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Richard Brown: What housing and planning powers do London Mayors actually have?

Many promises will be made in the run up to 7 May election, so Londoners might like to know how plausible they really are
Richard Brown

Housing remains a top concern for Londoners. As they prepare to elect their next Mayor, it is worth pausing to explore what powers the Mayor actually has to shape the physical fabric of the city. The candidates will make big promises to tackle the housing crisis, but what are Londoners actually voting for?

The Mayor of London’s powers over housing and planning are substantial and have grown since 2000. The Mayor’s spatial strategy – the London Plan – provides a framework for every planning decision taken in London. The Mayor is also able to allocate funds for affordable housing and is a major landowner. And the ability to control transport alongside development is the envy of many other city governments, who lack the powers to link infrastructure provision to city-shaping.

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What formal powers and resources does the Mayor have?

Planning

The London Plan – prepared by the Mayor – is the spatial development strategy for London. It sets out policies – on everything from car parking to affordability – to which every borough’s detailed land use plan and planning decisions must conform. The plans are published in draft for public consultation, and planning inspectors hold public hearings to consider whether they are deliverable and in line with national policy. The inspectors’ reports are considered by the Mayor, and by national government ministers, who can instruct the Mayor to change the Plan if it clashes with national policy.

The Mayor also has specific powers over planning applications. If a proposal is of “strategic significance” (eg, if it is for a building more than 30 metres high or is for more than 150 homes), it must be referred to the Mayor for his views. The Mayor makes comments, which are reported to the local planning committee, but can also instruct the local planning committee to refuse planning permission or say that he wishes to take the decision himself, if he is concerned that the council’s decision might not be in line with his policies. Like borough planning decisions, those taken by the Mayor can be the subjects of appeal to Government.

The Mayor can also, like other planning authorities, charge community infrastructure levy (CIL) to pay for strategic infrastructure, and currently charges CIL to developers in some parts of London, to pay towards Crossrail and in the future towards Crossrail 2.

Development

The Mayor also has the power to establish mayoral development corporations to facilitate large-scale “regeneration” sites within the city. Development corporations can buy, own and develop land and take over planning powers within a designated area within a specific time-frame. But they can only be set up following public consultation and approval from the London Assembly. The Mayor sets their budget and strategic direction, and appoints the boards that oversee them. Two have been established to date: the London Legacy Development Corporation and Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation.

The Mayor can own land and develop it, and the Mayor has previously entered into development agreements to build 50,000 homes on land inherited from the London Development Agency. Transport for London – which is also run by the Mayor – also owns more than 5,000 acres of land in London, with more than 10,000 homes on 300 acres already in the pipeline, and more planned for future phases.

Housing

While the Mayor of London sets a separate housing strategy, many of his levers over what sort of homes are built in London are wired through the planning system. However, since 2011, the Mayor has also had the power to buy land for housing, and to allocate grants to help fund councils, housing associations and developers who are building affordable housing. This is a similar role to that played by Homes England outside London.

The government has allocated just under £5 billion for affordable housing in London for 2016-22, and the current Mayor has used this funding to promote new forms of affordable housing tenure (such as London Living Rent), to encourage council housebuilding, and to implement other policies (such as the requirement of residents’ ballots before the redevelopment of social housing estates). What the next Mayor plans to do with these funds, remains to be seen.

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What are the big tasks for the new Mayor? When the new Mayor enters City Hall in May, what should be top of the priority list?

First, the London Plan will need attention; as one version is formally issued, work begins on the next set of updates. The current draft Plan is awaiting final decisions by the Mayor and government, following the inspectors’ report. This argued that the Mayor’s targets for house-building on small sites were overambitious, and proposed a review of the Green Belt. Such a review, which has been suggested by Centre for London as well as other think tanks, seems increasingly urgent, but remains politically toxic. Reviewing the Plan, and considering how to reconcile the needs of a growing population with the constraints of land supply, will be an immediate priority for the next Mayor.

Second, the Mayor will also need to work with government to agree a funding settlement for the next phase of affordable housing delivery in London. All parties acknowledge the extent of need in London, though talk of ‘rebalancing’ might suggest a shift of investment. It will be important for the Mayor to make the case for investment in London and the south east, which remain the areas of highest demand and lowest affordability, whatever the political mix that emerges following the general and mayoral elections.

Finally, there is unfinished business in terms of mayoral powers. The current Mayor has said he would like powers to control private sector rents and oversee the licensing of private landlords, and this is likely to be a major campaigning issue. Alongside this, the London Finance Commission, which has sat under both the last two mayors, has argued for comprehensive devolution of property taxes, and the ability to reform these could be an additional tool in managing London’s housing market.

Richard Brown is deputy director of Centre for London think tank, on whose website this article was originally published. Follow Richard on Twitter. Photograph: Omar Jan.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to providing fair and thorough coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations, including from readers. Can you spare £5 a month (or more) to held the site keep going and growing? If so, follow this link. Thank you.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Centre For London, Green Belt, housing, London Living Rent, planning, regeneration, The London Plan

Enfield: Development agreement means Meridian Water house building to begin

Work on the 900-home first phase set to start in "next few months"
Dave Hill

A deal has been reached for building the first 900 new homes of the 210 acre Meridian Water development in the south of Enfield, with a detailed planning application and work on the site to begin in the coming months.

The development agreement between Enfield Council and developer Vistry Partnerships (formerly known as Galliford Try Partnerships) follows the granting of outline consent by the council in 2017 and sets in motion the first phase of the overall Meridian Water regeneration, which is intended to eventually produce 10,000 homes and thousands of jobs in the area.

On London reported last year that the project was at last making progress, with the opening of the new Meridian Water London Overground station (next to IKEA and Tesco in Edmonton) and the  developer partner being chosen for the first phase.

Earlier plans for Barratt London to develop the entire site fell through in October 2017 and an alternative company was not to the liking of a changed Labour council leadership that took power after the May 2018 borough elections.

The council has previously purchased around two thirds of the site’s developable land, beginning in 2014 after the then London Mayor Boris Johnson had designated Meridian Water part of the Upper Lee Valley opportunity area and a housing zone.

Enfield’s approach under the leadership of Nesil Caliskan has been to retain control of the regeneration’s progress by linking up with developers on a stage-by-stage basis rather than finding just one to deliver the entire project.

Caliskan has again stressed her belief that this process helps ensure that the benefits of Meridian Water are maximised for local people. Half of the 900 homes will qualify as “affordable” and half of those will be council owned and let at London Affordable Rent levels (slightly higher than new social rent tenancies).

“These will be world class dwellings for families in Edmonton,” Caliskan said. “This development will be a shining example of how councils can lead major regeneration projects to deliver real benefits for their residents.” A variety of different kinds of homes, including some suitable for larger families, are planned. The first should be completed in 2022.

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Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, Enfield Council, Galliford Try, housing, Meridian Water, Nesil Caliskan, Vistry Partnerships

New research shows Londoners worst hit by housing benefits freeze

The work by homelessness charity Crisis has been endorsed by the capital's cross-party local authority body
Dave Hill

New research into the effects of housing benefit caps on private renters’ family finances underlines that Londoners are the worst affected in England, according the cross-party local authority body London Councils.

Homelessness charity Crisis has assessed shortfalls between local housing allowance – LHA, the form of housing benefit paid to private sector tenants – and rent levels and found that in the capital it is greater than the price of a weekly food shop for many small families. LHA levels have been frozen by national government since 2016.

The Crisis findings are in line with London Councils’ own research, published in July, which says the freeze has significantly reduced the number of homes that can be afforded by the 200,000 low income London households that qualify for the benefit, resulting in no more than 15 per cent of private sector rents falling within the price range of LHA recipients and, in the case of single people seeking accommodation in outer south west London, none at all.

The average shortfall faced by London households affected is £51.71 per week, resulting in them cutting back on basics such as food, gas and electricity to avoid rent arrears or taking out loans, according to the London Councils work. Meanwhile, almost 20 percent of claimants were found to be living in properties with fewer bedrooms than they are entitled to, a sign of overcrowding and a shortage of suitable housing.

London Councils also says there is no evidence that the government’s changes to LHA rates have had the effect of bringing own rents as was claimed, while an increase in temporary housing placements since initial LHA reforms introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2011 suggests a link between the two. There are currently around 54,000 London households designated homeless living in temporary dwellings.

Responding to the Crisis research, Muhammed Butt, London Councils’ executive member for welfare, empowerment and inclusion (and also leader of Brent Council), said it “confirms that low income Londoners face an unbridgeable gap between their rent and the support they receive for their housing costs”.

Butt praised Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a former London Mayor, for making tackling homelessness “an urgent priority”, but said London’s boroughs could not tackle the problem in partnership with national government unless LHA rates are raised to to “cover at least the bottom third of rents”.

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Categories: News
Tags: cost of living, Crisis, homelessness, housing, housing benefit, local housing allowance, London Councils, Muhammed Butt

London childcare costs are Britain’s highest. What can a Mayor do to help?

The prices of nurseries and childminders are often overlooked in debates about the capital's cost of living
Dave Hill

London’s high and sometimes punishing cost of living is routinely (and quite correctly) associated with housing and transport, but the expense of the city’s childcare often goes unrecognised. As the 2020 London Mayor election appears on the horizon, it is a big issue that is likely to get too little coverage during the campaign. On London‘s small attempt to put that right begins here with some figures recently compiled by Coram Family and Childcare (formerly known as the Family and Childcare Trust) for its 19th annual childcare survey, based on information provided by local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales.

Regional price breakdowns show that Londoners pay considerably more for 25 hours of childcare a week than people anywhere else, whether it is provided by a nursery or a childminder. In Inner London, the average figure for an under two-year-old in a nursery was £174.54 per week and £163.01 for a two-year old in 2018, while employing a childminder for the same age groups cost £159.46 and £156.91 respectively. The equivalent figures for Outer London were a little lower, by between £10 and £25. These were by far the highest rates in Britain, with only the east and south east of England coming anywhere close.

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For 50 hours a week for he same age groups of children under three, the Inner London nursery rate was a table-topping £329.54 for an under two and £313.24 for a two-year-old. Again, all London prices were clearly the highest for under threes, whether cared for by nurseries or childminders.

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For older pre-school children too, when free childcare entitlement comes into the picture, Inner and Outer London are comfortably first and second in the national league.

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Only when considering the costs of after school clubs or childminders for five to eleven-year-olds did London move down even a rung or two compared with every other nation and English region. You can read the national survey in full here.

What can a London Mayor do to help? A “parental employment project”, funded by the European social fund, was launched under the current one in September. There is also a two-stranded London early years campaign designed to help parents find out about childcare support options. Could Mayor Khan do more. Do any of his rivals for the mayoralty have different, possibly better, ideas? If so, On London will be keen to report them.

OnLondon.co.uk exists to providing fair and thorough coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations, including from readers. Could you spare £5 a month to held the site keep going and growing? If so, follow this link. Thank you.

Categories: News
Tags: childcare, children, Coram Family & Childcare, cost of living, education, employment

On London borough profile: Tower Hamlets

The borough of the East End has a history as astonishing and varied as the place itself
Lewis Baston & Dave Hill

The borough of the East End has an extraordinary past, a complicated present and a huge part to play in London’s future. Its personality has been formed by big events and large forces – successive waves of immigration, the physical and social importance of the River Thames docks and their demise, massive destruction during the Blitz and the redevelopment of the former docklands into the gleaming towers of Canary Wharf in an era when the capital’s financial sector has become ever more dominant. Tower Hamlets is the most vivid example of a borough of two halves, containing the highest poverty rate of  them all, much of it concentrated right next to that other crucible of financial power, the City of London.

Some of the most important chapters of the capital’s history have unfolded here in neighbourhoods that have also generated some of its most enduring legends. London is a city made and endlessly remade by migrants from overseas. The area now encompassed by Tower Hamlets has long provided many with their first English home. French Protestants, Russian and Polish Jews, Irish Roman Catholics and Muslims from Bengal have all found sanctuary here, fleeing persecution, conflict or famine and seeking new lives. The Brick Lane Mosque, famously, was built as a Huguenot meeting place and was later converted into a synagogue before becoming an Islamic place of worship. The East End has also spawned that London working-class archetype the cockney, traditionally synonymous with uncomplaining chirpy Britishness as well as a famous accent and rhyming slang.

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The churn, change and internationalism so characteristic of the wider London have long been at their most vivid here, along with some of its most striking inequalities, emblematic conflicts and extraordinary triumphs over adversity. Remarkable social reformers, such as Salvation Army found William Booth and poverty cartographer Charles Booth were based here. The area has also generated political radicals and is celebrated by the Left for George Lansbury’s Poplar rates rebellion in 1921 and for the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, in which an alliance of Irish and Jewish East Enders blocked a march through their area planned by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, though rather less so for the 1,000 dockers who marched on Parliament in 1968 in support of Enoch Powell. Alf Garnett, the bigoted lead character of the BBC domestic sitcom of that era, Till Death Us Do Part, portrayed a less cosy kind of cockney character.

Tower Hamlets was formed from the former metropolitan boroughs of Poplar, Bethnal Green and Stepney. The initials of the latter’s council, SBC, are referred to in one version of a very old joke as Sullivan Brothers and Cousins – a comment on the local government body’s domination by Irish families. A more recent period of East End history, documenting the community politics that evolved among the area’s Bengali Londoners was powerfully portrayed in Farrukh Dhondy’s 1986 TV drama King of the Ghetto.

By that time the dying East End docklands had begun undergoing their extraordinary redevelopment into Canary Wharf, now London’s second central business district, at the old West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs. Its trio of towers are now an established skyline feature, albeit that the area itself can still feel like a place apart from its immediate surrounding neighbourhoods.

Tower Hamlets has seen huge population growth in recent years. In June 2018 there were 37 per cent more people living in it than ten years earlier, representing by far the highest increase of any borough during that period. It is also an astonishingly young borough with a median age of just 29 and only one resident in 20 aged over 65. There are huge pressures on housing, and high grade Canary Wharf jobs can still feel out of reach for the poorer residents of Tower Hamlets, parts of which are feeling the varied impacts of gentrification experienced in several other boroughs. As London’s centre of gravity moves east, the East End is, as ever, changing fast.

 

TOWER HAMLETS PEOPLE

The borough’s population is approaching 320,000 and the median annual gross pay is £37,603. Its child poverty rate is a distressing 43 per cent.

 

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TOWER HAMLETS POLITICS

Though Labour-dominated at council and parliamentary levels for most of its political history, Tower Hamlets has seen periods of political conflict, controversy and turmoil in recent decades, including the election of Britain’s first ever British National Party councillor in 1993, George Galloway’s general election victory in Bethnal Green & Bow for the Respect Party in 2005, and the rise and fall of borough Mayor Lutfur Rahman between 2010 and his removal by an election court five years later.

Note that the judgement, though damning, did not demonstrate (and did not need to) that voting irregularities were widespread or decisive in carrying Rahman to a now void second victory in 2015, underlining that the potential for a candidate able to mobilise Muslim Bangladeshi East Enders against an established political party might still exist. It’s worth stating here that populist Right claims that Tower Hamlets is some kind of sharia law no-go zone are complete and utter rubbish.

Current composition of Tower Hamlets Council

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The borough has long had its own very distinctive and often bewildering political configurations, and the forces driving these survive beneath Labour’s recent reassertion of its control of the council and the two parliamentary seats. The 2018 borough elections involved much competition between Labour and various pop-up parties stemming from the Rahman period, whose positions were generally either to the left of Labour or adhered to varying degrees of political Islam, or both. They also largely emerged from Labour – Rahman was a Labour figure until 2010 and so were most of his supporters. Backing for local micro parties and candidates has also been affected by personal and clientist relationships to a greater degree than in most boroughs.

Tower Hamlets has had a directly-elected Mayor since 2010 – one of four boroughs to adopt this system – and the current holder of the post is Labour’s John Biggs, who was a leader of the council under the previous local government system and later became the London Assembly Member for the area. He is experienced, resilient and able. Every current councillor is Labour, except for two Isle of Dogs Tories, a former member of Rahman’s cabinet who’s become a Lib Dem and a single representative from a Rahman loyalist grouping called Aspire.

The borough’s two MPs are the experienced Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green & Bow) and the newcomer Aspana Begum (Poplar & Limehouse). The London Assembly Member for the borough, along with Newham, Barking & Dagenham and the City) is Unmesh Desai.

 

TOWER HAMLETS PLACES

Compressed into the borough’s 7.6 square miles are some of London’s most famous and resonant place names – and, of course, the places themselves.

Bethnal Green

Bethnal Green forms the north west part of the borough, covering the space between the edge of the city and Victoria Park. Close by its Underground station stands the office of Bethnal Green & Bow Labour Party, the York Hall, historically famous for its basement Turkish baths and as a boxing venue, and a sculpture called Stairway to Heaven, commemorating the 1943 Bethnal Green tube disaster.

Bow

The name refers to a bowed bridge built in the 12th century, but historically Bow, in the east of Tower Hamlets, is better known for the 18th century manufacture of porcelain and for a strike by female workers at the Bryant and May match factory in 1888, regarded as a milestone for the trade union and suffragette movements. The factory is now a private apartment complex called Bow Quarter and the area is undergoing rapid redevelopment, spurred by its proximity to the Olympic Park.

Canary Wharf

The young upstart of London’s two big financial centres towers futuristically on the tongue of land the Thames takes a detour round, known since the 16th century as the Isle of Dogs. Canary Wharf grew out of the ground as part of the massive redevelopment of former dock areas from the 1980s, driven by the London Docklands Development Corporation and served by the Docklands Light Railway. Despite initial setbacks, its success as a business hub is now undisputed, though the stark contrast between its wealth and the poverty of communities nearby, including Poplar (setting for Call The Midwife) to its north, remains a challenge for local politicians.

Spitalfields and Banglatown

This warren of mostly narrow streets around Commercial Street north of Aldgate heaves with London history and contemporary forms of change. For centuries a rag trade centre, initially due to French Huguenot silk makers taking refuge there, it contains several markets, including Petticoat Lane and Old Spitalfields, and Brick Lane, legendary for its curry houses. Many people living in this bit of Tower Hamlets are Bengali Londoners, which is how it acquired the second half of its name. The area has also become a hive of hipster consumption and nightlife intensity, spilling over from Shoreditch.

Stepney

Stepney Green lies at the heart of this district stretching south from Mile End Road into the “v” it forms with Commercial Road. In the 19th century this former marshland filled up with low rent housing and in the middle of the 20th German bombs destroyed a third of it. Stepney’s housing is now a mix of post-war tower blocks and modern estates, with some Georgian and Victorian survivors. It is the birthplace of actors Steven Berkoff and Terence Stamp and of entertainer Des O’Connor.

Whitechapel

Primarily lies south of Whitechapel Road and High Street, whose north side merges into Spitalfields and Banglatown, and west of Stepney. In the Victorian era this was heartland social reformer territory and famous also as the hunting ground of Jack the Ripper and the home of Joseph Merrick, the “Elephant Man”, who was based at the Royal London Hospital. The hospital site is to house the new Tower Hamlets Town Hall. South of Whitechapel, below Cable Street and The Highway, are the waterfront areas of Shadwell and Wapping, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge.

OnLondon.co.uk is dedicated to improving the standard of coverage of London’s politics, development and culture. It depends on donations from readers. Can you spare £5 (or more) a month? Follow this link if you would like to help. Thank you.

Categories: Intelligence, The Boroughs
Tags: Bethnal Green, Bethnal Green & Bow, Brick Lane, Cable Street, Canary Wharf, Conservatives, John Biggs, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Limehouse & Poplar, Lutfur Rahman, Poplar, Stepney, Unmesh Desai

TfL business plan assumes no Crossrail until ‘later stages of 2021,’ says Mike Brown

A clearer indication of when the Elizabeth Line will start running is expected from the Crossrail company later this week
Dave Hill

The outgoing Transport for London commissioner has said he is “as confident as I can be” that no more money will be required by Crossrail Ltd in order to launch the main section of its Elizabeth Line service as early as possible next next year.

Mike Brown, who will step down as TfL chief in May, told the London Assembly budget and performance committee that TfL had “looked to a delay to the later stages of 2021” in its business plan assumptions about when income from the new service will start coming in, but that this reflected a “very pragmatic look at the demand forecasts” and that an “indicative timeline” for the Elizabeth Line’s launch will be revealed at a meeting of the Crossrail board on Thursday.

He added that this assumption was at the “pessimistic end” of the scale and noted that it was not the same thing as Crossrail’s predicted starting date, with the the company’s bosses well aware of the need for “bringing that date forward as much as they can possibly and safely do because of the imperative of getting the revenue flowing into TfL”.

It was announced by Crossrail Ltd’s chief exeuctive Mark Wild in November that the main, central section of the Elizabeth Line will not be ready for service until “as soon as practically possible” 2021, having originally been scheduled to open in December 2018, and that the cost of the project is set to increase by up to a further £650 million over budget to reach £18.25 billion overall compared with an original budget of £15.9 billion. Wild promised “further certainty” about the opening of the line “early in 2020”. Crossrail had previously set a window for the service opening of between October 2020 and March 2021.

Acknowledging that he had said a year ago that an early cash boost of around £2 billion would be enough, Brown referred to the view of Crossrail Ltd chief executive Mark Wild that “the level of disarray discovered was much greater than originally envisaged” when he took on the job in November 2018. In addition to inheriting the challenge of ensuring that different key software systems were compatible, Wild had later  discovered that work on a number of Elizabeth Line stations was far from complete.

TfL says delays to the opening of the Elizabeth Line service have deprived it of between £500 million and £700m in lost revenue so far, though this has been made up for with cash reserves and business rates funding. Chief financial officer Simon Kilonback explained to the committee that the latest setback has had further budgetary implications “both in terms of revenue and capital costs”, though this had not harmed the transport body’s credit ratings.

Other difficulties were arising from uncertainties about demand for TfL public transport services, the general state of the economy and “the lack of long-term certainty about our funding from March 2021,” Kilonback said. All of this meant TfL had to “remain cautious” about projects it could safely commit to and prioritise.

Overall, “core elements” of previous business plans had been protected, Kilonback said, including the (lately reduced) distance covered by London’s bus services, funding for local authority schemes and the Mayor’s healthy streets programme, including the ongoing creation of a “city-wide cycle network” with the addition of electric buses to the fleet and the expansion of the ultra low emission zone also still on schedule.

The business plan “continues its trajectory” towards a reduced deficit for this financial year to “about £300m”, Kilonback said. TfL has raised money by selling Crossrail trains already built and leasing them back in a deal that has brought in about £1 billion and selling the historic London Underground headquarters building, 55 Broadway, for £12o million. Kilonback also said that continued reductions in “back and middle office jobs” has factored over £200 million of recurring savings into the plan”.

TfL has, however, “paused the procurement of the Jubilee and Northern Line additional trains and Piccadilly Line signalling and the Holborn and Camden Town “major station upgrades” and also stopped repairing its roads for two years, though this work is now starting again. Rotherhithe-Canary Wharf bridge has also been shelved. Kilonback said the upshot is that TfL is, “Still on track to break even by 2022/23” and then show an operating surplus.

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Categories: News
Tags: Camden Town station, Crossrail, Elizabeth Line, Gareth Bacon, Holborn, London Assembly, Mark Wild, Mike Brown, Simon Kilonback

On London borough profile: Waltham Forest

Part conservative suburbia, part fringe inner city, Waltham Forest was not named a "growth borough" for nothing
Lewis Baston & Dave Hill

Stretching from meeting points with Hackney and Newham along the River Lea to Greater London’s boundary with Essex, Waltham Forest is very much one of the boroughs of two different halves. The split feels psychologically as well as spatially defined by the sweep of the A406 North Circular road: the part to the north has long been associated with the values as well as the physical landscapes of suburbia, while much of southern Waltham Forest has an increasingly Inner London flavour, as demographic change and gentrification make their marks.

Waltham Forest was designated an Olympic borough – subsequently a “growth borough” – and has an outlying section of the 2012 Olympic Park, Eton Manor, within its territory. Its council’s leader, Clare Coghill, has sought to harness the forces of change flowing her borough’s way rather than try to resist them – changes which, for the most part, have helped strengthen the position of Labour in all kinds of recent elections. Even Tory strongholds in the geographically smaller “Essex” parts of the borough have become susceptible to Labour’s advance.

Walthamforest

The London borough was formed from the old municipal boroughs of Chingford, Walthamstow and Leyton. During the 1920s, the London County Council’s chief architect, George Topham Forrest, described the latter two areas, along with Leytonstone, as part of a “suburban dormitory for clerks and workmen” with many long, terraced streets as well as quite a lot of industry. By contrast, Chingford, its subdivisions and immediate neighbours, which spread comfortably to the north of the North Circular, developed at far lower densities during the interwar decades, and contains plenty of detached houses.

During Margaret Thatcher’s years as Prime Minister, the Chingford parliamentary constituency was famously held by Norman Tebbit, one of her most astute and combative ministers. Tebbit’s successor was and continues to be arch Eurosceptic Iain Duncan Smith. It is, perhaps, a further measure of Waltham Forest’s split personality that the borough as a whole voted 59 per cent to Remain in the European Union in the 2016 referendum, almost exactly as London as a whole did. The Liberal Democrats have had no electoral success in the borough since 2010, but will hope to revive their fortunes in some wards.

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Other major roads through the borough include the A104 Lea Bridge Road, which spears through it from Hackney to the North Circular, and the A106 and A12, which run in parallel towards the M11. Walthamstow Central is the northernmost station of the Victoria Line and also a stop on the London Overground line linking Chingford with Liverpool Street. Walthamstow bus station is across the road from it.

The Central Line serves Waltham Forest too, with stops at Leyton and Leytonstone. In 2016, the Lea Bridge station was reopened, easing journeys to Stratford shopping city to the east and the Tottenham Hale rail interchange to the west, and providing a further spur to residential and other development at the eastern entry point to the borough.

The positive embrace of change by Clare Coghill’s administration has not come without its regeneration tensions. Neighbourhood activists, including some from the Corbynite and extra-parliamentary Left, have protested against redevelopment plans for Walthamstow Town Square and its shopping mall because they include tall buildings and some public land being sold to developers.

A different kind of resistance was mounted, prior to Coghill becoming leader, to one of Boris Johnson’s Transport for London-funded local cycling infrastructure schemes. Some welcomed it as a victory for sustainable active travel and a more salubrious “liveable” environment, but others saw it as catering at their expense to the lifestyles of gentrifying middle-class incomers, of whom there are increasing numbers. Not for nothing have estate agents declared the Blackhorse neighbourhood a “village”.

The council’s policies actively encourage cultural activity, including the provision of workspaces for artists and the nurturing of the local night time economy. Waltham Forest was named London Borough of Culture for 2019 by Sadiq Khan, making it the first borough to have that honour bestowed. The River Lee Valley Regional Park occupies much of the borough’s western and southern boundary areas and includes Walthamstow Marshes.

The borough’s eastern edge is covered almost entirely by Epping Forest. But for many, its crowning cultural glory is its stunning Grade II-listed Portland stone Town Hall in Forest Road (pictured above), designed and built by Philip Dalton Hepworth between 1937 and 1941. It and its adjacent public buildings stand in handsome landscaped grounds, complete with fountain. Waltham forest is worth visiting for this glory of London civic architecture alone.

 

WALTHAM FOREST PEOPLE

The population of Waltham Forest is an estimated 283,500. Average pay is just over £25,859 a year and the poverty rate is 28 per cent, according to the most recent Trust for London Poverty Profile.

W.forestpeople

All figures from GLA area profiles and/or Office for National Statistics.

 

WALTHAM FOREST POLITICS

From 1994 until 2010, Waltham Forest Council was mostly under no overall control, but Labour has strengthened its position since then and now dominates that handsome Town Hall with a majority of 32 and its largest ever number of seats. The question for the immediate future is how far and how fast the party can extend its incursions into the Conservative-leaning north of the borough, powered by demographic and social change.

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There is only one entire parliamentary constituency within Waltham Forest although it also contains the bulk of two others. The energetic Stella Creasy represents the Walthamstow seat, which is the one that falls completely within Waltham Forest. It covers the centre and south west of the borough. Creasy has campaigned successfully for tighter regulation of payday loan companies, fought online battles with poisonous misogynists and, for a time, appeared to be a target of local Corbynites, but held her seat in 2017 with a massively increased 81 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, in the north, Iain Duncan Smith was run pretty close by Labour in what had previously been the impregnably Tory Chingford & Woodford Green in both 2017 and 2019, but has held on. Labour’s John Cryer is the very safe incumbent of the Leyton & Wanstead seat. Both of these seats are primarily in Waltham Forest, but each has two wards in next-door Redbridge.

Waltham Forest forms part of the North East London Assembly constituency, along with Islington and Hackney. It has been represented by Labour’s Jennette Arnold since 2004. She will stand down in 2020.

 

WALTHAM FOREST PLACES

With the large exception of the North Circular’s dividing effect, Waltham Forest doesn’t readily fall into specific sub-divisions, and several of its residential neighbourhoods merge into each other seamlessly. But some of its better-known place names are helpful places to start.

 

Chingford

The “Essex Man” archetype has spiritual homes in Greater London’s eastern outer fringes and Chingford is one of them. Leafy, leisurely, home-owning and demographically primarily White British, its name is stamped on the bulk of the north of the borough and it contains some of Waltham Forest’s most resolutely Conservative electoral wards, including its northernmost, Chingford Green. There is a River Ching, a tributary of the River Lea, which flows through Chingford and from which it took its name, rather than the other way round. The Ching flows along the edge of golf course. There are also neighbourhoods called Chingford Mount (pictured below), Chingford Hatch and Chingford South.

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Highams Park

This area takes its name from a manor house built nearby while the park itself is looked after by the City of London Corporation (as is Epping Forest to which it is joined). But the residential Highams Park and the adjacent Hale End are today leading edge indicators of how Waltham Forest’s character is evolving. These districts lie just to the north of the North Circular, though a section of the electoral ward of Hale End & Highams Park is south of it. In the 2014 borough elections, two of its three seats were won by Conservatives and one by a Labour candidate. In 2018, all three were won by Labour.

 

Leyton and Leytonstone

The name of Leyton is nationally known among football fans for Leyton Orient, one of London’s oldest professional football clubs, founded in the 1880s. The club’s historian has written that it acquired its curious name because one of its players worked for the Orient Steam Navigation Company. Leyton itself sits in the right angle formed by Lea Bridge Road and Hackney Marsh and the River Lea, stretching down towards the Waltham Forest section of the Olympic Park. It, and neighbouring Wanstead and Leytonstone, fall to the east of a bundle of Essex-bound A-roads and are characterised by long residential streets. Leytonstone bumps up against the green space Wanstead Flats, part of which lies in next door Redbridge. Leytonstone’s Underground station is distinguished by a series of mosaics honouring Alfred Hitchcock, who was born there.

 

Walthamstow

Classified as a major town centre in the London plan, Walthamstow can also claim to have a village heart that is more than a marketing concept. Centred on the 12th century St Mary’s Church, the tranquil Walthamstow Village has been a conservation area since 1967. Wider Walthamstow’s main commercial avenue is Wood Street, which is served by an Overground station of the same name and has a popular eponymous indoor market. Wood Street also boasts a horse chestnut tree thought to be at least 175 years old and listed as one of the 61 Great Trees of London. On Forest Road, you can find the William Morris Gallery, opened by Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1950. The magnificent Town Hall is along there too. West of Hoe Street, Walthamstow High Street hosts the cosmopolitan Walthamstow market, said to be the longest in Europe. The Town Square lies off it.

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Categories: Intelligence, The Boroughs
Tags: Chingford, Chingford & Woodford Green, City of London Corporation, Clare Coghill, Forest Road, Hackney Marshes, Hale End, Highams Park, Iain Duncan Smith, Jennette Arnold, John Cryer, Lea Bridge Road, Leyton, Leyton Orient, Leytonstone, North Circular, River Ching, River Lea, Stella Creasy, Waltham Forest Council, Walthamstow, Wanstead, Wood Street

Daniel Moylan: Spending on London’s rail services – what should Sadiq Khan ask the government for?

The Mayor needs to produce a strong argument for more capital spending on the Tube and new projects if ministers are to oblige
Daniel Moylan

From time to time, every Mayor of London has to go cap in hand to national government for money. At no time is this more important than when a newly elected government is preparing its first budget, because that budget normally sets the scene for several years ahead. This is particularly important for capital investment, because capital projects can take several years to complete and the money has to be in place before work can start.

The newly elected Boris Johnson government will be setting its first budget in March. What should Sadiq Khan be asking for? And what approach will he take? Police, housing and transport are City Hall’s big areas of budgetary responsibility. The police don’t require much capital spending and the housing budget is already set for some time ahead. But what of transport? And what, in particular, of the capital’s railways, both Underground and Overground, that fall under Transport for London’s remit? Because they are the big consumers of transport capital spending.

Money, to be well spent, has to buy you something. And in a large, compact city like London, what money well spent on transport is meant to buy is capacity: the ability to take large numbers of people safely and reliably to and fro. That’s what keeps the economy humming. The projects to prioritise are those where each pound spent achieves the highest increase in capacity.

A wise old managing director of London Underground once told me, “The railway will be absolutely fine – as long as you keep spending money on it.” Railways – and London Underground is no exception – need constant maintenance. But they also need periodic upgrades: new rolling-stock is an obvious example of that, but, even more significantly, introducing the latest signalling technology is crucial to getting the best out of the existing infrastructure. And in a growing city, like London, there also need to be new lines and new services to cater for a rising population and to open up opportunities for new housing.

All that is pretty uncontroversial. Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan would all agree with it. Indeed, the argument for capital investment in London’s transport has only very recently been made in a comprehensive and up-to-date report issued by City Hall. But when it comes to talking to hard-nosed government ministers (and their even more sceptical civil servants), what matters is having a prioritised, long term plan that has the credibility to persuade them to unlock a steady stream of capital finance. On that front, London is lagging.

Under Livingstone and Johnson, TfL had a rolling ten-year business plan precisely to show how it intended to prioritise and timetable its investment. (Admittedly the second five-year periods were somewhat vaguer than the first.) Ministers liked that. Under Mayor Khan, the TfL business plan is very much a five-year lookahead – and what we see in the coming five years is a small number of funded projects all started by his predecessor: the re-signalling of the District, Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines; the Northern line extension to Battersea; the improvements to Bank station; the new, developer-funded ticket hall at Elephant & Castle; and the replacement of the rolling-stock on the Piccadilly line. (The re-signalling of the Piccadilly line has been postponed.) And, crucially, Crossrail has to be finished. All this is to be found in the latest Transport for London Business Plan 2020/21 to 2024/25.

There is no pipeline of investments beyond works already in hand. Yet Londoners hear talk about new projects: Crossrail 2 has had new life breathed into it by some approving remarks made by Boris Johnson during his successful bid to be elected leader of the Conservative Party. The extension of the Bakerloo line to Lewisham (but not beyond) has its partisans. But who is to set out what the priority should be amongst these projects? Will the government only agree to contribute to them if the loss of revenue consequent on the current Mayor’s current fares policy is made up? And how will Londoners be consulted on what will be really big decisions for their future and their wallets?

Well, don’t ask me. Ask the Mayor. But, while you’re waiting for an answer, here is my top list of rail projects (in no particular order) that need to be in the mix, so that you can consider for yourself what priority you would give them – and whether you would be willing to put your hand in your pocket to help pay for them through higher fares.

 

Line upgrades

Unaccountably, TfL no longer publishes the number of passengers carried by each Underground line, but when the figures were last issued (in 2011), the Piccadilly was the fourth most-heavily used and it is the busiest line still running on antiquated signalling. (The Central, Northern and Jubilee lines all carry more passengers but they all have automated signalling.) New Piccadilly line trains are promised in the business plan, but without new signalling there will be only a modest improvement in capacity. The associated track and power works make this upgrade a multi-billion pound project, but the increase in capacity could be a whopping 60 per cent.

The Bakerloo line, by contrast, carries about half as many passengers as the Piccadilly line, but it is palpably in need of new trains and signalling. This is the dog to which the proposed Bakerloo line extension to Lewisham is in fact the tail, because it would be absurd (indeed practically impossible) to extend the line with the existing trains and signalling. A new fleet and automated signalling for the whole line would be required, meaning that the “extension”, far from being a discrete little add-on, will in fact involve a major upgrade of the whole existing line as well. This will be another multi-billion pound project. While the number of passengers who would benefit would be smaller than on the Piccadilly, the extended Bakerloo would open up some sites on the way to Lewisham to new housing.

By the time you have done these upgrades, you will probably want to come back to the Central line, the busiest on the network, because, although it has automated signalling, it is a couple of decades old and the trains are also showing their age. Another multi-billion pound upgrade beckons.

 

Station upgrades

Beyond the improvements being carried out at Bank, work is crying out to be done at two other major stations: Camden Town and Holborn. Holborn speaks for itself: its internal layout means that it cannot cope with passenger demand in the peak periods and it is routinely closed to entry at the busiest times. This is embarrassing in a major Central London location, and reconfiguring the station will in any case be crucial if and when the Central line upgrade goes ahead.

But the real near term prize is Camden Town. Plans already exist for a station rebuild that would allow the Northern line to be split into two separate lines north of Euston and King’s Cross (it has already been split into two lines south of Kennington). For complicated reasons this would achieve a major increase in capacity on the line, taking full advantage of the newly automated signalling. These station upgrades should come in at well under a billion each. For the capacity increase it would allow, the Camden Town upgrade would be a snip.

 

New rolling-stock

Both the Jubilee line and the Northern line are short of trains. Without them, they cannot take full advantage of the recent, state-of-the art signalling they have had installed. At key stations it is already a struggle in peak periods to get on the first – or even the second – train on the Jubilee line. Normally a Tube train should cost between £10 million and £12 million, but that is for a large production run. Although both Jubilee and Northern lines use essentially the same rolling-stock, the additional sets would still be a “small” order for the manufacturer, so expect to pay a lot more for the 25 or so trains that would make all the difference.

 

Crossrail 2

The biggie. Here we are not talking “multi-billion”, but “multi-tens-of billions”, with the price-tag now north of £40 billion, reportedly. But it would be a hugely transformative railway, linking south-west and north London, taking pressure off mainline services at Waterloo and, it is claimed, facilitating the construction of around 200,000 new homes.

The above, of course, is just my list. Others will wish to add to it, particularly those concerned about the continuing patchy state of disabled access to the London Underground network. And there are useful projects to be carried out on the Docklands Light Railway and on London Overground as well. But it doesn’t stop there. The Mayor has more transport issues to care about than the Underground and, while London is making progress with the provision of electric charging infrastructure for cars and vans, many believe that the demand for electric vehicles has now built to a pitch that will make a much wider network of charging-points an urgent necessity. That won’t come cheap either. But of course nothing will happen if the Mayor and TfL don’t make a credible and convincing case to government. And with a mayoral election inconveniently looming, who can be sure that that will happen?

What’s your priority list? It’s your transport.

Daniel Moylan is a former deputy chairman of Transport for London. Copyright © Daniel Moylan 2020. 

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Categories: Comment
Tags: Boris Johnson, Crossrail 2, Ken Livingstone, London Underground, Piccadilly Line, Sadiq Khan, transport, Transport for London