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Philip Glanville: Hackney’s council house building programme is a model for the nation to follow

By making good use of its own land and with financial support from the London Mayor, the East London borough has shown what can be achieved
Philip Glanville

Hackney Council has built no less than 912 by itself since 2009. That’s despite receiving barely a penny of national government funding to do so amid austerity, a constantly shifting national housing policy environment and a Conservative Mayor of London from 2008 until 2016.

I’m incredibly proud of that record, achieved – it shouldn’t be forgotten – during a sustained attack on council housing and tenants by a succession of housing ministers and prime ministers who have turned to a failing market to build the genuinely affordable homes our city needs.

Hackney, the borough I lead as its Mayor, has done it by acting as our own developer, and building for ourselves on our own land rather than flogging it to the highest bidder, while giving tenants and leaseholders a meaningful voice in what their new homes look and feel like.

And we’re getting noticed – our new homes have been called “some of the best council housing ever built” and we’ve picked up a bulging shelf of architecture and design awards. Most importantly, our residents – whether they rent or buy – love their new homes.

But as we mark the centenary of the Housing and Planning Act 1919 that marked the first direct council housebuilding in Hackney – dubbed the Addison Act after Shoreditch MP Christopher Addison – the sad truth is that we’re simply not building enough homes to tackle London’s growing housing crisis.

There are 13,000 families on Hackney’s housing waiting list alone, more than 3,000 of whom are homeless and in temporary accommodation. If we are to provide them with the genuinely affordable council homes they deserve, Hackney and other boroughs must return to their historic role as housebuilders at scale.

Sadiq Khan recognises this. This week, I set out how we’ll use the funding he awarded Hackney through his building council homes for Londoners programme to deliver 100 more council homes for social rent than would otherwise have been possible. Without that money from the London Mayor, we would have had to sell outright or use for shared ownership some of the new homes in order to help pay for the expensive business of building new Council homes through our cross-subsidy model.

That’s 100 more families on our waiting list with a permanent, modern and high-quality place to call home. While the government’s removal of its arbitrary cap on our ability to borrow to fund housebuilding last year was welcome – and something I had long campaigned for – ministers did not give local authorities in London any additional direct funding to build social housing. So although house building ambitions are no longer handcuffed in that pointless way, we can’t simply borrow to build the homes we require, especially given the need to maintain our existing stock and deliver the urgent fire safety work that is so necessary after the Grenfell tragedy.

Without the Mayor’s lobbying for the capital, and his provision of cold hard cash, we would not be able to deliver these 100 homes at social rent levels or start work on a new long-term programme to build another 2,000 over the next few years.

Stable, sensible grant funding would transform the delivery of council housebuilding in London and across our country. If ministers were serious about tackling the housing crisis, they’d follow Sadiq’s lead, back Hackney’s vision and celebrate the anniversary of the first council homes by kickstarting a new era of public sector housebuilding.

Philip Glanville is the Mayor of Hackney.

Categories: Comment
Tags: council housing, Hackney Council, housing, Sadiq Khan, social housing

Mayor’s violence reduction drive will take ‘hyper-local, place-based’ approach, London Assembly Members told

Lib Peck, who heads Sadiq Khan's violence reduction unit, explained her approach the police and crime committee yesterday
Charles Wright

Community and young people’s voices must be at the heart of an effective “public health” approach to reducing violence. That was the message from Lib Peck, head of Sadiq Khan’s newly-created Violence Reduction Unit, in her first appearance before the London Assembly police and crime committee.

The former Labour leader of Lambeth Council, who took up her City Hall post in March, fielded questions from Assembly members on the unit’s priorities, work programme, and when £5 million earmarked by the Mayor for projects to tackle violent crime across the capital would be allocated.

Plans for the unit were announced in September last year to take forward the “public health” approach in the wake of significant increases in violent crime since 2014. Met Police figures for 2018 record 136 homicides alongside nearly 15,000 knife crime offences, 2,500 gun crime offences and around 85,000 domestic abuse offences, while since the beginning of this year London has seen 33 homicides.

It’s about looking at violence “not as isolated incidents or solely a police enforcement problem” but as “as a preventable consequence of a range of factors, such as adverse early-life experiences, or harmful social or community experiences and influences,” according to City Hall.

The approach is based on successful violence reduction initiatives in Glasgow. But it was important to remember that “London isn’t Glasgow”, Peck told the committee, batting off questions as to why she hadn’t yet made a visit north of the border. “London is much more complex.”

That complexity, at institutional level as well as in terms of varying levels of crime and a wide variety of initiatives already underway, had also led her to revise the unit’s initial proposals for pan-London work based around six sub-regional “hubs”.

Plans due for ratification today at the unit’s “partnership reference group” of professionals and community representatives will now adopt a “more hyper-local, place-based approach”. While those plans confirmed that delivery would initially “focus on priority areas…and not cover all of London”, Peck stressed that the whole of the capital would benefit from sharing good practice.

“My rationale for changing was that it felt too imposing and spreading what we had too thinly across London,” she said. “My concern was the notion that you had to get a template out and every borough had to have a VRU. Talking to people on the ground I’ve sensed a reluctance to set up new structures where there are existing systems in place. There’s lots of good practice out there. I want to go with the grain.

“So community and local activity isn’t going to be determined by City Hall, but we will be looking at the areas most affected and then spreading lessons across London. It’s also as much about listening and learning as it is about money.”

Commissioning plans would be in place by the end of June to allow organisations to bid for support, she confirmed, with success measures in place too, and community representation on the partnership reference board increased.

Peck also confirmed that, despite the current focus on young people and knife crime, violent crime of all types would fall within the unit’s remit. And she confirmed Mayor Khan’s support for her unit’s objective of discouraging the use of images of knives by the police as well as the media, as well as sensationalist media headlines reinforcing fear among young people and others.

City Hall funding for the unit amounts to £6.8 million in 2019, including £5 million of project funding. The funding runs alongside the Mayor’s £45 million Young Londoners Fund, £1.4 million for hospital-based youth workers directly supporting knife crime victims, and a separate £15 million allocation supporting women and girls suffering domestic violence. The Mayor has also bolstered the Met’s violent crime taskforce, with £15 million specifically to address knife crime.

Categories: News
Tags: crime, knife crime, Lambeth Council, Lib Peck, London Assembly, Sadiq Khan, violence reduction unit, violent crime, youth crime

Dave Hill: Corbyn’s Labour does not deserve London Remainers’ Euro elections support

The party's high command is run by hardened eurosceptics who've always wanted to leave the EU
Dave Hill

Yesterday, the Labour Party decided that its manifesto for the (probably) forthcoming European elections on 23 May will not include an unequivocal commitment to campaigning for a second “confirmatory” EU referendum. Instead, it is sticking to only retaining the idea as an option if the Conservative government doesn’t make changes it requires to its battered Brexit deal.

There are different of ways of looking at this fudge. It can be seen as a simple snub to those many Labour voters, members and MPs who want the party to get fully behind a “People’s Vote”. Others regard it as a bargaining ploy to put pressure on the Tories in the ongoing talks between the two parties to find a compromise Brexit deal that the House of Commons will accept – a ploy some second referendum supporters are confident won’t work, meaning that things have actually shifted a bit their way.

Those maddened by this approach should, perhaps, imagine themselves being in Labour’s shoes. The party’s 2017 general election manifesto promised to abide by the 2016 referendum outcome. That needn’t bind it any more, but it has a policy agreed at its annual conference last year and there’s some obligation to stick to it. And if the party’s “constructive ambiguity” towards Brexit is largely about holding together a voter coalition that includes Leave voters in marginal seats as well as Reamainers in safe ones – plenty of those being in London – well, such considerations, though arguably overstated, cannot be lightly dismissed.

But what does Labour’s stance means for Londoners who want to stay in the EU – of which there were 2,263,519 million in 2016 compared with 1,513,232 million who felt otherwise – and see the European elections as an opportunity to reiterate that view? Should they cast their single vote for Labour, as so many Londoners do in other types of election, or should they instead give it to a party – the Greens, the Liberal Democrats or Change UK – which out and out supports a second referendum and wants Brexit abandoned? Has Labour done enough to deserve their support?

The answer is no, and the reasons are about something more than all that tortuous fence sitting and triangulating. Never forget that Corbyn himself and his coterie of fixers and advisers have always wanted out of the EU. Imagine how different the last three years of UK history might have been had that not been the case. While other major Labour figures, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, campaigned vigorously and conspicuously for Remain, the Labour leader did not exert himself.

Perhaps such a dug in eurosceptic would not have been much of an asset to the Remain campaign, but that just underlines what a dogged old Lexiter Corbyn is. A national Labour leader who had been upfront and passionate for Remain in 2016 might have swung the result the other way. Surveys conducted before the referendum found that around half of Labour voters across the country didn’t know what the party’s view about it was. Corbyn has wanted out from the start.

A further reason for Labour-leaning London Remainers to deny Labour their Euro vote is the party’s list of candidates. Labour has four MEPs at present, two of whom are seeking re-election. They are first and second on the list for 2019 and unless there is a truly massive collapse in the Labour vote, will probably retain their seats. But third on the list is Corbyn’s anti-EU former political secretary Katy Clark, who was reportedly installed in that position by party officials. Do London Remainers want to give her a helping hand?

Following Labour’s manifesto decision yesterday, fully pro-“People’s Vote” parties are using the hashtag #LabourMeansLeave. As things stand, it is hard to disagree.

 

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit Party, Change UK, Conservatives, Green Party, Labour, Liberal Democrats

Cityread: Magic on the streets of London

For one month in each year, a book festival helps us discover more of the capital through the lens of literature
Andy Ryan

I recently received an email from someone telling me that her Women’s Institute reading group had enjoyed reading our Cityread 2018 book, The Muse by Jessie Burton, so much that they undertook a journey to the National Gallery to see for themselves the painting  Jessie describes so realistically in her novel. Unfortunately, on arrival at the gallery they were told that both the painting and the artist were fictional. I emailed back admitting that I took had been so convinced by Jessie’s depictions that I spent considerable time on Google seeking a reference to it before accepting that they were indeed made up.

But that’s what really great literature does, isn’t it? It pulls us into orbit around a planet that is very much like ours, but just, well, isn’t. Amazing novels that are firmly rooted in “place”, are pretty much a door to a parallel universe – books such as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, or Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. I can’t be in Clerkenwell without feeling the ghost of the Artful Dodger hovering around, and when in Covent Garden I’m forever on the lookout for PC Peter Grant and his guvnor Nightingale.  

Cityread is a festival that, I hope, helps Londoners throw wide that door marked “other dimension” and together discover our city through the lens of literature. I’ve always been fascinated by the places where the real world and fictional worlds push closest together. For example, books with maps. If they are fold-out maps, like the ones in my beautiful hardback copies of Lord of the Rings trilogy (the best bit of the books, actually, if you ask me), so much the better. But as a little girl I was pretty mesmerised by any map that brought me a bit closer to seeping into the book I was reading. Enjoying Narnia, Hogwarts or, a more recent discovery, Goth Girl’s Ghastly-Gorm Hall with my own little girls, I find tracing the maps with my fingers makes it seem entirely possible that we can step into those worlds.  

So its not really surprising that when I read books set in London that are precise in their naming of real streets, parks and alleyways I’ve strolled along – or sprawled in or stumbled down – I find myself turning to an A-Z (I still have one…) to just double check a character’s route is entirely accurate. It’s always wise to be mistrustful of someone who makes thing up for a living, after all.

It’s this desire to look at London through a gauze of fiction that is behind my love of Cityread. That, and my slightly pig-headed determination to insist that other Londoners do the same. Cityread connects us, though literature, to London, the city we call home, and those we share it with. And by looking at the capital, its streets, its architecture and its history, through the lens of literature we can bring a bit of magic to that connection.

Every year since 2012, we’ve chosen a book set in London and asked the whole city to read it together. Oliver Twist and Rivers of London were previous choices, as you might have guessed. For one month in each year we’ve brought the capital together as we’ve brought London’s novels to life through immersive theatre, digital installations and supper clubs.

This year, our chosen novel is Sofia Khan is Not Obliged by Ayisha Malik. We meet Sofia in London in 2011, she’s just split with her boyfriend and has somehow managed to be convinced by her publisher boss to write a book on Muslim dating. It’s a fresh and funny rom-com for sure, but somehow Malik manages to tackle the weighty themes themes of race and identity and also the “London experience” with an incredibly light touch. Hope you’ll read along with us this May.

The Cityread festival will run throughout May. Read more about it here. Andy Ryan is the charity’s chief executive.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Ben Aaronovitch, Charles Dickens, Cityread, Clerkenwell, Covent Garden, National Gallery

Mayor must take lead on smarter approach to traffic congestion and pollution, says new report

Centre for London report says reform of current systems long overdue
Charles Wright

London needs to get a lot smarter in its approach to tackling traffic congestion and air pollution according to a new report from the Centre for London think tank, which calls on City Hall to replace existing road user charging systems with a “next generation” digital approach.

A simplified but sophisticated system that charges drivers by the mile instead of the current flat rate and uses an integrated app and website could represent a new “Bazalgette” moment, the report says – a reference to the celebrated Victorian engineer Joseph Bazalgette who created the capital’s sewer system and some of the first underground train tunnels in response to the transport and health concerns of his time.

With London now the most congested city in Western Europe, costing the city economy almost £5 billion a year, air pollution at dangerous levels and an increasingly complex and fragmented charging system, reform for all London’s private and public transport users is overdue, the report argues.

The once pioneering Congestion Charge is no longer stemming traffic growth, and the new Ultra-Low Emission Zone, a welcome intervention, is nevertheless a “blunt tool”, charging a car driving a few metres on a quiet road in the zone the same as a vehicle driving all day on the most congested routes.

The new approach would use digital technology to charge drivers by the  mile, with costs varied by vehicle emission levels, local levels of congestion and pollution and the availability of public transport alternatives.

A new app, which the report calls City Move, would integrate charging based on the true impact of individual journeys – the polluter pays principle – with the wider transport system, providing travel information in one place and allowing one-stop payment alongside comparative costs and alternative journey options, ultimately encouraging drivers to leave their cars at home.

As well as tackling congestion and the impact of individual journeys in a fairer way, the system could reduce emissions and air pollution by a further 20 per cent compared to the estimated impact of the newly-introduced Ultra Low Emission Zone, with charges equivalent to the price of a “cup of coffee or a bus ticket”, the report claims.

Income from the scheme would support improved road maintenance, while reduced traffic levels would support business, underpin efforts to make city streets more pleasant and encourage more active lifestyles.

Incentives for sign-up could include partial or full refunds where journeys were delayed longer than expected, cheaper rates for businesses shifting delivery journeys off peak, and “mobility credits” to reward greener travel choices.

The proposals are backed by transport experts, business groups and London’s local authorities.

The report was a “welcome contribution to the debate on road user charging, which can have a positive impact on a city but also needs to keep pace with the changing needs of our residents,” said London Councils transport chair Cllr Julian Bell. “That is why any scheme should use digital innovation and help Londoners make better-informed travel decisions.”

The plan was “the only effective way of making a real difference to London’s transport challenges,” said Living Streets vice-chair Robert Molteno, and a key element in measures to “keep London an attractive place to visit, live and work,” according to Richard Dilks, transport director for business group London First.

With the technology and City Hall implementation powers already available, the reports challenges the London Mayor Sadiq Khan to take the lead and develop options to get the scheme in place by 2024, the end of the next mayoral term.

Read the Centre for London Report, entitled Green Light, via here.

Categories: News
Tags: air quality, Centre For London, congestion, congestion charge, Josephe Bazalgette, pollution, Sadiq Khan, ultra low emission zone

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 88: the unburied Three Tuns pub

Dating from medieval times, it had its own wine bar and microbrewery
Victor Keegan

The piece of Lost London that most frequently haunts me is the Three Tuns pub on Snow Hill, buried close to today’s Holborn Viaduct. Archaeologists from the Museum of London were let loose on the site a decade ago, prior to a new office block being built at 60 High Holborn. What they discovered was a revelation – substantial remains of a medieval inn that had been expanded during the Tudor and later periods. It was a very modern inn, with its own wine bar and micro brewery. 

Some of its walls were 2.5 metres high, and in an ideal world its extensive remains would have been preserved intact within the new development for public access, or even rebuilt as a pub within the new building (now occupied by Amazon). It is almost certainly the oldest inn in Central London. Snow Hill was the main road from St Paul’s to the west of London, taking in the gallows at Tyburn. It followed a steep incline past the pub to a bridge over the River Fleet, then up again. It was the construction of Holborn Viaduct that raised the level of the road and left the pub below ground for future generations to discover.

And so they did. The archaeologists, led by Dave Saxby, uncovered a cornucopia of artefacts, including clay pipes, blue panels, charred bricks from the 1666 Fire of London, writing, water tanks and furnaces and carved bones from nearby Smithfield market. Also unearthed was was the inn’s logo with three barrels and the words “at the 3 Tuns, Holborne Bridge”. 

PS: At the end of the 17th century, Richard Ames wrote an epic poem about the difficulty of getting a decent glass of claret in London. He visited dozens of pubs in search of one, including another on Snow Hill called The Castle, where criminals on their way from Newgate to execution at Tyburn were allowed to stop for their final bevy. Ames was about to enter when he realised Tyburn-bound prisoners were already there, and he decided to beat a retreat. He wrote in 1691:

“On Snow Hill at the Castle, two fellows in Halters,

Just going to Tyburn and reading their Psalters,

Made the cart stop, and drink of a pint of Canary,

To attend their sad face with a countenance merry,

To find no claret there, though we had a suspicion, 

Yet declined we to enter, by odd superstition,

That if we drank there, it would follow of course, 

That in a few sessions their turn would be ours.” 

Vic Keegan’s Lost London series can be enjoyed in full here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Great Fire of London, Holborn Viaduct, Museum of London, Newgate prison, River Fleet, Smithfield, Snow Hill, St Paul's cathedral, Tyburn

Enfield: slow-moving Meridian Water is at last gathering speed

It's been a troubled six years for this big redevelopment scheme by the North Circular, but builders are at last on board and a new station is soon to open
Charles Wright

Crossrail may be delayed, but next month will see at least one brand new railway station open in London as Meridian Water station in Edmonton goes into service on 19 May – the harbinger of progress at last on major regeneration plans for the Upper Lee Valley.

The new station replaces little-used Angel Road nearby. It was used by just 33,000 passengers last year, but the new station is expected to serve up to four million people as ambitious, £6 billion plans for 10,000 homes and 6,000 jobs finally get underway in a former industrial area off the North Circular, once the home of Thorn Electrical Industries and now best-known for its IKEA, whose opening in 2005 prompted a bargain-seeking customer riot.

Plans for Meridian Water have a long history. Designated an opportunity area and housing zone funding recipient by Boris Johnson, it was masterplanned by Enfield Council in 2013 as a “new waterfront eco-quarter”, exploiting its transport connections, network of waterways and proximity to the Lee Valley Regional Park, London’s largest park. It’s not been a smooth ride since. The council selected Barratt London in 2016 as preferred developer for the entire 210-acre site, but negotiations soured and Barratt pulled out in October 2017 after failing to agree terms.

“We were simply not prepared to sign up to what we considered to be a poor deal for the residents and businesses of Enfield,” the council said. Correspondence disclosed under Freedom of Information provisions suggested that Barratt’s offer was “materially different from that in the Final Tender…submitted”. Disputing that claim, Barratt cited the “central issue” as a “difference between what we share with you as an ambition or aspiration for the project and what is acceptable as an absolute contractual commitment”.

The council turned to reserve bidder, Hong Kong-based Pacific Century Premium Developments (PCPD), but discussions again foundered, with PCPD withdrawing shortly after a showdown with the new Labour administration in June last year. Council leader Nesil Caliskan confirmed “significant concerns” over commercial and financial terms.

“I have always been uncomfortable with having just one master-developer for the entire 20-year delivery period,” she said in an interview. “It became apparent that it was not a good deal for local people…There was a risk that the majority of homes built would be sold to overseas buyers, and that was not something I was not willing to sign up to.”

In a significant change of tack, Enfield is now taking control, seeking development partners incrementally rather than a single master developer. This week, Galliford Try Partnerships were selected for the first phase of 725 homes around the new station. Procurement is underway for a phase two site, to comprise 250 affordable homes plus workspaces at Leeside Road, south of the IKEA.

Sites for “meanwhile” uses are being offered and a new 10,000 capacity music venue, the Drumsheds, will open shortly, with outdoor space for a further 30,000 attendees. It will host its first event, the Field Day festival, in June.

It’s a “genuinely new” approach according to the council, though it builds on significant direct involvement to date, including the council assembling land itself, buying up two-thirds of developable land since 2014 at a cost of more than £150 million, securing planning permissions, managing infrastructure works, supplying low carbon heat through its own company Energetik, and substantially funding the new Meridian Water station.

Proceeding via development agreements rather than outright sale also keeps the council in the driving seat, says Caliskan: “Investing council money and resources to ensure that local people are the principal beneficiaries of the new homes and jobs that will be created.” The proposed deal with Galliford includes a 12 month bar on overseas sales, and a buy-back option for the council on units unsold after that period.

Spades may not be in the ground quite yet and the council is still awaiting the outcome of a £156 million joint funding bid to Whitehall to improve connectivity and train frequencies. But things are finally moving at Meridian Water.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Angel Road station, Enfield Council, Galliford Try, Lee Valley Regional Park, Meridian Water, Nesil Caliskan

John Biggs: 20 years after Brick Lane, Brixton and Soho were bombed, let us renew our intolerance of hate

The East End's history of rejecting racist violence has long set an example for London as a whole
John Biggs

The East End has a long history of standing up to hate. This historic role in defining London as a place that draws strength from its diversity is why Brick Lane was a target of the 1999 London nail bombings, along with the black community in Brixton and the LGBT community in Soho.

Three people were killed in the three attacks, including a pregnant woman, and 140 were injured, four of whom lost limbs. In Brick Lane, 13 people were injured and surrounding buildings and cars were severely damaged. It could have been a lot worse if the bomb hadn’t been put in the boot of a car by a concerned passerby.

I was a Tower Hamlets councillor at the time and remember the feeling of shock and fear it caused in the heart of our community. It’s important that we all remember and learn from the history of our great capital city. Tower Hamlets has a proud tradition of being a welcoming borough. The East End has been where Huguenot, Jewish, Irish and Bangladeshi communities have arrived in London and made it their home. Whether fleeing persecution, economic hardship or political upheaval, this area has been a refuge and a melting pot of cultures.

I’m very proud that today we are home to Banglatown and thriving Bangladeshi and Somali communities, as well as many from Eastern Europe and a growing Chinese population. This diversity – the very thing the Brick Lane bomber sought to attack – has contributed so much to making the East End the vibrant place it is today.

Brick lane bombing commemoration 24apr19
Brick Lane bombing commemoration.

But there has always been a hateful minority seeking to divide us. We have been challenged and sometimes faced great pressure, whether from the fascists who targeted the East End’s Jewish community in the 1930s, the National Front and others who targeted black and other minority ethnic residents, particularly the growing Bangladeshi population, in the 1970s and 1980s, or the election of a BNP councillor in 1993.

In each case, external agitation sought to divide us and preyed on the view that change was a zero sum game which produced loss. In reality, the East End has always come through strengthened, powered on by innovation and cultural energy, and pulled together to fight extremism. 

In 1936, Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists thought they could pass through the East End, but the community came together to stop them. In the 1970s, the racist murder of Altab Ali in Whitechapel again provoked community uproar and solidarity, which we mark each year on 4 May. It was a watershed moment that led to marches and a campaign against racism. We also saw off the BNP in the early 1990s, and continue to fight off racism in whatever form it takes, from the Football Lads Alliance to the spike in hate crime following the Brexit vote.

Twenty years ago, the nail bomber wanted to start a race war. He failed. Walking along Brick Lane today you see people from all around the world who have made the area their home or who visit to enjoy one of the capital’s best curries or a late night bagel, taking in the modern street art or visiting the vintage shops.

On the 20th anniversary of the Brick Lane, Soho and Brixton attacks, the best way to honour those affected by them is to celebrate the multiculturalism that has made our capital city the envy of the world and renew our collective resolve to fight racism and intolerance wherever we find it.

John Biggs is the Mayor of Tower Hamlets. Photos courtesy of Tower Hamlets Council.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Banglatown, Brick Lane, Brixton, Soho, terrorism