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Jonathan Seager: Are developers in London land banking instead of house building?

Probably not, actually
Jonathan Seager

It’s a persistent claim that land banking is preventing an increase in the number of homes being built. But before apportioning blame for the squirrelling away of land, it’s important to agree what land banking is: at what point does owning a sustainable pipeline of land become land banking?

A commonly accepted definition is owning land and having planning permission for it (there is a separate but related debate to be had about those who own land without planning permission). But, instead of building homes, the developer waits for the value of the land to increase and then sells it on for a profit. This is the accusation often levelled against developers of all sorts. But is it true?

The evidence is that land banking is not prevalent. This is not to say it never happens, but study after study has shown that land banking is not a significant factor in why we aren’t building enough homes. Most recently, the now former Conservative MP Sir Oliver Letwin concluded as part of his Independent Review of Build Our Rates, Draft Analysis that developers don’t land bank. And, going back to the last decade, in 2008 the then Office of Fair Trading and the seminal 2004 Barker Review both, as part of wider reviews of housing, reached the same conclusion as Letwin.

Why then if report after report states that land banking isn’t an issue does the perception that it is a big problem remain? It is, like all the perceptions about housebuilding we are exploring at London First, convenient political fodder. If you delve a bit deeper the truth can be found.

Two key issues need to be understood: firstly, the operating model of major housebuilders and, secondly, the complexity of the planning system. Understanding these factors helps to explain why not all the land which has planning permission is being built on, and why this doesn’t constitute land banking.

The Letwin Review’s analysis of the housebuilding industry is clear: major housebuilders have a legitimate need to hold enough land so they can plan ahead, and they deliver a flow of homes to the market at a rate that will give them a return on their investment, reflecting the price they paid for land and other obligations they are required to provide such as affordable housing and community infrastructure. Equally, housebuilders generally want to turnover their capital quickly, hence if they have a site with planning permission and they can build on it they will, with the hope of making a profitable return on their investment and then investing that money into other developments.

Turning to the planning system, the argument is made that there’s a disconnect between the number of planning permissions versus the number of homes being built, and this is because developers are land banking. Back in 2012, a study commissioned by the Greater London Authority highlighted that planning permission existed for 210,000 homes that hadn’t been built, but also stated that, for a variety of reasons, this was a notional figure. More recently, analysis undertaken by Quod looked in detail at 604 sites across London with planning permission for 175,963 homes.

There are several good reasons why there is always a significant gap between planning permissions granted and homes built. The first thing to clock is that planning permission is just that – permission to build rather than a requirement to do so. The economy could take a downturn, a developers’ plans could change, a company could go out of business – there are a long list of reasons why, despite the best of intensions, permissions don’t automatically turn into homes.

In London, many of these homes with planning permission are part of large regeneration schemes that take years to build out. So while the overall scheme has been granted planning permission, it is divided up into phases and built out phase by phase over several years, if not longer.

And planning permission often comes with a long list of conditions that must be met before building can commence. This means the principle of the scheme has been approved, but construction activity can’t start until various technicalities have been ironed out. For example, agreement might need to be reached about the landscaping plan for the site. Seemingly minor details can take an inordinate amount of time to be approved.

And finally, schemes that require big bits of infrastructure, such as a new road or Tube station, are likely to have a planning permission that constrains how many homes can be built before the infrastructure is provided. For example, if a development needs a new Tube station to be built, this will take time, particularly where third parties are responsible. So the total number of homes being built under that planning permission will only be realised after another party has delivered the supporting infrastructure.

It’s a complicated old business. What might appear to be land banking is generally far from it. That said, any egregious cases of land banking could and should be cracked down upon by using compulsory purchase powers to acquire the land and put it to productive use. If it really is so prevalent then that is an obvious way to stop it.

So, if land banking isn’t the big issue, what is? To tackle the housing crisis and start building the 65,000 homes London needs each year, three things need to happen:

  1. Government must invest more money to get homes built, unlocking another £8.6 billion from both the public and private sector for London.
  2. The Mayor must use the full weight of his powers to bring more land forward for development, including using compulsory purchase powers.
  3. Boroughs must support innovative ways of building, such as making better use of land through embracing density and supporting new tenures such as build to rent.

Jonathan Seager is executive director, place, with London First, whose website published this article originally.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to providing fair, thorough, anti-populist coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers and would like to pay its freelance contributors better. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: housing, London First

Dave Hill: Build a new Latin Village for Seven Sisters, starting now

Campaigns to save this indoor market in its present form are misleading, misplaced, uninterested in most local feeling and doomed to fail
Dave Hill

Competition for being London’s most blinkered anti-regeneration cause celebre has been hot of late, but the campaign to save the indoor market by Seven Sisters Underground station, known as the Latin Village, is in this Donkey Derby’s leading pack.

Few can match it for stamina: for at least a dozen years, a quarrelsome yet self-replenishing alliance of conservationists, Protest Leftists, “community” agitators, Liberal Democrats and some of the traders operating in a section of a dilapidated former furniture store have been agitating against the property firm Grainger delivering Haringey Council’s policies for the area.

Throughout that time, they have succeeded in taking a whole herd of journalists for a ride and persuaded hundreds of members of the public to give them thousands of pounds to make plans for alternative developments that will never be built and for a legal challenge that has been laughed out of court

Last week, in a classic operation of its kind, a bunch of Save Latin Village activists dominated much of a People’s Question Time event in Wood Green in a vain and vainglorious attempt to get Sadiq Khan to take their side against the demolition of the rotting block known as Wards Corner and its replacement with something better for the people of the neighbourhood and, yes, for most of the Latin Village traders themselves.

Let’s look at some plain realities. There is, first and foremost, no way on this Earth that Haringey Council is going to break its long-standing legal agreement with Grainger for the Wards Corner building to be knocked down and redeveloped. To even try it would devour vast quantities of human and financial resources that could not possibly be justified. To press on would be suicidal.

Grainger has spent 15 years and millions of pounds negotiating the purchase of the site from its various owners and has reached agreement with the biggest and most significant one – Transport for London, which owns the part above the Underground station where the Latin Village is and is currently making sure it’s not about to fall down. Eventually, Haringey, being the relevant planning authority, used its compulsory purchase powers (CPO) to secure the last few bits of the jigsaw and so clear the way for the second part of the wider Seven Sisters regeneration to commence.

The first part is already nearly finished, though reading the propaganda of the “Save” campaign – much of it repeated and legitimised by Big Media outlets – you’d never know it. A building that was Haringey’s customer service centre has been replaced by Grainger with a new one directly across the Seven Sisters Road from Wards Corner to which Latin Village traders are entitled to temporarily decamp – rent-free for the first three months – while a permanent new home for them is constructed on the same site as the present one. While indignation is directed at the absence of any “affordable” homes in the Wards Corner plans, no mention is made that such dwellings comprise 40 per cent of those in the block across the street.

Needless to report, strenuous efforts to impede the improvement of Wards Corner have also been made within the council, reflecting the unending faction fighting and personal feuding of the majority Labour Group and a Liberal Democrat opposition whose stance appears identical to the Hard Left’s. Committees containing some of the world’s most devout worshippers of Jeremy Corbyn have done their very best to locate questionable pretexts for giving a vocal minority what its wants while, in the cloth-eared manner of their flattened hero, ignoring the preferences of others who live and work in Seven Sisters and what might be best for the area and the borough.

Council leader Joe Ejiofor, many of whose comrades have been plotting his removal since the day he took the helm of the so-called “Corbyn Council” in 2018, has been breaking it gently to Jeremy fans who continue to make local Labour politics nasty and daft that any attempt by him to “save” the Latin Village in its present form would be insane. He has set up his own group of councillors to work out a way forward and he and his cabinet have accepted some of the backbench underminers’ ideas. In-depth interviews conducted with most of the market traders themselves revealed that more than half of them are actually in favour of the regeneration plan.

Screenshot 2020 02 05 at 19.27.58

But even as the besieged leader tiptoes through these minefields, power over the process continues to pass into other hands. Much ire has been directed at the company that manages the market, but that part of this saga will be history when its contract expires later this year. The CPO will take effect. The traders will cross the road and a new building will start to rise next to Seven Sisters station. Some of the traders have already made their enthusiasm for this publicly known. Even hardened Haringey class warriors find the “Save” campaigners unrealistic and, in some cases, pretty unpleasant.

Of course, in the alternative universe the oppositionists inhabit, every other interested party is a spinner of fake news. They should take a hard look at themselves. It is proclaimed that the council has long been deaf to the voices of the traders and dismissive of alternative ideas. This is drivel. Special provisions to preserve a Latin American market space have been written into the plans since 2008 and in 2014 Haringey designated it an “asset of  community value”. Opposition leaders have been given time in the diaries of a succession of Haringey leaderships and even the top brass at City Hall.

Their “community plan” has been granted planning consent. But what its advocates didn’t mention to the 353 people from whom they raised over £9,000 is that it doesn’t stand a cat’s chance in Hell of being put into effect. The champions of this plan don’t own the building. They don’t have the resources to buy it, let alone develop it. The “community plan” will never be realised.

Last year, a judge dismissed the core contention of a legal bid to overturn the CPO as “inherently incredible“. Its proponents immediately asked for yet more money, saying they would seek to appeal. But anyone wanting to support the Latin Village and its traders should put their pounds to better use. When the Village moves to its temporary home across the road, they should go there and spend. And when the permanent new quarters for the Village opens, they should go there too and spend some more.

It is time to bring this farrago of presumption, self-indulgence and disinformation to an end. Seven Sisters will be graced by a new Wards Corner, with a new and much improved Latin Village market at its heart. Let that new market be built. Let’s help it to flourish. Let’s start that job right now.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to providing fair, thorough, anti-populist coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers and would like to pay its freelance contributors better. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Grainger, Haringey Council, Joseph Ejiofor, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Sadiq Khan, Seven Sisters, Seven Sisters Road, Transport for London

Darren Rodwell: A housing wish list for 2020

We need a big collective effort to provide homes of the quality and safety everyone in our city deserves
Darren Rodwell

Darren Rodwell is leader of Barking & Dagenham Council, London Councils’ executive member for housing and planning, and a vice chair and Labour spokesman for the environment, economy, housing and transport board of the Local Government Association Labour Group. Here he writes in a personal capacity.

As we begin 2020, I’ve given some thought to my housing “asks” for the coming decade. Like all New Year resolutions, it’s based on past failures and missed opportunities. 

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the Becontree estate, which went on to become part of Barking & Dagenham, the borough I lead. Like all 100-year-olds, we are wishing for a letter from the Queen. Built to rehouse traditional East Enders, the Becontree marked a new dawn for housing in Britain. A product of the 1911 Addison Act, it ushered in what we would later call council housing. Back in the Roaring Twenties, the Becontree became the largest council estate in the world.

Wide grassed verges, from which a thousand daffodils emerge every spring, are all that remains from those times. Before the estate was built, they formed a very different kind of bedding as the base for railway tracks laid to bring building materials in from the Thames. The ambition of the London County Council, which built the estate, knew no bounds. By 1933, 27,000 houses had been constructed. If we were to build that number today, it would cost around £6.75 billion. Can you imagine us doing that? The LCC also provided schools, community halls and other social infrastructure.

It took a world war to bring us to our senses and realise that we needed to invest in housing on that scale, but problems with the high rise council homes built in the 1960s changed minds. The old Victorian streets which had made way for them suddenly didn’t seem quite so Dickensian. Of course, we were looking through rose-tinted glasses. But by the end of the last century, much affordable housing had become something you settled for rather than chose. Home ownership became the dominant creed, and in the 1980s council house building was put on a life support machine. 

In many other Western democracies this was simply not the case. But subsequent UK governments, including those of New Labour, did little to reverse the UK trend. Today, the crisis in affordable housing has never been more acute. Under our very noses, up and down the country, behind all those net curtains, the debate that your home shouldn’t cost you the earth, has returned. We need to wake up and smell the coffee.  

As we move into the second decade of the new century, old-style class divisions have disappeared. But Britain is more divided than ever before by housing tenure. The richest live beyond their own and everybody else’s wildest dreams, and what’s left of our former council housing stock is available only to the neediest. The majority, the squeezed middle, sometimes have the bank of mum and dad, but only if they’re lucky.

Building communities is as important in today’s London as it was for Edwardian London. After all, our capital is not just the City of London. It needs workers to keep it running and our workers need somewhere they can live and grow. It will take a collective effort across public, private and voluntary sectors if we are to come up with a plan to put to the government to achieve this. 

That history and those ambitions inform my housing wish list for the new decade. Judging by what I hear from colleagues from all political parties and parts of the housing sector, I think a desire for the items on it is widely shared.  

End Right To Buy discounts and reinvest the profits from sales in building new homes 

If the Right to Buy is to continue, I would end the discounts that go with it and allow local authorities to keep 100 per cent of the receipts from the sales that remain to invest in building new stock for the future. Similarly, the host council should retain part of the asset of shared ownership properties sold under the Right to Buy. The Right to Buy may be good for the individual, but its long-term impact has been to polarise communities, and the inability of local authorities to reinvest the proceeds has hampered affordable house building. The time for reform is long overdue. 

Tackle rogue landlords

Most landlords are good and decent, but the rogue variety has flourished as the Buy To Let market has grown. On the Becontree, Right to Buy has played a huge part in the growth of Buy to Let – more so than in most other places. That’s one reason why Barking & Dagenham has become the first London borough to implement borough-wide private sector landlord licensing. This gives us greater powers to identify and take action against the bad landlords.

All London boroughs want to tackle the rogues, but are having to do so while coping with a 63 per cent reduction in government funding over the last 10 years. What we really need is a London-wide scheme administered on behalf of London Councils to help deal with landlords who let their properties go to rack and ruin and fail to take responsibility for addressing the behaviour of anti-social tenants.

We also need to be able to impose rogue landlord orders. At the moment, local authorities pick up the tab for clearing up fly-tipping and clamping down on the behaviour of problematic tenants. Under a rogue landlord order system, the costs would be born by the landlord instead. At the moment, local authorities face an uphill struggle going to court and waiting months for a decision that might cost thousands of pounds in legal fees. A pre-agreed legal order, signed off by a judge, would enable us to recover those costs from the guilty landlords at no loss to local taxpayers. 

Map infrastructure need for the next generation

It’s not all about bricks and mortar. Hearts and minds make communities too. We need to take a more rounded view of this. We should establish and map soft or social infrastructure needs, such as transport, schools, parks, community halls and GP surgeries. The whole country needs this, London included. London needs it because it is a vast oversimplification to talk about the poor north and the rich south. Yes, there are regional inequalities, but there are towns in London that figure in the Index of Multiple Deprivation just as often as places in the northern metropolitan areas.  

Maximising brownfield for housing  

Who can have failed to be moved by images of the fires in Australia or film of our polar ice caps melting into the sea? Our environment is precious and, as the leader of a council with some of London’s best parks, I don’t want to bulldoze over the countryside. But sometimes land that is obvious brownfield in reality is nonetheless officially deemed to be on the Green Belt. We need a modicum of common sense about this. For example, Barking and Dagenham College’s car park is technically classed as Green Belt, but has been under tarmac since 1952. The college wanted to upgrade its offer to the local community by investing in more buildings for educational use. However, the car park’s Green Belt designation prevented it.

Establish a database of short-term lets

We have seen a huge growth in short-term lets by large multinational institutions in the last few years. Research by London Councils shows that one in every 50 homes in the capital is now let short-term some of the time. Around 73,000 of these are let through Airbnb and others like it. According to the ministry for housing, communities and local government, London boroughs approved 67,884 new homes between 2017-2019. The lesson is that the provision of permanent homes is barely keeping pace with those coming on to the short term letting market. 

This is a more and more pressing issue. Fellow local government leaders tell me privately that lots of their own properties are being used for short term letting. Incorporating a database of short term lets into a larger licensing scheme would help local authorities regulate this situation in the interests of their local communities. 

Establish a Buy to Let social value index to encourage social responsibility

Over the last 40 years, the Buy to Let market has grown beyond recognition. This may be good for investors, but the side effects of absent landlords and anti-social tenants has caused untold costs no accountant could calculate in full. Should we treat privately rented properties more like private businesses and have an index of them in each community? It’s not local government’s job to subsidise the operating costs of the private sector, so councils need a mechanism that ensures they are not the ones who meet the financial costs when Buy to Let dwellings or houses in multiple occupation are a source of anti-social behaviour, noise nuisance, fly tipping and so on. Perhaps we need to levy a charge on landlords who are responsible for social misendeavours. 

Bite the bullet and use the power to inspect

It’s clear to me that safety in construction and maintenance of both private and public buildings is too low on the agenda of the house building industry. Grenfell should have been a wake up call for those who build high-rise blocks. Yet since that fateful night, more questions have been raised about the safety of all public and private buildings. Since Grenfell, we have seen dangerous fires take hold in lower-rise blocks, including at Samuel Garside House in Barking, Worcester Place in Sutton and Harry Zeital Way in Hackney, as well as at student accommodation in Bolton. 

 Grenfell was a wake-up call in how not to manage high-rise blocks, yet only a very small number have been remediated in the two-and-a-half years since. We need a review of the safety inspection regime. I’m talking to the Local Government Association, London Councils and individual local authorities about the need for more powers to inspect private properties, so that people feel safe in their homes. Above all, we cannot allow a situation to continue where profit comes before people. We need to bite the bullet and use the power to inspect.

Follow Darren Rodwell on Twitter.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to providing fair, thorough, anti-populist coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers and would like to pay its freelance contributors better. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: affordable housing, Barking, Barking & Dagenham, Becontree estate, council housing, Green Belt, homelessness, housing, London Councils

Harness tech to build for a ‘less car-dependent’ future London, says new report

Think tank warns that the rise of autonomous and even electric vehicles could add to congestion and pollution
Charles Wright

New approaches to housebuilding are urgently needed if London is to reap the benefits from technological advances in how we move around the city – and tackle the challenges of traffic congestion and climate change. That’s the message of new research published this week by the Centre for London think tank.

The report, Building for a New Urban Mobility, warns that new technology, including greater digital connectivity, improved and cheaper electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous driverless vehicles, could actually increase congestion and pollution by putting more vehicles on the road.

With air pollution “far above safety thresholds” and London still one of the most congested cities in the world, with the one-and-a-half-hour daily commute longer than anywhere else in the UK, technology should be harnessed to support a “less car-dependent future”, the report says.

A “new urban mobility” approach is needed, it argues, putting “walking, cycling, public transport and light electric vehicles at the heart of planning new neighbourhoods”.

The analysis suggests this poses a difficult challenge, with developers and planners continuing to “lock citizens into 20th century patterns of car ownership and use, by allocating space and investment to private car parking.”

Despite two decades of City Hall policy promoting high density housing close to public transport, new developments are more likely than existing housing to include car parking space, and their residents are more likely to own and use a car, with 66 per cent car ownership in new developments compared to the 54 per cent London average. Many residents “also use their cars frequently, even in areas with excellent public transport,” the report finds.

In contrast, bicycle parking “is rarely provided with the same generosity”, with a 2016 survey of 71 new developments in west London finding that almost half the bike parking spaces promised by developers had not been installed. And limited resources and expertise in council planning departments, alongside sometimes outdated assumptions about travel – for example, the major Barking Riverside development being based on transport assumptions and modelling from 2004  – hamper “future-proofing”.

On current progress, London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s target for 80 per cent of journeys to be on foot, by bike or public transport by 2041 will only be reached in 2070, the report concludes. Even so, the report argues that the scale of new development in the capital – there will be a 20 per cent increase in new homes over the coming decade, according to City Hall forecasts – nevertheless represents a “unique opportunity” for change.

Key recommendations include the need for stronger political leadership in planning for fewer cars, piloting “new urban mobility zones” in every borough and creating “mobility hubs”, with government and City Hall support – public spaces for transport interchange including shared modes of transport such as car, bike and taxi hire and parcel pick-up – alongside a new focus on flexible and adaptable design to respond to technological change.

Climate change meant the need for action was urgent, said Waltham Forest council leader Clare Coghill, speaking at the report’s launch. “We need to close roads. It’s got to happen,” she said, citing outcomes of the council’s £30 million “mini-Holland” schemes promoting cycling and reducing unnecessary car journeys.

Photograph: Addison Lee hire car in Canary Wharf.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to providing fair, thorough, anti-populist coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers and would like to pay its freelance contributors better. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: air quality, Barking, cars, Centre For London, Clare Coghill, cycling, housing, pollution, public transport, Sadiq Khan, transport, Waltham Forest Council

Brent borough of culture year launches with RISE dance spectacular

The show kicked off 12 months of events and shows
Joshua Neicho & Oliver Nelken

Brent’s year as London Borough of Culture, following on from Waltham
Forest which was the first to hold the title, began earlier this month with RISE: a mass participation dance spectacular held on an outdoor stage in front of Wembley Stadium. The film below shows one of the final rehearsals for the show, and features interviews with dancers who took part talking about their involvement in the production and their lives in the borough. Their warmth and enthusiasm are infectious.

 

Led by Southpaw Dance Company and Middlesex University dance students, around 300 dancers from local communities told the story of Brent’s physical growth, diverse heritage and unchallenged spot as the mecca of English football through dances choreographed by Southpaw artistic director Robby Graham and backed by audio-visual displays and stirring soundtracks. For the  finale, the dancers threw clouds of coloured dust into the air, evoking the Indian festival of Holi, and Brent ragga DJ General Levy took the stage.

Interviews by Joshua Neicho, film footage by Oliver Nelken of Mornington Media Ltd.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to providing fair, thorough, anti-populist coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers and would like to pay its freelance contributors better. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Brent Council, London Borough of Culture, Waltham Forest Council

London business groups give lukewarm response to migrant salary threshold recommendations

The government has been urged to lower the entry bar, but not to make special arrangements for the capital
Dave Hill

Organisations representing London’s business sector have given only a qualified welcome to a report by a government advisory body which recommends that the salary threshold for people wishing to come to the UK to work should be lowered to allow more of them in.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) said the pay bar currently applying to potential employees outside the European Union should be brought down from the government’s preferred £30,000 across the board post-Brexit to £25,600, saying this would particularly help with recruiting teachers and skilled NHS staff.

However, Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of London First, said the MAC “should have gone further” by recommending a reduction of the threshold to £20,000, which “would have ensured we could keep the economy at full strength”, while Sean McKee, director of policy and public affairs at the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), said that while “businesses will be encouraged” by the MAC’s proposal, “some will still question whether the newly-proposed figure is low enough”.

Both organisations have consistently argued that new rules designed to reduce inward migration from overseas should not damage the capital’s economy, which produces close to one quarter of the UK’s entire economic output and generates billions in taxes that are spent in other parts of the country.

A 2017 report published by London First and PwC drawing on figures from the Office for National Statistics found that large percentages of London workers in the construction, creative, financial, transport, retail and hospitality and wholesale sectors as well as the NHS were born overseas.

While describing as “positive” the MAC’s recognition that a £30,000 limit would “decimate key sectors such as construction, hospitality and social care” Whitbread argued that the report clear that a future immigration system that clamps down too heavily on unskilled workers will hit total GDP”. She added: “Firms across the capital and beyond want to support the roll-out of the new points based system, but must have a seat at the table as it is finalised and be given time to prepare for changes.”

For the LCCI, McKee emphasised that “As a global city, London has a greater reliance on international workers than the rest of the UK,” and expressed regret that the MAC does not recommend that regional variations in the salary threshold should be adopted, as the LCCI and others have advocated. McKee also raised “a point of concern” over the recognition by MAC chair Professor Alan Manning that it remains difficult to obtain high quality data to inform the government’s migration system.

In its report, the MAC estimated that the impacts of its recommendations would “vary across the regions and countries of the UK, with the largest predicted impacts in London, driven by the greater share of migrants living and working there”.

However, it concluded that “a different salary threshold for each region and country of the UK would be too complex and many of the salary thresholds would be similar as, with the exception of London, salary variation is limited.”  The committee calculated that a separate salary threshold for London would be “about 25 per cent higher”.

Manning described characterisation by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a former London Mayor, of the new migration rules his government wishes to bring in as an “Australian-style points system” as a “soundbite” whose true meaning is unclear.

The day before the MAC report came out, home secretary Priti Patel criticised British businesses for relying too heavily on “low skilled cheap labour” from the EU, and has since stressed that the committee’s findings are only advisory and that “We are committed to ensuring we have a system that has the ability to level up across the whole of the UK in a way that immigration policy has failed for too long”.

Photograph by Omar Jan.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to providing fair, thorough, anti-populist coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers and would like to pay its freelance contributors better. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Boris Johnson, Jasmine Whitbread, London Chamber of Commerce & Industry, London First, Migration Advisory Committee, Priti Patel, Sean McKee

Barking & Dagenham: Public consultation on new home for historic London food markets begins

The City of London Corporation is looking to relocate three famous food wholesalers east
Dave Hill

Consultations of residents of Barking & Dagenham about plans to create a new home in their borough for three of London’s most famous historic wholesale food markets are to begin this week.

Billingsgate, New Spitalfields and Smithfield markets, which have existed in parts of the capital for centuries, would move to a single location at Dagenham Dock under proposals launched by their owner, the City of London Corporation.

The new market buildings would be built on the site of the decommissioned Barking Reach power station, which the City purchased from Barking Reach Power Ltd in December 2018. The City says this would secure the futures of the markets, improve “operational, environmental and sustainability standards”, and bring new jobs and businesses to the area, assisted by rail connections and being next to the Thames.

Council leader Darren Rodwell has welcomed the City’s plan, saying the arrival of the markets “promises to bring a huge economic boost to the borough” and that his administration’s priority will be “to make sure that local people have the skills and training to take advantage of the employment opportunities that will arise”. Local MP Jon Cruddas told On London last month that there is considerable local excitement about the scheme.

Billingsgate, which has existed as a fish market in various forms since the 16th century, has been based in Poplar, close to Canary Wharf on land owned by Tower Hamlets, since 1982. It originated at Billingsgate Wharf near Lower Thames Street and was formally recognised by an Act of Parliament in 1699. Past employees have included the writer George Orwell and the gangsters Ronald and Reginald Kray.

The history of Smithfield as a livestock market can be traced back to the 10th century, and its present home on Charterhouse Street was established by parliament through the Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Act of 1860, though some of its buildings have in more recent times been converted for different uses. Its official name is London Central Markets and it is the only wholesale market that still occupies its original site.

Fruit and vegetables have been sold at New Spitalfields from a site in Leyton, close to the edge of the Olympic Park, since as recently as 1991, though its “old” predecessor was based in Tower Hamlets, just outside the City’s boundaries. It dates from Charles I’s decision to grant it a royal charter in 1638.

Consultation events for the Dagenham Dock site are to be held on 29 and 30 January and on 1 February. The plans can also be looked at on the City of London website.

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Categories: News
Tags: Barking & Dagenham Council, Billingsgate, City of London Corporation, Dagenham, Dagenham Dock, Darren Rodwell, Jon Cruddas, New Spitalfields, planning, River Thames, Smithfield

Westminster: Businesswoman takes helm as council’s new leader

She will lead a wealthy borough facing challenges over development, the environment, rough sleeping and poverty
Dave Hill

Lady Rachael Robathan formally commenced her duties as the new leader of Conservative-run Westminster City Council last week, becoming the third woman in a row to have the job of leading a borough with an economy of national importance and some acute social problems locally.

Robathan, 57, whose title derives from her marriage to former Conservative minister Lord Andrew Robathan, succeeds Nickie Aiken as leader following Aiken’s election as the new MP for Cities of London & Westminster at the general election last month. Aiken’s predecessor was Philippa Roe, now Baroness Couttie, who was leader from 2012 until 2017.

She has a background in business, working for 20 years in emerging market investment management, and was recently appointed a non-executive director of Aurora Investment Trust plc, a company chaired by former Tory MP and shadow chief secretary to the treasury, Lord Howard Flight. Robathan is also a board member of the National Lottery community fund and a director of the Westminster Almshouses Foundation, a sheltered housing charity based in Rochester Row.

Robathan, who has represented the Knightsbridge & Belgravia ward since 2010, was previously the council’s cabinet member for finance, property and regeneration, a brief that encompasses some of Westminster’s most important and sometimes fraught areas of responsibility.

In a statement following her election as leader, Robathan endorsed her predecessor’s City For All strategy, whose main themes are opportunity, celebrating its different communities, providing high quality local services, and creating both a “caring and fairer” and a “healthier and greener” Westminster.

She takes charge of an administration that has fallen out with Labour London Mayor Sadiq Khan following Aiken’s administration withdrawing its support for plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street, for which it, rather than Transport for London, is the highway authority. Westminster also has high numbers of rough sleepers, an issue Aiken described during the general election campaign as “not just a national but an international crisis”, with more than half of local rough sleepers coming from overseas.

Robathan will now oversee delivery of the borough’s alternative plan for improving Oxford Street and its surrounding West End district and has pledged to address “complex challenges including climate change, air quality, rough sleeping and affordable housing”.

A member of the opposition Labour Group, Pancho Lewis, who, in 2018, became the first Labour councillor elected to the West End ward, swiftly challenged her to set out “any immediate first steps” she intends to take to address the climate issue, suggesting that fewer building demolitions might help.

Conservatives have run Westminster ever since its creation, usually with healthy majorities. They won with ease two years ago in terms of seats, despite Labour making three gains at their expense, and hold 41 seats compared with Labour’s 19. Yet the the popular vote totals were much closer, with the Tories taking a 42.3 per cent vote share to Labour’s 40.3. The north of the borough, represented in parliament by Labour’s redoubtable Karen Buck, accounts for much of a 30 per cent poverty rate. Robathan is right to recognise that making Westminster a “city for all” will not be simple task.

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: Conservatives, Labour, Nickie Aiken, Oxford Street, Paul Dimoldenberg, Philippa Roe, Rachael Robathan, rough sleeping, Westminster Council