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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brent, Camden, Harrow Road

Southwark: Defection from Labour illuminates party’s survival hopes

A high-profile councillor has joined the Greens, but might he have helped his old party more than he's hindered it?
Dave Hill

The departure of James McAsh from his role as Labour-run Southwark’s cabinet member for clean air, streets and waste to the Green Party opposition benches is certainly a significant event. It follows a chaotic Labour group leadership contest last summer, which saw McAsh initially elected, only for the result to be overturned after a higher Labour power deemed there had been irregularities in the process.

A re-run saw McAsh defeated by Labour colleague Sarah King, who duly became the successor to Kieron Williams. Now, as Southwark News reports, McAsh is heaping scorn on his former party, and the leader of his new one is cheering him on. But McAsh’s defection raises an interesting question – will it help Labour in Southwark come 7 May more than it will hurt them?

In Southwark, the Liberal Democrats form the official opposition, having won 11 seats in the borough elections of 2022, compared to Labour’s 52 and the zero of everyone else. Although a long way behind, the Lib Dems have a significant recent history of winning elections and exercising power in Southwark. At parliamentary level, Simon Hughes had a seat there for decades. And in 2002 and 2006, following close finishes with historically-dominant Labour, the Lib Dems took the lead role in hung councils with Conservative support.

It is therefore unsurprising that they are portraying themselves as the natural and most potent alternative to Labour in 2026 for voters disillusioned with that party’s performance both local and nationally. But as the Lib Dems themselves appear very aware, they have a rival suitor for the Southwark anti-Labour vote. It is, of course, the Greens. If the party McAsh has just joined picks up votes the Lib Dems need, the overall effect could be be to split the anti-Labour vote within what psephologists are now calling the Left Bloc of voters – those who choose between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens – and in so doing enable Labour candidates to prevail, even if their share of the vote falls.

The 2022 result in McAsh’s Goose Green ward – which he has told On London he intends to defend as a Green in May – illustrates the potential for such a scenario this time. As Southwark’s website shows (below), the three Labour candidates, McAsh among them, topped the Goose Green ward with room to spare, taking 21, 19 and 17 per cent shares of the vote respectively. In fourth place, a Lib Dem candidate got eight per cent. She was followed by a Green, also with eight per cent (and just 23 fewer votes). In sixth and seventh came two more Lib Dems, both on six per cent, and in eighth came the other Green candidate to contest the ward with five per cent.

Screenshot 2026 02 18 at 15.10.54

In summary, there was next to nothing to chose between the Green and Lib Dem challenges to Labour four years ago – expect that support for the Greens increased. If the same occurs this time, Labour could feasibly win in Goose Green again, even if their candidates experience a fall in support (as they could well do) and even if backing for both the Greens and the Lib Dems goes up (as it might). The challenge for the Greens and Lib Dems alike will include persuading Labour switchers that they are the better option, both in policy and tactical terms. If no clear winner emerges, maybe Labour will hang on. Or maybe there will be winners from more than one party.

Of course, across the whole of Southwark, as elsewhere, local factors will come into play too: all parties may need to decide to give some wards more attention than others; some individual candidates will be more energetic than others; in Goose Green, McAsh’s relatively high profile might give him an edge; the national picture could shift a bit as well. It’s all highly unpredictable, and similar scenarios exist in other Southwark wards, as they do in other inner London boroughs, such as Camden.

Southwark Lib Dems seems well aware that the Greens could rain on their comeback parade. Earlier this month, they issued a press release welcoming as a candidate to defend St George’s ward a woman who stood for the Greens in a different one four years ago. Her new party, she insisted, is the only one in Southwark with a serious chance of beating Labour. And their leader, Victor Chamberlain, responding to McAsh’s defection, told Southwark News: “Everyone knows that after May the council will be led by either the Labour Party or the Liberal Democrats.”

The Greens, though, received 16.5 per cent of the popular vote in Southwark in 2022 – up by 4.4 per cent on 2018. It didn’t win them any seats, but it put them close behind the Lib Dems, who got 19.5. One way or another, they could have a significantly bigger influence on the outcome this time.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Apple podcasts. Photo: Southwark Town Hall, Tooley Street.

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

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Green Party, James McAsh, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Sarah King, Southwark Council, Victor Chamberlain

Sadiq Khan announces funds to target phone thefts as Met says number falling

The Mayor has released early details from his forthcoming 20206/7 budget as he and the police continue to challenge negative portrayals of the city's street crime levels
Dave Hill

Sir Sadiq Khan has announced that additional funds from his next budget will be devoted to what City Hall is calling “a major new crackdown on mobile phone theft in the capital” as political and media opponents continue to portray the capital as “lawless”.

Focussed primarily on the West End, the initiative includes a proposal for the Metropolitan Police Service to set up “a new mobile phone Command Cell” for coordinating intelligence about thefts and robberies of phones and responses to them.

City Hall has also published Met crime figures showing that the number of recorded thefts of mobile phones in Greater London as a whole fell from a total of 81,365 to one of 71,391, a drop of 12.3 per cent, during a recent one-year period.

The 12 months to November 2025 saw:

  • The number of Met-recorded offences categorised as “knife crime” reduce by 2,420 or 14.5 per cent (“knife crime” ranges from an injury being inflicted by a bladed incident to assailants intimating to victims that they have a knife in their possession without one necessarily being seen).
  • The number of recorded violent offences resulting in injury falling by 4,884 offences, or seven percent. The downward trend has been seen to varying degrees in all 32 boroughs except Harrow.
  • “Personal robbery”, which means theft from the person involving violence, has fallen by 4,309 offences (or 15 per cent) according to the Met figures.
  • Crimes involving the use of guns, which are much rarer, have fallen too, including incidents in which they were fired, according to the Met stats.
  • City Hall also says police data show that robberies of all kinds have fallen by 46 per cent in what it terms “key hotspots” with thefts in those areas down by “more than a quarter”. It attributes these falls to funding from the Mayor enabling a doubling of the number of police officers in the West End as a whole, “leading to a 25 per cent reduction in theft”.

Sir Mark Rowley said the Met has been “relentlessly cracking down on phone thieves and dismantling organised criminal networks at every level – from the pickpockets and phone snatchers operating on our streets, to the handlers who profit from their crimes, right through to the international networks exporting stolen phones overseas.

As well as celebrating the new figures, Rowley renewed his call for manufacturers and tech companies to “do more to stop criminals being able to reset, reuse or resell stolen phones” and for the courts to “play their part by preventing repeat offenders being bailed only to go out and offend again,” undermining officers’ work.

The Met said that “local officers” had been working alongside “specialist proactive teams” using drones, Sur-On e-bikes and live facial recognition technology to catch offenders and disrupt the stolen phone market.

To observe some the Met’s work, the Mayor visited Charing Cross police station from which operations against crime involving culprits using two-wheeled vehicles are conducted. The station was the subject of a BBC Panorama investigation, which uncovered numerous examples of Met officers falling below professional standards. Several of them have faced disciplinary proceedings and charges of gross misconduct were last week found proven against a constable who has since retired.

The Mayor’s final draft budget, covering proposed spending  on all members of the Greater London Authority group of organisations, including the Met, for the financial year 2026/27 will be published on Wednesday.

Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Apple podcasts. Photo from Met Police.

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

Categories: News
Tags: crime, Metropolitan Police, policing, Sadiq Khan

Jim Minton: Devolution can help London do more for young Londoners

New legal powers and national strategies will enable the collaborative work of major institutions across the capital to achieve even more in the future
Jim Minton

Last week, providers of London’s key public services, including the NHS, local authorities and the police and fire services, as well as universities and other public bodies, gathered at City Hall to reflect on five years of the London Anchor Institutions Network (LAIN) whose members employ tens of thousands of people and make a huge contribution to London’s civic, social and economic life.

I co-chaired one of the Mayor’s “recovery missions” during the pandemic at the outset of the LAIN, so it was good to look back with enthusiasm at its achievements: significant employment opportunities for young people; raising living standards through collectively committing to paying the London Living Wage; embracing climate adaptation; and, most of all, creating a positive momentum across the city in partnership with the Mayor and the boroughs.

Conversations similar to those at the anniversary event took place at Monday’s London Funders conference, where the broad and stimulating agenda aimed to grapple – amid national political uncertainty – with the significant, multi-level challenges communities face, including in the context of devolution. Again, there was a view that embracing the potential of long-term partnerships for systemic change, particularly for young people, could make a major difference.

There has definitely already been positive progress from taking this approach. In January, the London crime figures showed that over time a major reduction in violence had been achieved. The leadership of the Mayor and his Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) were key in this, but so were anchors such as the police and NHS as well as charities like the Mayor’s Fund for London – of which I am chief executive – and hundreds of partner community organisations.

The result of this sustained, collective effort is that London is now safer than many other cities. Young people can live their lives less fearfully and more able to take advantage of the city’s many positive opportunities. We can build on this.

The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will soon become law. Over the last year, I’ve worked closely with charities in other regions and civil servants looking at the opportunities it might open up. It is clear to us that the Bill sets a higher expectation that Mayors and regional partnerships should be the engines of growth and positive change.

Of course, what governments say about regional power and what they do may be different things – particularly at a time when Westminster is striving to reset and stabilise. And often in London there’s a risk that devolution is seen as something that affects “the north” and not us. However, the ambitions of the government’s new strategies for addressing child poverty and supporting young people anticipate a greater role for regional leadership in all parts of the country.

If we in the capital are to take this opportunity and make progress with tackling other deep challenges that young people face – being excluded from the jobs market, of the affordability and availability of good quality housing options, the crisis of wellbeing and the broader cost of living – we need to four things to happen:

  1. Let regions lead: the government must be true to its devolution ambitions. It’s so obvious that a region’s challenges can be better solved by the people and communities within that region. Yes, there should be a national framework and ambition. But let the power to change rest locally and regionally.
  2. Engage young people and communities: at the LAIN event, anchor institutions in Barnet showed how they had actively engaged young people and communities in setting their net zero strategy. And youth engagement has been a key feature of how the VRU has led progress in London around safety for young people. This should be central to policy development and implementation.
  3. Align funding: government-led initiatives should explicitly be aligned with regional priorities and even channelled through Mayors or Mayor-led partnerships. Any future releases of dormant assets, or the new £10 billion Better Futures Fund could be good starting points. Building on initiatives such as the London Funders-inspired Collaboration Circle, Trust and Foundation funders could also continue to be better aligned with regional and mayoral agendas. We can’t afford resources to be not as well joined up as they should be.
  4. Unlock new resources: and finally related to this, we need urgently to find new sources of investment. This is where London has a genuine advantage and can lead. There is great wealth in London and a shared interest in making the capital an even greater place to live for young people and everyone else. The Mayor’s Fund for London is actively working with stakeholders to help unlock new investment for Londoners, and his call for future investment needs to be part of a wider public narrative.

From the anchors celebration and the London Funders discussions and beyond, it feels as if there is a strong appetite for change, and that it is essential to use London’s assets and advantages better. Let’s take the opportunity of devolution and the openings offered by the new government strategies to really make the long-term change that young people and communities need.

Jim Minton is chief executive of the Mayor’s Fund for London, which you can follow on Bluesky. Photo from Mayor’s Fund for London website.

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

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Devolution, net zero, skills

Talk About London podcast: The Southbank Centre at 75, with chief executive Elaine Bedell

She's seen a lot of change during her nine years in charge and is now looking forward to celebrating the arts complex's 75th anniversary
Dave Hill

When Elaine Bedell became the first female chief executive of the Southbank Centre in 2017, she says she knew there would be “the most incredible staff here, highly creative, spinning gold from not very big budgets.”

That is still the case, she told me and my co-cost Leanne Tritton, chair of The London Society, in our latest edition of Talk About London, despite its Arts Council grant having “declined in real terms over the last 15 years” with the last Conservative government cutting its grant by 10 per cent in the name of “levelling up”.

During her time at the Southbank’s helm Bedell had to steer it through the “traumatic” pandemic and emerge with “a different operating model”, but the centre is still, for financial reasons, able to be fully open only six days a week instead of seven.

Meanwhile, the fabric of the buildings, which the government owns, has had no public money spent on it since 2005 and Arts Council funding cannot be used for that purpose. The Royal Festival Hall, the founding institution of what became the Southbank Centre, was officially opened on 3 May 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. Today it has a leaky roof.

And yet, for all these pressures and problems, the centre will, in earnest from April, celebrate its 75th anniversary this year, with a major Danny Boyle event beginning on anniversary day, 3 May, which Bedell describes as a narrative journey through the building and the history of youth culture – with lots more to come. It will also be 50 years since the advent of the skateboard park in the undercroft. That will be celebrated too.

Bedell also emphasised the Southbank Centre’s national importance. “Lots of regional arts organisations like to use us as their London home,” she says. THe RFI’s National Poetry library will going on tour in a bus to 11 coastal towns and cities to celebrate local poetry. “The denigration of the capital city or the stifling of its creative life is a real mistake,” she says. Enjoy the whole conversation below.

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

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

Categories: Culture
Tags: Lambeth, Southbank Centre

John Vane: Resolution 26 (Update 1)

Having publicly set three demanding goals for this year, it seems only right and proper to provide progress reports
John Vane

I have this method for writing novels. It’s one I often readopt yet always fail to stick to. Like Alice, I give myself such very good advice, but very seldom follow it. But maybe things will be different with Project Z.

Project Z was introduced to you in my article of 20 January headlined Resolution 26, though I didn’t give at that name (or any other). It is a novel for children. In the book trade it would fall into the “middle grade” age group, meaning eight to 12-year-olds.

I suppose that’s the audience I have in mind, but I’m not thinking about targeting or reading the market or all those things you ought to do if you’re trying to find a publisher (which I’m not, at the moment) and attract droves of fans. For me, as I explained before, Project Z is primarily a piece of long-unfinished business that I am determined complete this year and, almost certainly, publish myself. Anything else can wait.

My (ahem) method is basically to reach a point where about the first third of the text is written in solid first draft form, all the characters are established and their backstories fixed (though not yet revealed to imagined Project Z readers), and the whole of plot, right the way to the end, has been worked out in advance. From that solid base I then, in theory, proceed to write the rest of the novel, knowing exactly what I’m doing, what happens next and after that and after that, until I get to the gripping and deeply meaningful end.

Well, I have reached that happy stage. Almost. As I previously explained, Project Z has been gestating for far too many years and various versions of the first 25,000 words or so – just over half of the intended finished length of 50,000 – have been floating around on my desktop, sometimes stored in forgotten folders, for ages. My task with getting to the one-third point this time around has largely involved combining and consolidating the various unfinished drafts and generally sharpening them up.

That has enabled me to complete, as I write, just over 18,000 words of the 50,000-word novel, or fractionally over the one-third of it that was my goal. In parallel with this I have made significant progress with the characters’ backstories, though I can’t claim they are finished yet. As for the rest of the plot – specifically, the part that will unfold in the last roughly 10,000 words of the book – that is taking shape but still needs thinking about. A clue: it will concern the main child characters entering London secretly and embarking on a dangerous rescue mission there. To be continued…

Meanwhile, the other short novel I intend to complete this year has received no serious attention from me at all, though it is bubbling away in my subconscious. I’m going to called that novel Project V. As for the third project, the one I’m very shy about, perhaps I’ll call that Project Nuts. Or Project Foolish. Or Project Daft. I don’t suppose I will, but you’re getting the idea. Stay tuned.

Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist here . Photo show Infinite Accumulation, a sculpture by Yayoi Kusama, next to Liverpool Street station. Good, isn’t it?

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

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

What is social housing ‘rent convergence’ and why does London need it?

The capital's councils and housing associations see it as key to repairing their strained finances, improving their stock and building more homes
Dave Hill

Last week, a government press release announced that “thousands more families” will be getting “warm, secure social homes” thanks to “new funding and financial flexibilities” designed to “accelerate social and affordable housebuilding” by councils and housing associations, and to help them deal with damp, mould and poor insulation in existing ones.

Specific measures included a forthcoming, updated Decent Homes Standard, confirmation of the provision of £2.5 billion in low-cost loans to housing associations – of which 60 per cent will be for London – extending a discounted borrowing rate for homebuilding by councils, and reviving a thing called “rent convergence”.

This has long been desired by both London Councils, the body representing all 33 of the capital’s local authorities, and the G15 group of the largest housing associations operating in London. However, despite politely welcoming the government’s measures as a whole, they had hoped rent convergence would go further. So, what is social housing rent convergence and why is it important for London? Let’s begin by going back a bit.

HOW ARE SOCIAL HOUSING RENTS SET?

Since 2002, social housing rents have been determined according to a national formula devised by the Labour government of that time. “Formula rent” levels are based on a combination of local earnings relative to national averages, the value of the properties concerned, the number of bedrooms they contain and housing association rents in England.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has described the formula’s aim of bringing to an end disparities between rent levels in different places and to gradually “achieve convergence” between housing association rents and council rents. The latter tended to be lower, though there could also be striking inconsistencies between council rents in different London boroughs. For example, a report from 2000 found one London council charging £15 a week more than a next-door neighbour for a very similar dwelling.

The goal was to bring all social rents into alignment over a ten-year period. Landlords were initially allowed to increase formula rents by the Retail Price Index (RPI) measure of inflation plus 0.5 per cent. Then, as a House of Commons research briefing explains, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government allowed social landlords to add, in addition to the formula hike, up to £2 a week year-on-year to rents that were lower than the national formula allowed.

In 2013, following some very sharp social rent increases, the coalition announced it would be changing the measure of inflation from RPI to the alternative and lower Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus one per cent, and decided to cut short the convergence policy. The financial implications of this worried social landlords  – but not as much as what followed.

In 2015, soon after the general election of that year which saw the Conservatives win a majority, the then-chancellor George Osborne announced that, from 2016, social housing rents would, for four years, be reduced by one per cent instead of raised.

This was prompted by politically unwelcome rises in the level of housing benefit being awarded to tenants who could not afford to pay their rents without its help. For other tenants, therefore, it was good news. But for social housing providers, it was seriously bad news for their revenues.

Conservative policy changed again from April 2020, with CPI plus one per cent returning for five years, but no accompanying freedom for landlords to increase rents on top of that in order to resume bringing them up to the relevant full “formula” amount and further hasten convergence towards the target of full alignment – an outcome that would also help housing associations and councils afford the costs of maintaining their existing social rented properties and building more new ones, something London urgently requires.

CONVERGENCE COMEBACK – UP TO A POINT

With a new, Labour, government elected in 2024 and the previous one’s social rent policy expiring, London’s councils and housing associations set about making their cases for a settlement that alleviated the financial pressures they are under and addressed one of the most damaging aspects of London’s deepening housing emergency, in particular the condition of some of the city’s existing social housing and the urgent need to build more of it.

Consultations were opened about the future of social housing rent policy in general and then, in July of last year, about how to implement convergence. Last June, chancellor Rachel Reeves said in her spending review that social housing rents would continue to be permitted to rise yearly by CPI plus one per cent from April 2026. The convergence consultation asked if weekly rents should also be allowed to go up by £1 or £2 a week on top of that “until they converge with formula rent” and what the implications would be for tenants and for landlords.

Both the G15 and London Councils asked for more: in each case, they wanted to be able to put rents up by an additional £3 a week, effective from this April. For the latter, which wanted “at least” £3 per week, failure to allow this “could mean at least 7,000 fewer council-led homes over a decade” than would otherwise be the case, and less capacity for reducing homelessness rates and associated ballooning costs.

But they were out of luck. The government has decided to limit it to £1 from April 2027 and to £2 from April 2028. G15 chair Ian McDermott, the chief executive of Peabody, welcomed “the move towards greater rent fairness” along with the other measures. On behalf of London Councils, Grace Williams, executive member for housing and regeneration and leader of Waltham Forest, was fairly frank.

The rent convergence rates “will not end the tough times for London’s social housing finances,” she said. They could bring in about £183 million extra for London’s boroughs, but that would not be enough to cancel out a forecast  estimated £269 million of cuts that will need to be made to housing revenue budgets to make them balance.

Williams concluded: “We are as committed as ever to working with the government and other partners to tackle the crisis. But to achieve this, boroughs urgently need more funding firepower if they are to overcome the challenges stalling development.”

NOW WHAT?

There are approximately 800,000 social rent dwellings across Greater London, a figure that hasn’t changed very much in recent years. A little more than half of them are housing association properties, the rest are council-owned.

At present, there are at least 336,000 households on council waiting lists in the capital for such homes. Some of those will already be living in social housing – a term that became prevalent in the 1980s – and want to move to a different one, frequently because they need more space. But many of them are living in temporary accommodation arranged by their local council – an estimated 210,000 Londoners altogether.

Very broad estimates put average council social rents in London at about £130 a week and those for housing associations at about £148 a week. So there’s still a bit of converging to be done between the two types. Meanwhile, within those two categories, there will be rents for individual tenancies that, for various reasons, have fallen behind the maximum the formula allows, perhaps because social landlords had felt in the past that they couldn’t put them up by the full amount if inflation had been particularly high. It was notable that the Conservatives capped rent increases at seven percent in response to the inflation surge that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Without it, rents could have soared by a punishing 11 per cent.

When a new tenancy begins, a landlord might re-set the rent level up to the full formula amount, which is one way to contribute towards the continuing convergence objective. But it’s the freedom to raise the rents of households in ongoing tenancies by more than CPI plus one per cent a year, and therefore to take them up towards the overall rent formula ceiling, that can make the biggest contribution to convergence – and to helping social landlords into better financial shape. In that respect, London’s housing associations and councils have got a bit of what they asked for, but quite a lot less than all of it.

There are lots of ways of looking at this issue. An extra £1, £2 or £3 a week in rent on top of your formula rent hike might not seem like a fortune, but every pound counts when you don’t have many to spare. Another way involves maintaining that relatively well-off social tenants whose rents are lower than the full formula amounts are getting an unjustified better deal than those whose aren’t. This is what social landlords mean when they talk about convergence creating greater “fairness”.

Stepping back, the rent convergence question forms just one part of a larger debate about social and other “affordable” rent setting and the basis of the national formula, which is still based on metrics from 1999 and 2000. London Councils argues that it is drastically out of date and no longer reflects the high costs of maintaining social homes in the capital. They would like the property value element rebased to 2024 levels. There is also the matter of the extent to which the finances of councils and housing associations should depend on rental income compared with loans of various kinds and government grant funding.

We can come return to all that another day. In the meantime, London’s housing emergency continues.

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: G15, London Councils, social housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for your time. And thanks for reading.

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

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