an additional 400,000 jobs £101 billion annual GVA and over 50,000 new homes by 2045, enabled by high quality business cluster development, a “flexible” approach to reconciling commercial and environmental objectives, pragmatic co-operation between boroughs, City Hall and Business Improvement Districts with support from central government.

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Categories: News
Tags: Howard Dawber, London Property Alliance, Sadiq Khan