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Charles Wright: London’s affordable housing supply looks likely to recover. But how strongly?

Deputy Mayor Tom Copley was optimistic when questioned by the London Assembly, though the private sector's contribution is still very stalled
Charles Wright

Are things beginning to look up for affordable housing in London? Sir Sadiq Khan’s housing deputy Tom Copley sounded optimistic about the progress of City Hall’s government-funded affordable homes grant programmes when he appeared before the London Assembly housing committee earlier this week.

It’s a mixed picture, though. The Mayor’s initial affordable homes programme (AHP), which saw an allocation of £4.8 billion for the period for 2016 to 2023, met its target of 116,000 homes started. However, a second programme, running from 2021 to 2026 with £4 billion to invest, has seen just 5,500 “starts” to date. That’s well short of its target of between 17,700 and 19,000 affordable homes got underway by next year.

The housing associations delivering the bulk of the programme, along with councils taking forward their own schemes, had been hit by the same problems affecting the wider housebuilding sector, Copley said: the now familiar cocktail of high interest rates, spiralling building costs, labour shortage, hold-ups over post-Grenfell safety rules, the continuing impact of Brexit and inadequate past government funding, all pushing construction in the city to the brink.

But “green shoots” of recovery were now evident, Copley said. Last year, affordable housing starts were up 70 per cent, alongside renewed confidence in the social housing sector, putting the Mayor’s challenging targets within reach. “Starts will ramp up and we will be able to achieve the 2021 to 2026 target range,” he asserted.

What’s behind the optimism? Government action, said Copley (pictured), including the new £11.7 billion ten-year AHP funding deal from 2026, hailed by Khan as the “biggest and longest funding settlement that the capital has ever received for affordable and social housebuilding”. In addition, there is a long-term rent deal that will boost housing association balance sheets, easier ways for councils to recycle Right to Buy receipts into new housing, and more cash for vital post-Grenfell fire safety improvements. Initial bids for the next round of AHP funding will be invited next month, with overall delivery targets to be confirmed next year.

Good news, then. But City Hall funding is just one part of the affordable homes story. On the other side, where private developers build affordable homes under “Section 106” agreements with boroughs in return for planning permission, there’s far less optimism.

Just 2,158 private homes were started on schemes of more than 20 homes in the first half of this year. There are 200,000 permitted but unbuilt homes on “stalled” sites in the London Plan’s 47 “opportunity areas” alone, with developers arguing that they are now “unviable”. That’s a big concern, given that the Section 106 deals on sites like these have generally provided up to half the affordable homes in the capital in recent years

Berkeley’s 637-home Camden Goods Yard scheme is just one example, with the housebuilder saying that rising costs mean it can no longer provide the affordable housing it originally promised. The builder now wants to slash that commitment by almost half. Without that concession, it warns, the site would “stall altogether, like so many others”. Councillors are so far resisting, but calls are growing for Khan to relax his “35 per cent affordable” homes threshold for larger developments.

It’s a particular issue on brownfield sites that are expensive to develop, including the opportunity areas. Consultant and former councillor Rhys Williams warned last month that the threshold is now squeezing developers “beyond breaking point”, resulting in brownfield development collapsing “exactly where we need housing most urgently”.

City Hall is listening, it seems. “We’ve been hearing the message from the sector about how challenging viability is, and we intend to respond to that,” Copley told the committee. The 35 per cent threshold would be reviewed as Khan gets to work on the next London Plan, to run from 2027, he confirmed.

But Khan is also looking to identify development opportunities in the capital’s extensive Green Belt – land which had “substantial potential” and was cheaper to develop, Copley said. “We can’t meet our targets without Green Belt development.” That set alarm bells ringing. “We are worried we will get to a situation in a few years where we will still have brownfield sites that are empty and the Green Belt being built on,” said committee chair Zoe Garbett.

Will the new London Plan meet developers’ demands, or might Khan act sooner to get brownfield sites going, as some are urging? “The industry cannot wait for a new London Plan. There is a mountain of stuck consents that are working off yesterday’s assumptions. They can be unlocked before we go to the Green Belt,” says Nick Cuff, experienced in local government and now managing director of real estate advisers Urban Sketch. He proposes immediately reducing affordable housing requirements in opportunity areas to 15 per cent and reinstating “fast track” processes to review now outdated affordable home agreements on existing schemes.

Battle lines are being drawn. The capital’s housing associations argue that “in the face of acute affordable housing need, maximum delivery must remain the expectation…Viability concern should not become a route for reducing affordable provision.” City Hall, too, recently told MPs the threshold had successfully boosted affordable supply and helped “embed affordable housing requirements into land values”.

The key intervention, Copley said, would be the proposed City Hall developer investment fund, providing “different types of financing that will help to get some of those stalled sites moving again”. The government has supported the proposal, though details are still awaited. Meanwhile separate government funding has just been announced to unblock almost 4,000 new homes on currently stalled sites at High Road West in Tottenham and Billet Road in Redbridge.

Arguments about where to set the balance between public and private funding are not new. There’s hard bargaining on both sides, and current problems are not all down to planning rules, either. But the coming months could be critical, for all parts of the housing system.

Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Watch the London Assembly housing committee meeting here.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, Green Belt, London Assembly, planning, The London Plan, Tom Copley

Elin Morgan: Reviving London’s historic drinking fountains

With the ownership of water an issue for concerned debate, there is much to be learned from the pioneers of public provision
Elin Morgan

In her novel There are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak traces the life of a single drop of water from ancient Mesopotamia, through centuries and across continents to the present day. Following the life of water is an appealing idea, though on the long journey of that drop we encounter water that is anything but vital: in London in 1854 water infected with the comma-shaped bacteria known as Vibrio cholerae is estimated to have killed 10,000 people.

Cholera outbreaks were not uncommon in Victorian London and were often caused by unsanitary conditions at the public water pumps upon which many relied. Investigations at the time found that water supplied by unscrupulous private companies was often the cause.

It was in response to this public health crisis that in 1859, a group of philanthropists set up the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association. It unveiled the first clean public drinking fountain outside St Sepulchre-without-Newgate Church in the City of London. The use of innovative in-built filters ensured that the water supplied was safer to drink. In the years that followed, the association opened several more clean water sources across London, and were joined in their mission by other philanthropic associations and individuals.

There was often a moral bent to the intentions of the first fountain donors. Many were Quakers or otherwise involved in the Temperance movement and were, in part, motivated by the desire to stop the working classes drinking beer as a safer alternative to water. In 21st Century London, we don’t have to worry about the cleanliness of water from our taps (or resort to beer unless we want to), but a conversation about private ownership of water and the morals and standards of those who provide it is again taking place.

It’s also true to say that hydration on the move is very much part of contemporary life, much more so that when I was young, when barely anyone carried the now-ubiquitous portable bottles. Combine that with concerns about plastic waste from disposables and it’s no surprise that public water fountains are becoming a feature of London town planning again. Six years ago, Sir Sadiq Khan installed 100 new fonts at locations around the capital.

What, then, of London’s original Victorian water fountains, many of which were decommissioned and fell into disrepair? I can remember seeing them as a child in parks and outside stations, their marble sinks more likely to be stuffed with litter than splashed with drops of fresh water.

With that in mind, I was interested to hear about the work that the Heritage of London Trust (HOLT) is doing to restore London’s historic drinking fountains – 16 so far, and eight coming up. HOLT’s director, Dr Nicola Stacey, told me that they “involve local communities in all our projects from beginning to end, so they have a chance to see the conservation work up close. In the case of fountains, many local people remember drinking from them as children, but have seen them switched off and neglected for decades. There’s a brilliant ‘switching-on’ moment, which brings a huge uplift for the community and a sense of delight across the generations.”

Guilford place fountain, camden after

That sense of ownership echoes the intentions of the Victorian philanthropists who set up the first drinking fountains. I went to visit the one at St Sepulchre early on a summer evening (pictured, top). The crossroads where it sits was busy with people rushing in and out of pubs and restaurants and home from work.

The Old Bailey loomed large to my right, though when the fountain was first unveiled, it wasn’t there.  It was then the site of the infamous Newgate Prison. With Smithfield Market and several City guilds based nearby, this would have been an ideal site for footfall. It’s no wonder that at its peak St Sepulchre was used by 7000 people a day.

Today, the fountain sits humbly against the railings. Pink granite pillars topped by an arch enclose the marble shell from which water once flowed. Underneath, a dedication to its founders. At the base, an exhortation to users to “Replace the cups”. No plastic water bottles back then, though the cups, which I’ve seen chained to the font in photographs, aren’t there today and the fountain isn’t operational. HOLT have plans to restore it soon, but it’s not yet possible to fill my bottle.

Keen to find a water fountain I could use, so I headed east along the A40. On my way, I took a detour to Red Lion Square, known for its association with Bertrand Russell, among others, but also notable for being one of the 70 or so London gardens laid out by Fanny Wilkinson, a Suffragist and pioneering landscape gardener, who has recently been commemorated in the form of a statue attached to a water fountain in Southfields.

My final destination was Guilford Place, at the end of Lamb’s Conduit Street, just by Great Ormond Street Hospital. Walking through that part of town, busy with legal chambers and the bars that draw their employees after hours, I almost missed the fountain (pictured above) until I turned and saw it, with my back to Coram’s Fields. Built in 1870 in gentle white stone, it depicts the Woman of Samaria, who according to the Bible, Jesus accepted water from, although she was considered a social outcast.

It’s another echo of the religious intentions of many early fountain donors, but it also brings my thoughts back to Shafak’s novel and the idea that water, wherever we find it, completes its cycle over and over again, with the molecules in a single drop lasting through centuries. In London, as we once again look at who owns our drinking water, it’s an idea worth a few minutes’ contemplation. That is what I gave it, as I took out my bottle and prepared to fill it.

Elin Morgan is a writer and communications professional from East London. Follow her on Bluesky. 

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Culture
Tags: health, Newgate prison, water

Where in London will government New Towns go? Two places are getting mentioned

Expectations in the capital's planning circles are that one chosen site will be in the city's south-east and another at its northern border
Dave Hill

It is a year since the government’s New Towns Taskforce began figuring out where such settlements should be built, and six months have passed since it was announced that more than 100 sites had been submitted for consideration, including several from London.

In London planning circles there is an expectation that the decisions of the taskforce will be revealed soon, perhaps some time this month. Which parts of the capital will be named? I’ve been in touch with several well-connected sources. Two places have been mentioned by them all.

  • One of them is Thamesmead, where a big regeneration programme is already underway.
  • The other is in Enfield, specifically a place at its northern edge called Crews Hill.

If these are confirmed as London’s recommended New Town locations, they will excite interest of different kinds. Thamesmead would probably produce the least surprise or opposition – maybe none at all, given that the area is already undergoing a major transformation – and make irresistible the case for government approval for extending the Docklands Light Railway from Gallions Reach in Newham to a new station at Beckton Riverside, and then south of the river to Thamesmead itself.

On a recent site visit with the developer, Peabody, I was shown the very spot (big white sign in blurry photo below) where a Thamesmead DLR station would go, right next to an unexceptional drive-to shopping centre served by a large car park a mere spit from the Thames.

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The government said its New Towns, which can take the form of “urban extensions” of existing areas, will each provide a minimum of 10,000 homes. Transport for London has long made the case that 25,000 to 30,000 homes could be built along the route of the DLR extension as a whole.

There was annoyance and disappointment in the capital when Rachel Reeves didn’t back the extension in her spending review in June, preferring to make a performance of funding projects in the north of England instead, seemingly in the hope of appeasing voters attracted by Reform UK.

However, transport secretary Heidi Alexander soon after noted that “substantial work” had been done on the DLR scheme and pledged to “continue to work closely with the Greater London Authority and TfL” so that a “full business case and funding plan” could be finalised by the autumn of this year. A further TfL consultation was launched within days. Autumn has arrived. The stars have long looked very aligned.

By contrast, If Crews Hill in Enfield is indeed lined up to be the site for a London New Town, if will add a further dimension to the intense and already long-running local debate about housebuilding on Green Belt land in the borough.

Writing for On London, James Cracknell, editor of Enfield Dispatch, has documented the latest stages in that debate as they have been unfolding during the examination in public (EiP) of Labour-run Enfield Council’s new Local Plan, its master planning blueprint.

It is almost seven years since James reported that at an early stage in the plan’s evolution, Sir Sadiq Khan, when asked about Enfield’s intentions, confirmed his opposition to any building on the Green Belt within Greater London.

That had been the Mayor’s consistent stance on Green Belt land, and it remained so until after the Labour national government was elected. But even though his top planning officer told the EiP in January that Khan had concluded that building on the Green Belt was now necessary – a change of policy Khan himself confirmed in May – there was, as James wrote, a large caveat:

Even with the U-turn, the Enfield Local Plan was proposing homes on Green Belt sites that City Hall deemed “unsustainable”, thanks to their lack of existing public transport links. For that reason, the Mayor would still be objecting to them.

I went to Crews Hill this morning, arriving at its little railway station, courtesy of Great Northern, at about 8:30 and taking a short walk down the road to photograph some of its string of garden centres, once described as “Britain’s horticultural mile”. There is also a residential community of about 550 people, a large pub and a nearby golf course.

Img 6523

Crews Hill is right at the northern edge of Enfield and, therefore, of Greater London. The next stop on the line to Stevenage, a flagship post-war New Town, is Cuffley, a village in Hertfordshire. A sign within the station directs passengers to trains to London, perhaps suggesting that the area itself might not see itself as part of the capital.

Enfield Council’s plan is for the Crews Hill area to accommodate 5,500 homes – only about half the figure the government wants each of its New Towns to provide. The council envisages the redevelopment of many of those garden centre sites, the golf course (which it owns) and some adjacent farmland. Any New Town at Crews Hill would seemingly be more extensive, and public transport provision would need to be hugely increased.

If local arguments about Green Belt and housing need any further stimulation, a New Town designation for Crews Hill would provide it. The issue is already at the heart of Enfield’s political battleground, with the Conservatives firmly opposing Green Belt development and hoping this will help them secure control of the council in May’s borough elections.

Img 6525

How confident should we be that Thamesmead and Crews Hill are indeed to be named London New Town locations? As confident as my sources, I suggest. None wishes to be identified – in one case, our interaction amusingly parodied a famous scene in All The President’s Men – but all were very clear in their convictions that those are the two names in the taskforce’s frame.

If confirmation is to come, it might be delayed by the resignation from the government of Angela Rayner, who was the minister in charge of the New Towns programme. But it still might come pretty soon.

Dave Hill will be chairing a London Society discussion event about Enfield, housing and the Green Belt on 15 September, with James Cracknell bringing his local expertise to the panel. Buy tickets here. 

Categories: News
Tags: Enfield Council, Green Belt, housing

Dave Hill: The Right’s ‘lawless London’ slur is under challenge

The downward trend in homicides and some violent crime stats should be cautiously but loudly welcomed
Dave Hill

Sir Sadiq Khan’s fightback against the monstering of London by Britain’s Outer Right of Faragists, fascists and the fouler kind of Conservative has received a boost in the form of figures showing there were fewer homicides – a term covering murder, manslaughter and infanticide – over the summer months of 2025 than in any year since 2018.

Throughout August in particular, the “due impartiality” and pitchfork nationalist media alike have lavished coverage on ludicrous claims such as the Reform UK leader’s that no one dares wear jewellery in the West End after dark and the mendacious repeat slur that “Sadiq Khan’s London” is “lawless”.

These portrayals of London leading a national descent into rampant criminality, all of them linked with varying degrees of slyness to immigration, are at odds with even the police statistics Nigel Farage says he relies on (he dismissed the Crime Survey for England and Wales, held by crime trend experts to be the most reliable, as “based on completely false data”, but didn’t elaborate).

But now the capital has emerged from June, July and August, the period when homicides are often most frequent, with a tally of such grim deaths numbering 27 compared with, for example, 41 in 2021 and in the low or middle 30s for the three years after that.

The distinctive characteristic of homicide stats is that, unlike every other form of law-breaking, they aren’t open to concerns about routine under-reporting or unreliable gathering and processing that can be raised about police figures for other kinds of offence. When someone has been killed by someone else, that stark fact tends to be clear and undisputed.

The Mayor and the Met have also emphasised a reduction in the number of homicides for the whole of this year so far compared to this stage of last year, and falls over longer periods in the numbers of young victims. Add to these, drops in cases of theft from the person and personal robbery reported to the Met and a Notting Hill Carnival that failed to provide the carnage some had ghoulishly hoped for, and a sturdy counter narrative is underway.

Naturally, Susan Hall, the Donald Trump and Rupert Lowe-supporter chosen by the London Assembly Conservatives to be their leader, has dismissed the better news on homicides, preferring to talk up “knife crime”. This is statistical category includes offences where the assailant threatens to use a knife but might not even have one. It is, though, linked closely in the public mind with stabbings. Hall and her like are less interested in reality and remedies than in ramping up fear. Promiscuous use of the term “knife crime” serves that purpose well.

But what explains the fall in London homicides and, according to Met stats, other types of offence that cause anxiety as well as harm? How much of it can be credited to mayoral policies and Met policing, and how much to good luck that might not hold?

When crime figures are discouraging and the Mayor is held to blame – often, sad to say, by some or other twit scribbling for the Standard – it is important to point out that no Mayor of London has the ability to turn the crime tap off at will, whoever that Mayor may be.

Certain types of offending may increase or decrease for reasons beyond the immediate control of City Hall or the Met, sometimes linked to ebbs and flows in drug market competition, specific, highly local factors and so on. A rise in the numbers for a particular type of offence can indicate a greater public willingness to report them, or better Met success with detection. In any case, Mayors don’t sit in equivalents of Churchill War Rooms ordering battalions of bobbies around, and just as well – if they did, it would do more harm than good.

So, just as we should challenge political opportunists when the figures get worse, we need to pause before awarding plaudits when they are more encouraging.

Responding to the homicide stats, Sir Mark Rowley has said a “sustained crackdown on violent crime” has got results. Lib Peck, director of London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU), set up under Khan, has highlighted early intervention with the young. And certainly, a combination of relentless, tightly-targeted enforcement and the prevention efforts of Peck’s department and its neighbourhood partners seems more likely to produce good outcomes than the evangelical, often devious, authoritarianism craved by the “lawless London” mob.

The longer positive trends continue, the stronger the arguments made for the Met’s tactics and the VRU strategy will look. In the meantime, social attitudes and conditions that nurture violence, including by men against women, are still present in the capital. As any serious crime-fighting mission understands, they need tackling too.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. Photo from Greater London Authority.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: crime, Nigel Farage, Susan Hall

John Vane: Farringdon chuggers

Their flattery was energetic but it failed
John Vane

I had almost made it over Cowcross Street before being chased and hailed.

“Good morning, young man, you’re looking great today, I know you’re rushing off to a meeting with Bill Gates, but…”

A bit of what he said was true. I was, indeed, in a rush. I mentioned this over my shoulder as I completed my scuttle from the brand new Elizabeth line Farringdon station into the one opposite. It is old. Even older than me.

Addressing gentlemen in their sixties as “young man” is an interesting ploy. What is the thinking behind it? That we’ll be flattered? Amused? Charmed? How often, I wonder, does it work?

It didn’t work with me. I hastened to the barrier, Freedom Pass in hand, hoping I had conveyed some sense of good humour and well-wishing to my artful pursuer, whose line of work, after all, isn’t one I need to consider.

Guys like him, young, usually black, buzzing with ersatz affability, pouncing evangelically on passers-by, have become a regular feature of this pedestrianised link in a rail chain now used by up to 150,000 people daily.

You’ve seen them there. You’ve seen them elsewhere. You’ve seen the exposes. The complaints. Maybe you’ve made one. If so, it didn’t work.

There’s no escaping them. Your only option is to observe them while rebuffing them and wonder how they come up with their lines. Why Bill Gates? Why me?

An old favourite is “Could I be cheeky…?” Well, you can try. But I’ve got what I wanted from the encounter: a scan of your wares (a magazine full of nothing); a look into your eyes (less empty, more hopeful and more hopeless at the same time). You, on the other hand, have not.

This high-pressure chugging for an opaquely social mission is a modern London thing, but it is also an adjunct to a Farringdon tradition.

For centuries, long before the influx of creatives and tech, this mosaic tile of London, a subset of Clerkenwell and a spit from Smithfield, was a labyrinth of hustlers and hoods.

During the reign of the first Elizabeth, Turnmill Street, which leads off Cowcross, was notorious for crime and vulgarity, which is why playwrights of the era loved it.

The neighbourhood’s narrow streets were nicknamed Jack Ketch’s Warren, because so many who lived round there ended up being dispatched by Charle II’s executioner.

Under Victoria, Charles Dickens fashioned the Oliver Twist pickpocketing scene on Clerkenwell Green, which is a two-minute walk from the station.

The Farringdon chuggers aren’t robbers or thieves, but their methods can make you feel cornered and wary of being fleeced. Presumably, it works – at least well enough for enough of them to keep on trying, picking their targets, zooming in, referring to old blokes as “young man”.

And you have to feel for them. But Betsey Trotwood would not have approved, and even were I Bill Gates himself I doubt I would give them a bean.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Farringdon

Protecting Workers on the Track: An encounter and a dispute

An important group of London Underground workers, supplied to Transport for London as temporary staff, is unhappy about a new contractual arrangement
Dave Hill

It is easy to take for granted the scale and complexity of keeping the London Underground working, providing up to four million passenger journeys a day. And it is easy to forget, perhaps especially so with strikes by some Tube workers on the near horizon, that many people essential to keeping the network running are little known of and rarely seen.

I encountered some of those, entirely by chance, during a visit to Blackfriars the other day. Emerging from Southwark station, I spotted them across the road outside the Palestra building, where Transport for London has office space – a group of maybe 20, most (but not all) of them men, most wearing hi-vis jackets, some carrying placards, and all of them with armbands bearing the initials PWT.

That stands for Protecting Workers on the Track. Essentially, PWT personnel on the London Underground are responsible for the safety of others working on or around Tube rails, be that supervising the movement of trains or having full control or “possession” of a designated section of track. “If one of us is not there, people doing maintenance or whatever it is, cannot do their job,” is how one of those outside Palestra put it.

What is their beef with TfL? They aren’t TfL employees, but agency-supplied. TfL has recently entered into the latest of a number of contracts with Morson, a large recruitment firm that bills itself as the UK leader for placing people in transport and rail jobs.

The PWT demonstrators claimed that this new deal, due to come into effect from Monday, will weaken their job security and have the effect of reducing their incomes. Morson disputes this, saying in a statement that “terms have not been reduced” and that payment rates “remain on a like-for-like basis with the previous contract” at levels “well above the London Living Wage”.

The detail is complex, but in an email to Sir Sadiq Khan, sent last Monday, Ibrahim Shittu, writing on behalf of “protection services personnel” who work for Network Rail within London and TfL subsidiaries as well as on the Tube, says that a move to a form of PAYE taxation system will entail a reduction in net income and, at the same time, no enhanced employment rights or security. “Workers will still face a disguised form of zero-hour contracting, with no guaranteed shifts,” the letter says.

Agency work, of course, is often less reliably available than permanent employment, but also allows a flexibility appreciated by some. However, the PWT protesters feel that their positions have been made unacceptably more precarious.

Usually, they work at night, when track maintenance is routinely done. They describe not knowing if they are to be needed until four and five in the afternoon or even as late as eight in the evening, receiving the information by text. The unsocial hours and qualifications required mean, according to one I spoke to, that a five-shift week can yield an income of around £1,000 a week, which above the London median of around £850. But a two-shift week means only £400 or so.

In his letter, Shittu says that under the previous framework, PWT workers’ pay rates corresponded to their qualifications, so that those with higher level certificates were paid better accordingly, regardless of the specific tasks they were asked to perform, but that from now on, the highest qualified will only be paid the highest rates if the work undertaken requires that degree of expertise.

Moreover, he contends to the Mayor that workers will no longer be able to go to an alternative agency due to “Morson now monopolising the contract”. Previously, another agency also supplied this type of temporary staff. Shittu also points out, as did his colleagues outside Palestra, that some of them have been doing this work for more than 20 years.

A number of the roughly 200 PWT personnel in London are individually members of the RMT union – which has long called for their roles to be brought in-house – but it is not in a position to negotiate for them. The Mayor, who chairs the TfL board, has been asked to halt the contract.

Below is Morson’s statement in full:

“Terms have not been reduced; payment rates under the new PAYE model were developed in collaboration with our expert accountancy partners and umbrella company suppliers. These remain on a like-for-like basis with the previous contract. Workers continue to receive fair, transparent pay that is well above the London Living Wage, while their rights and job security remain unchanged. This PAYE model also brings track protection workers in line with other TfL contracts and other government bodies, ensuring consistency, compliance, and fairness across the board.

 Morson Group takes pride in maintaining the highest standards of compliance and worker protection across all contracts. These principles remain at the heart of how we operate and reflect our ongoing commitment to the workforce who are essential to the capital’s transport infrastructure. Looking ahead, we will continue working with TfL and trade unions to safeguard fair standards and ensure the voices of our workforce remain central as we support London’s future transport needs.”

I’ve asked for more detail about some specific points and will update when this arrives. TfL said:

” We encourage Morson to continue engaging with their workforce on the concerns raised.”

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: London Living Wage, London Underground, Transport for London

Lewis Baston: Lib Dems bury Labour in West Hampstead landslide

A big gain with a big swing in Labour-dominated Camden highlighted the party of government's vulnerability to challenges from several quarters
Lewis Baston

The Liberal Democrats won an impressive victory in a by-election in the West Hampstead ward of Camden on Thursday, gaining the seat with a high swing. But the question of which party they gained the seat from is a little more complicated than usual.

Both Labour and the Conservatives had cause for embarrassment thanks to the trajectory of former councillor Shiva Tiwari. A managing director at the private equity firm Peak Rock, Tiwari had been a valued recruit to Labour’s slate in 2018, but he became disenchanted with the party and resigned from it in March 2025 to join the Conservatives.

In doing so, he criticised Labour both nationally and locally, arguing that “I just don’t think the Labour Party stands any more for the values that I strongly believe in around supporting hard-working families and small and medium-sized businesses to drive economic growth”. He accused Camden Labour of “pursuing a minority leftist agenda”.

The depleted Conservative contingent on Camden Council, reduced to just three councillors in the 2022 elections, welcomed Tiwari with open arms and made him deputy leader of their group. He was selected as a candidate for the Frognal ward, Camden’s only Tory stronghold, for the borough elections in May 2026 and seemed set fair for a significant role in his new party home.

However, Tiwari’s period as an asset to the Conservatives proved short. On 12 July, he went to pick up a package at the Costcutter supermarket on Finchley Road and got involved in a dispute with the staff there about whether he had a correct form of identification. Tempers rose and Tiwani shouted, “Don’t annoy me, I’m a councillor for this area, I will shut down your bloody shop, ok? Call your boss, this is a joke,” and went on to use foul language. The incident was recorded on the shop’s CCTV. Tiwari expressed regret for his part in the altercation and resigned his seat on the council.

It was not an election Camden Labour wanted to fight. West Hampstead’s electoral history is interesting. Its predecessor ward, West End, elected one Conservative and one Labour councillor in 1978, but then voted Labour across the board in the next three sets of local elections. In 1986, the Alliance (precursors to the Lib Dems) won neighbouring Fortune Green and some of the local activism spread next-door: the Lib Dems won their first seat in West End in 1994, mopped up the other in 1998, and then dominated three-member West Hampstead from its creation in 2002 until 2014, when Labour gained all three seats. But the Lib Dem vote did not fade away, and even at their 2018 low point they still had a quarter of the vote. West Hampstead has been a vigorously contested Labour-Lib Dem battlefield for over 30 years.

It is a compact ward, well-served by public transport. The three West Hampstead stations (Jubilee Line, Mildmay Line, Thameslink), lined up along West End Lane, are the focus of the ward, although the railway lines divide the residential areas from each other. In the east, the ward extends to Finchley Road, the eponymous stations (including Finchley Road & Frognal) and the O2 Centre, a 1998 shopping centre which was very trendy when it first opened but has aged poorly.

In the east, West Hampstead touches the borough boundary just opposite Kilburn station at the end of Maygrove Road and under the railway arches. The southern boundary is the southernmost railway line, except for several streets around Sherriff Road opposite the West Hampstead Jubilee Line station. To the north, it is divided from Fortune Green at Mill Lane and the northernmost part of West End Lane that runs east-west. Fortune Green and West Hampstead are closely linked and effectively form a single urban community of West Hampstead.

Demographically, West Hampstead is the sort of ward found only in the big cities. It is dominated by flats (89 per cent of households), and 39 per cent of people live alone (29 per cent do in London as a whole). The population is disproportionately drawn from people aged between 20 and 50, and a staggering 66 per cent are educated to degree level, nearly twice the national proportion.

It is skewed towards professional and managerial workers (55 per cent, compared to 38 per cent in London). West Hampstead is ethnically mixed but fairly white for London (62 per cent compared to 54 per cent) and by faith it is plurality non-religious (37 per cent) with a significant (six per cent) Jewish community. The politics of the ward can be read off from these figures – it is a metropolitan liberal stronghold and proud of it, with a small but persistent wealthy Conservative element.

The residential areas forming West Hampstead ward are mostly late Victorian terraces, with subtle social gradations between subdivided villas overlooked by railway lines to the larger family houses up towards the centre of Hampstead. There is also the 1970s Lymington Road council estate, also known as the Potteries because its streets and walks are named, apparently randomly, after pottery firms and the city of Dresden.

Admirers of quirky street names, fresh from last week’s chinchilla-inflected contest in Hounslow, will also be happy with West Hampstead. There is a path named after rock and roller Billy Fury and a road named in Victorian times after a large Indonesian island for reasons nobody seems to know. There is a complete gazetteer of Camden street names with explanations (when they exist) and a little history of street-naming to be found online. Sumatra Road, incidentally, was crowned in 2015 as the UK’s most canvassed street, being in a key three-way marginal (Hampstead & Kilburn) within easy reach of Westminster on the Jubilee line.

The West Hampstead landscape is in the process of changing because of the development of the O2 site, which extends nearly all the way from Finchley Road to West Hampstead stations on a stretch of land originally earmarked for the Ringway motorway scheme that was cancelled in the mid-1970s. Camden Council approved the masterplan for the site in 2023, and it will eventually yield 1,800 new dwellings, 600 of them graded affordable. The development is intended to be car-free. Work on the first phase has already begun with the demolition of the Homebase store at the far end of the O2 car park.

The O2 development was a campaign issue. Labour supported the scheme for its new housing and argued that existing local residents would get benefits, including new parks and £10 million in improvements to West Hampstead station. The Lib Dems were more equivocal, arguing that the housing was good but improved local infrastructure should precede it, but it was not a major theme of their campaign. The Conservatives complained about the 15-storey “high rise” buildings in the development – the developers argue that density is needed to allow more green space – and Reform UK alleged that “uncontrolled development is reshaping West Hampstead behind closed doors”.

The issue of fly tipping was prominent in the campaign, as it was in Cranford last week. It seems a ubiquitous problem regardless of whether the ward is urban, suburban or semi-rural, although the very central boroughs are perhaps less affected. It rankles with voters who see it as a sign of creeping squalor in their neighbourhood and an example of the state’s inability to control antisocial behaviour.

Looking into the economics of why the tippers do it and enforcing the regulations that exist would be good investments by central and local government. Labour pointed out that Camden was doing this, funding an enforcement officer focused on West End Lane and prosecuting several local businesses for violations, but the opposition argued that there was a lot of room for improvement.

Liberal Democrat leaflets targeted left-liberal voters who had supported Labour in the 2024 general election and subsequently felt disappointed. They criticised the Starmer government over welfare cuts, Europe and potential cuts to central government funding of London boroughs. Gaza came up frequently on the doorstep. Labour’s campaign majored on the record of Camden Council, one of London’s more effective and popular borough administrations, although it is rare even in those circumstances for people to feel all that grateful for improved schools and libraries.

The candidates were an interesting bunch. The Lib Dems selected Janet Grauberg, a significant personality in the local party and Camden’s political history. Camden is, despite having more wealthy and Conservative areas than other inner north London boroughs, generally loyal to  Labour, and Labour control has only lapsed on two occasions – the Conservative sweep of 1968 and Labour’s recent nadir of 2006. The result in that year was a hung council, with the Lib Dems the largest single party. The administration was formed from a coalition between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives.

Elected for Kilburn ward, Grauberg became the borough’s cabinet member for finance. Labour regained control in 2010, unseating her in Kilburn. She stood there again in 2014 and 2018 with diminishing returns and was redeployed to the more hopeful ward of West Hampstead in 2022, achieving a strong result – the Labour version of Tiwari finished only 38 votes ahead of her, and she led her Lib Dem colleagues by around 200 votes, indicating an effective personal campaign.

Her personal qualities formed a major part of the Lib Dem by-election campaign – she had been awarded an OBE for services to education and the community. Labour criticised her record in power in 2006-10. If there is a non-Labour administration to be formed after the 2026 elections, Grauberg will form an important part of it.

Labour’s candidate was Francesca Reynolds, a young parliamentary staffer and management consultant. The Conservatives nominated Ian Cohen, who had contested West Hampstead in 2022 and Fortune Green in both 2014 and a 2021 by-election. Cohen runs a dry-cleaning business in West End Lane and is a long-standing local resident. Thomas Sterling stood for Reform and Matthew Hull represented the Greens.

Despite a vigorous campaign, the electorate had not shaken off its summer torpor and turnout was poor (26.4 per cent). As the Lib Dem bar charts claimed, it was a two-horse race – their campaigners were impressed by the Labour effort and pushed back against predictions of a big win. But when the votes were counted Grauberg (pictured, centre) had won in a landslide. She polled 1,176 votes – eight more than in the higher turnout 2022 borough elections  – which amounted to 54.4 per cent of the vote (up from 38.9 per cent in 2022).

Reynolds fought a good fight, but was miles behind on 21.2 per cent (a steep drop from the Labour team’s 44.5 per cent in 2022). Cohen polled 222 votes (10.3 per cent), a poor showing, although the Tory vote was buffeted by Lib Dem squeeze tactics and the arrival on the ballot of Reform (155 votes, 7.2 per cent). The Greens brought up the rear with 152 votes (7.0 per cent).

It is not a good sign for Labour that they ran a decent campaign yet only just scraped over the 20 per cent barrier, even considering the factors making for a good Lib Dem result. It is enough to make one revise down the estimates of Labour performance in the 2026 borough elections, and those predictions were not looking too rosy to start with. But the question with challenges to Labour’s inner London hegemony is always from which direction they might come, and whether the opposition merely split the vote and enable Labour to survive despite reduced support.

In West Hampstead it was always clear that the Lib Dems were the main contenders, but in many wards it is far from clear – Conservatives, Reform, Lib Dems, Greens, local parties, Independents and Corbynites will all have ambitions. Three Camden by-elections last year painted a confused picture. To lose Camden, for example, Labour needs to lose 20 seats compared to 2022. It is easy to see six going to the Lib Dems and two more going to the Greens, but after that it gets harder. The bedraggled Camden Tories would have to pick up seats in their targets such as South Hampstead and Primrose Hill and the Greens would need to expand into Kentish Town. That’s still only 19 seats, so somewhere unexpected would have to flip as well.

Camden, for the first time since 2010, will be one of the headline contests in London, as local voters weigh the merits of the council and their verdict on Sir Keir Starmer’s government on the Prime Minister’s home turf.

Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. Photo from Janet Grauberg’s X/Twitter feed.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Camden Council, Labour, Liberal Democrats

Nick Cuff: Why London stopped building

Housing supply has become chronically slow and the development sector will only change that if there's a big rethink of tax and regulation
Nick Cuff

This is a very lightly edited version of an article originally published last month at Prop Views. Its author is managing director of real estate advisers Urban Sketch Ltd and has long and varied experience in London local politics, planning and housing supply.

***

Two weeks ago, London focused furniture company David Phillips went into administration.  The business, roughly 25 years old, cited the ongoing downturn in the housing and construction market. I had worked successfully with David Phillips on mobilising several build to rent schemes. It was a great business and an important part of the complex ecosystem of companies that aid the delivery of good quality homes for sale and rent.

That ecosystem, once so bright, is being rapidly dissembled, the victim of a series of poorly thought through policy interventions and perhaps well-intentioned but politically motivated attempts to spur affordable housing that have backfired.

Only 3,950 new homes were sold in the first half of 2025, according to housing data company Molior – just nine per cent of the government’s half year delivery target for London.

Molior predicts that by 2028 the industry can expect just £90 million of completion funds to flow through per week rather than the £1 billion it should expect. This is not the bottom. It is likely to get worse. High density brownfield sites for residential flatted schemes, once the bedrock of the London market, are no longer viable. There appears as yet to be no meaningful attempt in government to address the issues.

Why has London stopped building? The first thing to say is that it is not because of NIMBYs and defective planning committees alone, although neither are very helpful.

The system was always precarious – a delicate balance of pragmatic trade-offs by local authorities and developers accepting risk of discretionary decisions because the returns were there.    Sometimes they did well, sometimes they did not, but there was always an opportunity to recover returns during the elongated development process.

Those returns have been whittled away over the last five years. On the demand side, erosion has come in the form of Stamp Duty, soaring mortgage rates, tax changes on overseas investors and Buy To Lets, the loss of Help to Buy and the impact of higher risk free rates on Build To Rent yields.

On the supply side, more taxes mean more costs to carry. Two forms of Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), Section 106 contributions, carbon offset levies, biodiversity net gain and now the soon to be adopted Building Safety Levy (BSL). It doesn’t end there: a landfill tax hike is also being mooted to firmly nail the coffin of brownfield housing development.

Then you have new regulatory requirements around fire safety. Buildings have lost around three to five percent of net saleable floor area from the addition of secondary cores and evacuation lifts. Less revenue, more cost and on an appraisal the impact is around 20 per cent on land value (or if you had already bought your site before the changes, your entire profit).

That’s a big ouch made worse by the fact you still have to pay CIL and the BSL on all that extra space. The newly implemented Gateway system, rather than facilitating safer developments, has merely become a check post causing serious delays to delivery, exacerbating the shortage of housing.

It’s been five years since James Murray left the role of London’s deputy mayor for housing to sit sits on the green benches. He departed with a legacy of additional planning requirements which now cannot work alongside the tax and building safety changes of the last three years.

“Genuinely affordable” housing was good party politics for Murray and adopted by the Sadiq Khan mayoralty when he came to office. It suggested previous administrations had somehow got a bad deal from developers. With limited grant available to pay for social housing, City Hall decided to put further onus onto the private sector by introducing a set of profit capture mechanisms, or late stage reviews, for all development proposals which didn’t hit 35 per cent both in terms of tenure and mix.

This meant the Mayor proposed to take the majority of profit over a certain percentage. His upside is unlimited and difficult to price. He has no downside and he has no capital at risk. That sits squarely on the developer: to assemble, fund and project manage a development where profit is fixed for all time but you are exposed to catastrophic losses. The result? Investors  required far higher returns because the London planning system is so obscure. Such complexity has also disempowered local politicians and planners from making judgement calls.

Is there much distinction between a local politician who opposes new housing and a local politician who supports new housing as long as it is social housing? If the state is not willing to pay for it and the private sector cannot afford it, there is actually little difference between the two positions. Both end up at the same place – nothing gets built. That is what is happening across London.

A mistaken belief that the private sector could and should pay for everything and anything has led to an exodus from the capital and to other, less politicised, asset classes. The housebuilders were the first to go, then the investors, both foreign and domestic. The housing assoications have consolidated and looked to their own estates for improvements rather than take development risk.

Multifamily Build To Rent, which should be motoring in a rental crisis, now creates negative land values, unable to provide anywhere near 35 per cent affordable due to higher debt costs. The sector that is functioning is single family housing – much less risk and far, far away from London.

Co-living and student development are still there. But London cannot rely on this alone and even these tenures are under huge pressure due to the building safety regulations and the risks around the Renters Rights Bill. There is no golden goose to be found in them, just an avoidance of negative land value.

The simple truth is that housing development is not a bonanza of goodies, yet successive governments and the mayoralty have mistakenly thought otherwise. It can offer something, but if the planning system is too demanding the consequence is that we all get nothing.

Urban renewal, housing agglomeration and regeneration yield long term benefits to society and the economy, but they are often not immediate cash cows and many times they need state subsidy or at least co-investment. Limited government resources have meant the default position is that the private sector is always there. But it has turned out to have alternative options.

There are huge tracts of land in London, much of it brownfield. You look at the bigger cities and the land is there. A “brownfield first” approach can carry a very significant part of the housing numbers where people want to live.

Unlocking it requires a move away from a discretionary, poorly resourced and land tax heavy broken system. Simpler rules, which are based on zones to which developers and investors are enticed and encouraged to put their capital at risk to improve the built environment is now the only way back. Politicians, both national and regional, need to get real about the viabilities of sites in London and elsewhere. Over the course of the past decade, governments and Mayors have extracted more and more value to the point where there is little to none left.

The public sector does not have the cash to build, so it must find ways to encourage others to take the risk.  That means simpler, fairer rules and an end to the war on profit that has stopped this great city from building.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: affordable housing, housing, Section 106