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Government should consider mandatory London Living Wage, says leading housing association

Report shows real terms decline in capital's low earners' incomes since 2010
Dave Hill

National government should investigate requiring London employers to pay a legally-required London Living Wage set at a level higher than the National Living Wage applied to the rest of the country, according to a new report on low income levels in the capital.

Published by leading housing association Peabody, the report concludes that the measure would help working Londoners on low incomes cope better with the capital’s higher cost of living after nearly ten years of weak income growth and cuts to the benefit entitlements of working age households have left many households “living close to the breadline”.

The report, compiled in partnership with think tank the Social Market Foundation, draws on official data for London social housing tenants and a survey of 1,000 Peabody residents living in the capital to describe “a decade of stagnation” in the disposable incomes of low income Londoners, with minimal wage growth outweighed by the effects of inflation and private sector rent rises.

“Lower income households in London have not benefitted from increases to the National Living Wage [formerly the national minimum wage] to the same extent as elsewhere,” the report says. It states that the lowest paid full time employees “have seen their incomes increase by 15 per cent in ten years” but that consumer price inflation has run at 25 per cent over the same period, producing a “real terms” wages fall.

Employment rates among Peabody’s working tenants are described as high, but the survey results showed that half of them earn less than the current, voluntary London Living Wage of £10.55 an hour, and just over half said they have not received a pay rise in the last three years.

A 2103 report for think tank Centre For London by economist and former Labour Party politician Kitty Ussher found that the London economy could afford a seven percent increase to the statutory national minimum wage of the time – akin to a London weighting. Funded by Trust for London, Ussher’s study applied the same methodology used to set the national minimum wage to London’s economy, with its various, high living cost characteristics.

Peabody says there are “few prospects for progression” for most low paid Londoners, citing significant numbers of older people possibly “trapped” in poorly paid jobs, zero-hours contracts restricting the amount of work those bound by them can do and few opportunities for training or promotion.

The report stresses that the predicament of low paid households leaves them particularly vulnerable to an economic downturn, and, in the context of Brexit and its associated uncertainties, urges the government to “ensure that the social security system is functioning as a safety net. Policy decisions like the benefits freeze, a number of benefit cuts and the continued use of aggressive sanctions despite a lack of evidence put this key function in question”.

Read Peabody’s report on low pay in London here.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Centre For London, Kitty Ussher, London Living Wage, Peabody, Social Market Foundation, Trust For London

London housing: There is no ‘clear choice’ between building ‘luxury flats’ and delivering affordable homes

A tiff between Sadiq Khan and James Brokenshire provides an insight into how simplistic and polemical debate about housing supply has become
Dave Hill

You can tell there’s an election campaign brewing when politicians posit a “clear choice” between a policy approach they wish to be associated with and one they want voters to associate with their opponents. We had an example of that last week, when Sadiq Khan launched a Twitter attack on James Brokenshire, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government.

Their disagreement was reported on ITV News. With Brokenshire about to appear on the Andrew Marr programme, the Mayor (or perhaps a proxy) posted a clip from the bulletin, which reported his riposte to remarks Brokenshire had made in the preceding days. I quote:

“The Mayor has accused the housing minister of not understanding Londoners, after he told ITV News there should be less focus on building affordable housing in the capital. Sadiq Khan says he makes no apologies for his commitment to building more low cost and social housing, but James Brokenshire claims building more expensive homes will create a healthier housing market”.

The Mayor’s comment on the clip included this:

“Earlier this week, he told me to focus on luxury private apartments rather than social and affordable homes. No thanks. I’m proud City Hall started building more social & affordable homes last year than ever before. The choice for Londoners has never been clearer.”

But is there really a clear choice between the building of “luxury flats” in London and the building of “affordable” homes of different kinds? If the Mayor should seek to get more “expensive” homes built, would that mean fewer “affordable” ones being built as a result?

Screen shot 2019 02 12 at 20.47.40

It’s worth considering the part of the ITV News report the Mayor did not post on Twitter, and which I’ve obtained a transcript of. It followed on from the part he did post and showed Brokenshire saying the following:

“The Mayor and I have common cause. We want to see more homes being built, but the Mayor’s focus is purely on the affordable side, on how we get more affordable, as I do. But the thing is, you need a healthy London housing market overall, seeing everything being built, and actually that delivers more affordable homes, and more social-rented homes as well.”

This argument from Brokenshire is the same one he made to me when I asked him at London First’s recent Building London summit if he thought the Mayor should do more to nurture building by private developers.

As when speaking to ITV News, the wording of his answer was rather tortured, but he sought to make the point that the building of market housing usually generates social and other forms of affordable housing too, as a condition of securing planning consent. Brokenshire’s logic is simple enough: the more market homes are built, the more “affordable” homes are built as well; the fewer market homes are built, the fewer “affordable” homes are built as a by-product.

Mayor Khan, of course, knows this perfectly well. Why else would he have bothered introducing supplementary planning guidance saying that private developer planning applications that propose a minimum of 35 per cent “genuinely affordable” homes would be fast tracked through City Hall? Some people think 35 per cent a bit high – Sir Mark Boleat, for example, has suggested 30 per cent – but the principle of helping private development along if it meets a viable “affordable” threshold is common ground.

The other thing to keep in mind is that affordable homes delivered through the planning process in this way, with the trade-offs initially conducted at borough level, are separate from those the Mayor supports with funding and built by housing associations and councils – funding provided by the Tory national government, by the way. They are different streams of affordable supply. Part of Brokenshire’s claim is that if the Mayor would be more helpful to private developers, they would build more homes overall, including more affordable ones, on top of those he helps to fund himself.

Brokenshire may or may not have a point. His remarks echo a complaint sometimes made in developer circles that they would invest with more confidence if Mayor Khan was more conspicuously on their side. In response, the Mayor would probably say that the 35 per cent threshold approach was formulated in close consultation with them largely to provide them with the kind of certainty about the planning process they desire.

But what the Twitter tiff shows us is that such subtleties go out the window when political advantage is at stake – even more than a year before the 2020 mayoral election. It is also a reflection of how deeply embedded populist mantras about housing have become at the expense of understanding and productive debate.

In reality, the stark opposition so often presented between private “luxury flats” and “affordable” homes is largely a false one – a polemical over-simplification that conceals the truth that a large proportion of London’s new affordable housing only gets built because “luxury flats” get built as well. It may be a galling, unsatisfactory truth, but it’s the truth just the same.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: James Brokenshire, London First, Sadiq Khan, Sir Mark Boleat

Time for preparing for a no deal Brexit has run out, business leaders tell London MPs

Representatives of the capital's financial and construction businesses have given a stark warning the capital's parliamentarians
Charles Wright

Stark warnings of the impact of a no deal Brexit coupled with more than a little frustration with parliament – that was the message from business leaders addressing a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on London held at Portcullis House in Westminster yesterday.

Time for avoiding the consequences of leaving the EU without a deal has run out, leaders from London’s construction, insurance, legal and financial industries told a group of the capital’s MPs.

“Everybody urgently needs transition to give firms the time to organise their businesses and avoid the cliff edge,” said Rachel Kent, head of regulation at law practice Hogan Lovells and board member at the City-based international strategy group lobbying on post-Brexit regulation.

Firms which had hoped for transition were now implementing their contingency plans and setting up EU-based subsidiaries, she said. Current estimates of 5,000 to 7,000 City job losses were likely to increase as jobs moved out of London, while “for every City banking job that is lost, three other jobs will go as well.”

The building industry was facing huge uncertainty particularly over the supply of labour and the movement of goods, said Mark Reynolds, chief executive of major construction and consultancy business Mace. With most building materials imported from the EU, including 92 per cent of timber, delays at ports would cost the industry £2 million a week, he added – costs which would be borne by the supply chain with huge implications for small companies in particular, hitting construction across the UK.

Reynolds said that 40 per cent of the 11,000 strong Mace workforce on sites in London and the south east are from the EU, and that recruitment at all levels has already been affected.

Government proposals on immigration salary thresholds were set too high, hitting construction in London as well as hospitality and care providers, the MPs heard. “There seems to be a myth that there’s a market of UK people waiting to take these jobs – but they just ain’t there,” commented APPG co-chair Bob Neill, the Conservative MP for Bromley and Chislehurst.

London’s position as the insurance capital of the world – the place where insurance was effectively created after the Great Fire of London – was also at risk, said Seth Williams, public affairs chief at the Association of British Insurers. London had slipped behind the USA, Japan and China in the global insurance market and “France is snapping at our heels,” he said.

With 100,000 people employed in insurance in London, and 40 per cent of its work conducted with EU business, there were major concerns around future legal frameworks, continuity and enforceability of contracts and cross-border data transfer, affecting individuals as well as companies. Drivers in Europe now faced having to apply for “Green Card” documentation last used in the 1970s, for example. “Transition is fundamental,” William said. “The closer we get to 29 March 29 with nothing sorted out, the more jittery we are getting.”

Lack of certainty was having an impact across London – and “London is the economic dynamo of the country,” said Labour co-chair Steve Reed, the MP for Croydon North. “And I’m hearing at the moment of no upside to Brexit – just damage limitation.”

Business leaders would not be drawn on Reed’s second referendum suggestion, expressing frustration with politicians failing to listen and with the current “horror show” in parliament. “It must be about compromise on all sides,” said Williams. “We need to get over this stage,” added Kent. “Then we can work together to meet the next challenge.”

“I can feel the frustration. We have become more polarised,” Reed admitted. , Commenting after the meeting, Kensington MP Emma Dent Coad concluded: “The prospect of no deal or hard Brexit is pretty terrifying frankly.”

Categories: News
Tags: Bob Neill, Brexit, Emma Dent Coad, Mace, Steve Reed

London Chamber of Commerce names next chief executive

New man at the helm was an adviser to Boris Johnson when he was foreign secretary
Dave Hill

The London Chamber of Commerce and Industry has announced that its next chief executive will be career diplomat and former head of the Scotch Whisky Association, David Frost.

Aged 54, Frost’s previous jobs include being British ambassador to Denmark, director for Europe, trade and international affairs at the department for business, innovation and skills, and a number of senior posts with the Foreign Office, including director for the EU and, later, advisor to former London Mayor Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary. His work as a diplomat has also seen him based in New York, Brussels and Nicosia.

Frost, who is a qualified tax adviser having spend two years with professional services giant KPMG, is credited with modernising the Scotch whisky industry’s approach to competing in overseas markets before taking up his role assisting Johnson in November 2016.

“Having spent so much of my diplomatic career on economic, business, and trade issues, I very much look forward to engaging and working with the Chamber’s members and other stakeholders at this vital moment for London’s businesses and the London economy,” Frost said.

Frost met staff at the Chamber’s office in Queen Street today, and will formally take up his post on 1 April. He will succeed Colin Stanbridge, who has been the organisation’s CEO for the past 16 years. The Chamber, which is the oldest business membership organisation in the capital, has around 2,000 members from across the capital, including large, small and medium-sized companies.

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Boris Johnson, Colin Stanbridge, David Frost, London Chamber of Commerce & Industry

What is different about Sadiq Khan’s new tagging scheme for lessening knife crime?

The newly-announced initiative seeks to build on outcomes from similar projects already in effect
Dave Hill

The Monday morning press release from City Hall announces a new Sadiq Khan initiative for tackling knife crime. It involves the GPS tagging of potential re-offenders. But tagging is already happening in some parts of the city. So what is different about this one and how new is it?

The scheme will see up to 100 people aged over 18 who have been jailed for a variety of different crimes involving knives fitted with tagging devices on their release from custody in a London prison. The offences in question include robbery, wounding, grievous bodily harm, aggravated burglary and simple knife possession. It will run for a year, starting next week, affecting offenders released into Lewisham, Lambeth, Croydon and Southwark.

The tags will be fitted to offenders thought most likely to reoffend, and will enable their spatial movements to be tracked. A company called Buddi will operate the system and be responsible for informing the local borough police if any of those tagged were in the vicinity of a crime reported to them. The aims are to lessen the chances of reoffending, assist with rehabilitation and improve detection rates (presumably if the tagged person was indeed involved in a crime he or she was seen to be in the vicinity of).

The use of tagging is, of course, nothing new – electronic monitoring of different kinds has been happening in England and Wales for at least 20 years.

In London under Mayor Khan, a 12-month GPS tagging pilot applied to prolific re-offenders of various kinds – not including knife-related crimes – was launched in March 2017 as a component of community or suspended sentences. It was expected to affect 75-100 people living in eight boroughs: Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Islington, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.

In this project, an alert was sounded if someone moved out of satellite range. One year later, tags had been imposed on 73 people and 41 of them had, as it were, completed the course. Of those, 23 had done so without breaking the terms and 21 had not.

Last March, the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) decided to extend and develop it for another year at a cost of £306,000, and in October it was widened to include first-time knife crime offenders (as opposed to prolific re-offenders) who had been given community sentences.

The main difference between this and the scheme for four South London boroughs announced today is that it is designed specifically for people who have been given jail sentences for crimes involving knifes and are thought likely to commit further ones. City Hall says this move follows encouraging feedback from the widening of the earlier tagging pilot to first-time knife offenders who weren’t jailed.

When the eight borough re-offenders pilot was launched two years ago, Napo, the probation officers’ union, told the BBC that while it welcomed the use of new technologies, it had misgivings about the cost of tagging schemes and the efficiency of companies that had run them. However, City Hall’s press release quotes Alice Burrows, a London probation officer who has been involved with MOPAC’s first GPS pilot, saying she’s found the tagging being used now “hugely beneficial”. It will be interesting to see what results the new pilot scheme achieves.

The Mayor’s London Knife Crime Strategy document can be read here.

 

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Camden, crime, Croydon, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, knife crime, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Sadiq Khan, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest

A broken nose on Kingsway

Another person's painful mishap produced a heartwarming response
Dave Hill

I came out of Holborn Tube, crossed the road, headed down Kingsway and a woman in front of me fell over. Her feet had got entangled in a drifting coil of packaging twine, and she fell forward, as if poleaxed, landing with a smack on the pavement, face down. She didn’t move.

I went over, knelt next to her head and spoke to her. I can’t remember what I said, except for reassuring her that the bag she was carrying was still attached to her. If she spoke in reply, I couldn’t hear her. I didn’t think she was dead, though for all I could tell in those few seconds, in the dark, with the traffic roaring and dozens of people walking and talking nearby, she might have been.

A man came over and he too bent down next to her. Unlike me, he had some idea what to do. He asked if she could see or hear and whether she felt sick. Maybe a minute passed before she moved. Slowly, she sat up. She was middle-aged, wrapped up against the cold and although she left only a smear of blood on the slabs, her nose looked broken.

“I’m a medic,” said the man. “Are you dizzy. Can you see OK?”

I took my phone out to call an ambulance, but a young woman had already got through. A female friend with her went in to Burger King to get some ice, and soon the woman on the ground was pressing a bunch of napkins with the ice packed inside it to her swelling. The medic man had to go, but the first young woman was now collecting and relaying information about symptoms.

“I might have a concussion,” the injured woman said.

And then:

“You can’t get here for two hours!?!?!?”

Neither I nor the young woman on the phone could believe it. Might it really take that long to send an ambulance, here in the centre of the greatest city on Earth?

“Apparently, people keep having heart attacks,” she said.

Where could the injured woman wait for all that time, especially if the Burger King closed? Was there someone she knew who could help? She said she had a partner, but that we shouldn’t call him – he was at home, way out in the suburbs, and he was blind.

I walked to the kerb and, with fortunate good timing, was instantly able to hail a cab. Could the driver please take our injured companion, as she had by now become, to the nearest hospital? He could see the pavement scene from behind the wheel. No problem. Jump in.

I was prepared to travel with her, but the two younger women were ahead of me again. As we helped her into the taxi, she said, “I have money, I have money,” but the cabbie wouldn’t hear of it. And off they went, presumably up Southampton Row, two very kind young women and one unlucky lady with a long wait ahead in A&E. But at least she would be warm and tended too.

So I continued on my way, re-running what had happened through my mind as I walked. A part of me was there-but-for-the-grace-of-God empathy, imagining the sheer, terrible shock of the fall and the unforgiving impact. Another part reflected on the considerable coincidence that the woman who was hurt, the medic man and the young woman who dialled 999 – and perhaps her friend too – were all of them American. Finally, there was the generosity of the London cabbie, offered without a second’s thought. And some people say this town has become a foreign country with no heart.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Holborn, Kingsway, London taxis, Southampton Row

Tower Hamlets: Labour holds one seat and loses another after distinctively fractured by-election battles

The electoral base that supported Lutfur Rahman to victory is still a significant force in the East End
Lewis Baston

Politics is a bit different in Tower Hamlets. Its electoral scene is incomprehensible without knowing some recent local political history and difficult to grasp even then. Before we start looking at the two wards where by-elections were held last week, we should review the last few turbulent years across the borough.

The borough is one of the four in London that has directly elected Mayors. The introduction of the mayoral system led to major ructions in 2010. Lutfur Rahman, who been a Labour leader of the council, was denied nomination by the party’s national executive committee, but stood as an independent and won. He organised his allies into a local political party called Tower Hamlets First and was re-elected with a group of 18 THF councillors in 2014.

However, his triumph was short-lived as the mayoral election was declared void by an election court in April 2015, Rahman was banned from standing again for five years and THF was forced to disband. A re-run election was won by Labour’s John Biggs.

The councillors who had been elected as members of THF split into two groups, both of which contested the 2018 borough elections – the larger faction as Aspire and the smaller faction as People’s Alliance of Tower Hamlets (PATH). But Labour demolished both sets of THF successors, winning 42 seats out of 45 and defeating all the Aspire councillors and all but one PATH candidate: party leader Rabina Khan, who held on in Shadwell ward. PATH was disbanded in summer 2018, with Khan and many of its activists joining the Liberal Democrats.

But despite losing all their council representation, the post-THF parties retained the loyalty of a significant section of the Tower Hamlets electorate. Depending on how you measure it, 27-29 per cent of voters supported Aspire or PATH in 2018 and many of Labour’s majorities were the larger due to the splintering of opposition votes between Aspire, PATH and others. Tower Hamlets politics is local and personal above all else, and in all-out borough elections there are often big differences between the votes cast for candidates of the same party. By-elections can therefore be wild rides that lead to interesting places.

This brings us to the two by-elections of Thursday 7 February 2019, held in the wards of Shadwell and Lansbury. The Shadwell election arose from the resignation of Labour councillor Ruhul Amin, citing personal reasons. The other vacancy was due to the departure of Labour councillor Muhammed Harun, who stood down following allegations of fraud, which he denies.

Shadwell ward is a small, well defined pocket of the East End, covering a stretch of several parallel routes eastwards out of the City – Commercial Road, the Docklands Light Railway, Cable Street and The Highway. It contains Watney Market, an East End landmark which was subject to a well-intentioned but disastrous redevelopment in the 1970s, and several older council-built estates. Fifty-four per cent of the population lives in social housing, and there is 22 per cent overcrowding level. There are also high levels of unemployment (16 per cent) and other economic inactivity arising from long term illness and family caring responsibilities and also the presence of some students.

Shadwell is the most Muslim ward in Tower Hamlets and its population is 52 per cent of Bangladeshi origin. It can be summed up as a mostly Bangladeshi community facing some serious social, economic and environmental challenges. The fact that the DLR line above Shadwell carries some of the highest-earning workers in London shuttling between meetings in the City and Canary Wharf symbolises the collision of wealth and poverty in contemporary London.

The Shadwell campaign was somewhat shambolic. The Liberal Democrat candidate Abjol Miah is a well-travelled figure in Tower Hamlets party politics. He has previously won in Shadwell as a Respect candidate in 2006, won St Peter’s ward for THF in 2014 and fought that seat for PATH in 2018, before accompanying Rabina Khan into the Lib Dems. But he was disowned by his party shortly before election day after it was revealed that in 2014 he had shared antisemitic videos produced by notorious American racist David Duke. The Labour candidate, Asik Rahman, also had to apologise for social media posts suggesting that he approved of extreme Islamist preachers. The Aspire candidate, Harun Miah, had represented Shadwell as a Respect and THF councillor until 2018 and was well-known in the ward.

Four other candidates stood in this keenly-fought election, which Aspire won with 1,012 votes to 914 for Labour and 484 for the disaffiliated Lib Dem. Shadwell was probably the most difficult ward in Tower Hamlets for Labour to defend. Their successful candidate in 2018 had finished a clear second behind Rabina Khan and Harun Miah was clearly going to be competitive. Talking of swing is probably futile in the circumstances, but what seems to have happened is that the PATH vote split evenly between Aspire and the Lib Dems leaving Aspire just ahead of Labour.

The election in Lansbury ward was less wayward, though only in Tower Hamlets could a Labour hold against a local Left/Islamic machine politics party be regarded as routine. Lansbury, like Shadwell, is a poor area dominated by social housing with a large community of Bangladeshi origin. It has the highest unemployment rate in Tower Hamlets (19 per cent in 2011) and the largest proportion of residents with no educational qualifications (26 per cent).

The ward lies north of East India Dock Road. The main district centre is along Chrisp Street and it contains the DLR station of Langdon Park. It takes its name from the Lansbury Estate, a post-war housing development that hosted an architectural exhibition as part of the Festival of Britain in 1951 and which in turn takes its name from former local MP and Labour leader George Lansbury. Not all the Lansbury Estate is in the ward. The ward also includes a small area to the east of the Blackwall Tunnel approach road, which has recently been given a property-developer makeover and dubbed “Aberfeldy Village”. There are some new blocks of flats in that area.

Lansbury, as it should be given its name, is stronger Labour territory than Shadwell, although THF won a seat in 2014 and the Lib Dems won a seat in the predecessor ward in 2006 and 2010. Aspire were 14 points behind in the 2018 election and needed to sweep up the entire PATH share of the vote plus a little bit more to win Lansbury, a steeper hill to climb than in Shadwell. They did not make it, and Labour’s Rajib Ahmed held the seat with a majority of 306 (1,308 votes to 1,002) over Aspire candidate Ohid Ahmed, formerly Lutfur Rahman’s deputy.

A hopeful sign from the elections was the success of the administrative arrangements. As in May 2018, there was a substantial police presence throughout, with the aim of preventing electoral fraud and abuse of the sort that marred the elections here in 2014, and it appears to have been successful. The turnout in Shadwell was relatively high (35 per cent) which might have raised eyebrows in the Tower Hamlets of old. In Lansbury it was was poor (26.5 per cent). Again in contrast to the shambles that took place at the count in 2014, the results were counted quickly and cleanly and declared in time for election buffs to get a good night’s sleep. There is not a lot that can be read from the results, other than that there has not been much of a shift in opinion on local matters since the full borough elections last May, and neither of the outcomes can be seen as indicators of political trends elsewhere.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Abjol Miah, Asik Rahman, Aspire Party, Blackwall Tunnel, Cable Street, Canary Wharf, City of London, Commercial Road, Docklands Light Railway, East India Dock Road, Festival of Britain, Harun Miah, John Biggs, Labour, Lansbury ward, Liberal Democrats, Lutfur Rahman, Muhammed Harun, Ohid Ahmed, Peoples' Alliance of Tower Hamlets, Rabina Khan, Rajib Ahmed, Ruhul Amin, Shadwell, St Peter's ward, Tower Hamlets, Tower Hamlets First

Goodbye Piccadilly, 1967

Vintage 1960s film footage portrays the famous West End location at a point when it seemed set to be changed forever
Dave Hill

This documentary in the Look At Life series – made by the Rank Organisation for screening in Odeon and Gaumont cinemas – was released in 1967 and anticipated a radical redevelopment of Piccadilly Circus, which never actually happened. More on that below, but for now just enjoy these nine delicious minutes of London history.

The thing we’re all supposed to know about Alfred Gilbert’s statue of Eros is that it isn’t of Eros at all, but his brother Anteros. More on that from Londonist. Another point of fact about the film is that in the section about the sewer system it refers to “Barking in Essex”, but Barking had been part of Greater London since the creation of the boroughs in 1965.

As for the redevelopment scheme, its fate is covered in what seems a very authoritative Wikipedia entry on Piccadilly Circus. A plan presented in 1962 had envisaged an elevated pedestrian concourse with most of the existing footways given over to additional road space. A later version proposed three new octagonal towers, but the whole idea was junked by the Conservative national government in 1972.

The reason? A 20 per cent increase in road traffic capacity was anticipated, but the government wanted 50 per cent. Let’s be thankful for small mercies.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Barking, Londonist, Look At Life, Piccadilly Circus