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Len Duvall: London is underfunded by national government and the whole country is paying the price

From policing to housing to health, the capital is being starved of resources and power
Len Duvall

One of the most stark examples of the effects of austerity is the level of rough sleeping in London in recent years. The sight of people bedding down on the streets in recent freezing conditions – a relative rarity ten years ago – is now commonplace across many British towns and cities. Social safety nets, including the benefits system, addiction support, mental health services and social housing have been eroded, and we see the consequences every day.

The causes of rough sleeping are complex, but they also represent the sharpest end of the housing crisis. Less visible, but greater in scale is hidden homelessness – 54,540 London families are in temporary accommodation. Many more pay extortionate rents for low-quality housing making home ownership is a distant dream for them. The housing crisis is undoubtedly a national one, but nowhere is it more acute than in London. For a number of reasons – demand, the cost of land, and the cost of labour – London can, and should, be regarded as special case by national government. Yet it is repeatedly left to City Hall, our borough councils and the third sector to make the best of a bad situation.

In transport terms too, London – like the rest of the UK – is being put through its paces. We hear a lot about the cost of large infrastructure projects relative to the rest of the country, but London is home to many of Britain’s most overcrowded stations and services, and to its oldest commuter trains. Following the withdrawal of Transport for London’s £700 million grant from Whitehall, it is now the only major transport network in Europe not to receive support from its own government for its daily operation. Projects like Thameslink and Crossrail aren’t extravagances being lavished on a wealthy city – they’re urgently needed infrastructure without which the engine of the national economy would grind to a halt.

The Metropolitan Police faces a unique set of challenges too, not only in terms of crime and terrorism but also issues that arise as a direct consequence of serving a capital city. The Met protects parliament and the monarchy, secures major football matches, and has responsibility for ensuring that demonstrations of all sorts pass off peacefully and safely. They provide diplomatic protection, facilitate state visits and much more besides. Surely then, you would expect the government to provide adequate funding for these additional responsibilities?

But the reality is that the national and international capital cities grant, which is supposed to reflect the additional burdens placed on the Met and the City of London Police, underfunds the former to the tune of £105 million a year. Ordinary Londoners are left to pick up the tab. All this comes in the context of the Met’s per head spending being reduced faster than that of any other police force in Britain. This means officer numbers are falling. In 2010, the Met had 33,367 officer, for a population of eight million people. By the end of last year, we were left with 29,693 officers for a population that had grown to 8.9 million.

I could go on: the national funding formula is disproportionately hitting London schools; some of London’s boroughs have faced some of the deepest cuts of any local authorities in Britain; parts of London (particularly in the east) have significantly fewer GPs per head than anywhere else in the country. Further still, Whitehall continues to lock London out of the clean air fund, and London’s drivers subsidise transport in the rest of Britain with every penny of vehicle excise duty raised in the capital being spent somewhere else.

Conversely, London clearly has enormous advantages and despite being home to some of the nation’s deepest and most ingrained poverty, the compact geography and vast cultural capital of our city provides for stronger wealth creation and social mobility. Moreover, other parts of the country face inequalities and injustices that we either don’t experience in London or face on a smaller scale here. But my argument is this – firstly, that despite its enormous wealth, London is also a city of profound inequalities that are exacerbated by a government that starves the capital of funding and power. And secondly, while it’s right that politicians stand up for their regions, we mustn’t allow that advocacy to fuel a race to the bottom.

Regions throughout the UK are struggling due to a combination the government pursuing its ideology of small government and the reality of what money is available to allocate to services. This doesn’t put anyone in good stead for whatever type of Brexit is delivered, particularly in the event of a no deal. We fall into this government’s trap and detract from these pressing issues, if we start pitching region against region, and community against community. The anti-London sentiment that weaves its way through the corridors of Westminster and into our newspapers is unfair and unwarranted. This is particularly the case given the extent to which our tax revenues are redistributed outside the capital.

Proper funding for London’s police isn’t an argument against the regeneration of former industrial communities. Making the case for meaningful transport funding in the north east of England isn’t a case against Crossrail 2. We can and should aspire to more than setting one poor community against another, and a positive case for London is an integral part of a positive case for our country.

Len Duvall is London Assembly Member for Greenwich & Lewisham and leader of the Assembly’s Labour group.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit, City of London Police, Crossrail, Crossrail 2, health, homelessness, housing, Metropolitan Police, Thameslink, Transport for London

All That Mighty Heart (and other film footage of post-war London)

The clips are fascinating and much of the below-the-line commentary, uncomfortably revealing
Dave Hill

YouTube is often thought of as a young person’s thing, but it is also a space for nostalgia. Watching footage of London as it once was is enlightening in more than one way. The things that haven’t much changed are often as striking as those that have. The comment threads too are revealing. If you can stomach the carping bigotry, they provide stark insights into how, for some, London has ceased to be the capital of a quintessential, post-war Englishness and become instead the prime example of national cultural self-ruin.

I’ve picked out three items for your enjoyment and reflection. The first is a 20 minute British Transport Films documentary released in 1962. Its title, All That Mighty Heart, is taken from a famous William Wordsworth London poem. Note that Stevenage New Town is also featured – an “overspill” settlement to which thousands of Londoners relocated during the 1950s. Its rather staged quality gives it something of the character of wartime propaganda films – a reminder that when it was made barely 20 years had passed since the Blitz.

The second clip is also a British Transport Films production and older still. Produced in 1953, it mourns the passing of the old London tram network which once linked North and South London,  including via the Kingsway subway, still very visible today. It is entitled The Elephant Will Never Forget, and one of its opening shots is of the landmark Elephant & Castle statue. Remember, this film dates from well before the Elephant shopping centre, now facing demolition, existed. It’s just over ten minutes long.

The third and final clip is unused British Pathé material and apparently compiled in 1958. Sadly, it has no sound other than the odd background crackle, but the scenes from London’s roads, walkways and heritage sites are quite engaging, not least for the fashions and paucity of motor vehicles.

“Oh england, please reclaim yourself and purge the multicultural disease so evidently spoiling your authentic beauty,” wails one commenter. I prefer the sentiment of someone going by the name of Beowolf: “Shame you can’t enjoy a bit of nostalgia without all the moaners spoiling it.”

 

Categories: Culture
Tags: British Transport Films, Elephant and Castle, Kingsway, public transport, The Blitz, trams, transport

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 76: Kennington Palace

Barely an echo of this fourth century royal dwelling remains, but there is plenty for the imagination to enjoy
Victor Keegan

If you are interested in buried history, look no further than the triangle formed in Kennington by Sancroft Street, Courtenay Street and Kennington Lane. Not that there is anything to see. The ruins uncovered during excavations in the 1960s have long gone. There aren’t even any paintings or prints in existence to show us what this pageant of history used to look like. But it was definitely there.

Kennington Palace was built between 1346 and 1362 by Edward, the Black Prince, whose military victories at Crecy and Poitiers made him a household hero. He would have become King of England had he not died a year before his father Edward III. His son Richard became king instead. 

Richard II spent much of his childhood at Kennington Palace and visited it regularly as king. It was barely half a mile from the Thames along what is today called Black Prince Road at the start of which he left a boat. Henry IV and Henry V lived for periods in the Palace too, as did Catherine of Aragon when she came to London to marry Henry VIII’s elder brother Arthur. 

The excavations revealed a string of separate buildings rather than a unified palace, dominated by an 80 foot long Grand Chamber with a hall, pantry, stable and sundry other rooms, including the Queen’s Chamber, which jutted out under today’s Sancroft Street. If you stroll to the backyard of St Anselm’s Church you will be standing where about a third of the excavations took place, while at the other end the gated entrance to the estate at the junction of Sancroft Street and Cardigan Street would have given you a view of the entire palace now, sadly, left to our own imaginations. 

The history of the palace came to an abrupt end when Henry VIII demolished it to provide materials to build his new palace at Whitehall, the biggest, and almost certainly the ugliest one in Europe. 

Although there are no memories of Kennington Palace left, apart from Black Prince Road the Black Prince pub which stands on it, there is one uninterrupted continuity: this triangle of land has had the same owner since it was built. The Black Prince was the first Prince of Wales and the land – and plenty else in the area – is still owned by the current Prince of Wales.

Read Vic Keegan’s Lost London numbers 1-75 here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Black Prince Road, Kennington, River Thames

On London wants to grow bigger and better. Can you help?

A year on from a successful and inspiring crowdfunding campaign, its time for this website to move up to the next stage
Dave Hill

On 1 February 2018, this website’s first birthday, I launched a crowdfunding campaign with the aim of keeping On London going and growing for at least another year. Thanks to 434 supporters, over £25,000 were raised and, 12 months on, the site is indeed still going and has grown. With its beautiful, new Hutch Agency design, it carries more content by more contributors and is read by more people. Now, I want it to get bigger and better still.

These are momentous times for the UK’s capital city. After three decades of economic and population growth it has entered a period of increased anxiety and uncertainty. Brexit is approaching and concerns about the social fabric and the whole character of the place are intensifying. There is an urgent need for journalism that reports, explains and comments on this new phase in the city’s history with breadth and in depth and that challenges the endless, misleading populism of so much coverage of London, found right across the media spectrum.

That is what On London exists to do. And to do it really well I need to put the project on a much firmer financial footing over the next years. My new aim is to increase the site’s output and its quality still more. That basically means three things:

  1. Being in a position to commission work by more of the very best writers on the big London issues and pay them respectable money for their work.
  2. Being able to hire a bit more editorial support which, in plain English, mostly means help with the technical stuff (which I’m clueless about) and someone to be my deputy when I’m out and about or very immersed in writing things.
  3. Me making a living again. Since starting this site two years ago, I’ve got by almost entirely on my savings. None of the crowdfund money has gone into my pocket so far. That’s all fine, I’ve no complaints, but the well will run dry before too long.

To achieve those three goals I am actively seeking organisations prepared to put substantial sums into the On London bank account and to do so solely for the pure and simple reason that they believe in what I and the site’s contributors are trying to do.

What are “substantial sums”? A full answer to that question will be available in the simple business plan a well-qualified ally is kindly putting together for me. But they will need to add up to a budget that can sustain paying a core group of up to ten freelancers contributing content on a pretty regular basis; paying for that editorial support mentioned above; and paying me.

I don’t have expensive tastes and don’t need a huge salary, but I’d like those core contributors to enjoy better rates of pay than the often dismally low ones for online work offered by even long-established, well-known media organisations these days. There is far too much low pay in London and I have no wish to add to a problem I want to see solved.

Making a good job of reporting this vast, varied and immensely complex city is an enormous task. Explaining clearly and well how it works is it difficult one. There are plenty of opinions about London flying about, but not enough are finely measured or properly informed. On London wants to do more to try to put that right, concentrating in the city’s politics, development and culture.

But also, and increasingly, I want the site to look more closely at London’s place within the current and future United Kingdom as a whole as it moves into a post-Brexit future that is difficult to predict. And what of London’s status as a pre-eminent “world city”, internationalist, cosmopolitan and open? Is that going to shrink or might it positively evolve? How can it better harness the effects of globalisation for the benefit of more Londoners? Questions like that need addressing too.

I’m not seeking to turn On London into a big media company, with dozens of full time staff. It will continue to be run almost entirely by me from the small room in my home in Clapton which has served as my office for more than a quarter of a century and which I’ve never got round to tidying properly. However, with financial support of the right type and on the scale I am now looking for, it can expand substantially into a significant alternative to the generally poor media coverage of a city that can be so very inspiring and so deeply troubling at the same time.

As its masthead says, On London is For The Good City. In its small way, it wants to help the UK capital become better place, for Londoners, for the UK and beyond. People and organisations interesting in providing financial backing for that mission can email davehillonlondon@gmail.com. And, of course, there are “donate” bars and buttons on the site itself. Thank you.

Categories: News
Tags: Brexit

London needs a world class concert venue, but will the Centre For Music ever get built?

The ambitious project will need a lot of private funding if the plan is to become reality
Charles Wright

Everyone loves a good architectural image and designs unveiled last week for a new concert hall for London got predictable blanket coverage. The Centre for Music, replacing the current Museum of London building at London Wall, would be a state-of-the-art 2,000 seat “in the round” venue and home for the London Symphony Orchestra, whose new musical director, classical superstar Sir Simon Rattle, has been a key advocate of the project.

The design by US architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro shows a tapering tower including four floors of commercial space as well as rehearsal and education areas and a base for the Guildhall School of Music, topped by a smaller performance space with views across St Paul’s and beyond. New public space would open up access to the Barbican complex, while the forbidding roundabout currently surrounding the museum will be remodelled and the road routed under the new building.

London certainly lacks a world-class concert hall. Its existing venues, the Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican itself are second-best in terms of capacity and acoustics. The centre, says Barbican managing director Sir Nicholas Kenyon, could “enhance the status of London as one of the world’s leading cultural capitals, delivering major new benefits to the city and the UK’s musical life, educational offer and international reputation”.

But will the £288 million scheme ever get built?

The project looked doomed in 2016 when Chancellor Philip Hammond reversed his predecessor George Osborne’s pledge of £5.5 million towards a detailed business plan, arguing the scheme was unaffordable.

Rescue came in the shape of the City of London Corporation, providing initial funding and earmarking the museum site for the project as part of its “Culture Mile” plans, linking the Barbican to Tate Modern via St Paul’s and revamping the area from Farringdon to Moorgate as a “world-leading cultural and creative destination”.

The museum is moving down the road to the disused Victorian general market building adjoining Smithfield meat market, with architects Stanton Williams and Asif Khan appointed and much of its estimated £250 million funding in place, including £110 million from the City Corporation and £70 million from Sadiq Khan.

By contrast, the cost of the Centre for Music will be met by private backers, its sponsors say. “It is my sincere hope that it will attract generous support from businesses in the Square Mile and beyond. That is vital to its success,” said City Corporation policy chair Catherine McGuinness.

It’s a significant challenge, described succinctly on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc cultural news website: “The London Symphony Orchestra issued new hall designs this morning, as if Brexit never happened.”

Commentators cite cost overruns on similar projects: the Paris Philharmonie three times over budget and Hamburg’s concert hall where the price rose from £157 million to almost £700 million. Also, the Garden Bridge debacle has dented appetites for public underwriting.

While Mayor Khan has welcomed the plans as potentially strengthening London’s “reputation as a global leader for culture” as well as giving “people of all backgrounds across the capital the opportunity to enjoy first class music, including young and budding musicians,” his Culture Strategy cautiously offers advocacy only.

Critics also point to the need for better funded music education and outreach and more provision outside London rather than another prestige building in the capital. However, the scheme would see the Barbican and the LSO extending “learning and discovery” programmes, using embedded digital technology to reach a “global” audience and Rattle is taking the “not now” argument head on. The centre, he said, is “a sign of London as a dynamic cultural city, at a time when we are going to need this more and more.”

Categories: Culture
Tags: Barbican, Brexit, City of London Corporation, Garden Bridge, George Osborne, Guildhall, Museum of London, Norman Lebrecht, Philip Hammond, Royal Festival Hall, Sadiq Khan, Sir Simon Rattle, Smithfield, St Paul's cathedral, Tate Modern

Housing minister says Sadiq Khan isn’t using his housing powers to the full

James Brokenshire also has 'concerns' about Mayor's draft new London Plan, but draws sharp response from City Hall
Dave Hill

Secretary of State for housing James Brokenshire has accused Sadiq Khan of failing to do all he could to increase overall housing supply in London and urged him to do more to help private sector developers to contribute.

Speaking at the Building London summit in Bishopsgate, organised by business group London First, Brokenshire invited the Mayor to “up his game and focus on delivery with the powers he has but isn’t using,” adding that “despite all the talk of putting housing first,” he considered City Hall’s recent record “disappointing”.

In a sharp response to the remarks, James Murray, the Mayor’s deputy for housing, quoted in the Evening Standard, described Brokenshire’s words as a “desperate” attempt to distract attention from his “track record of blocking plans for new homes, including those at social rent levels which Sadiq has given the go-ahead to”. City Hall points to three schemes approved by the Mayor that Brokenshire’s department has put a hold on, in Abbey Wood, Brentford and Newcombe House in Notting Hill Gate.

“The Minister knows that Sadiq has hit every single target for affordable housing that were agreed by his own Department,” Murray said, “and that his colleagues’ handling of Brexit has made fixing the housing crisis even tougher.”

Asked after his speech to elaborate on the mayoral powers he had in mind, Brokenshire, who is MP for the London constituency of Old Bexley & Sidcup, said, “I understand and recognise the Mayor’s desire to drive up more affordable and social housing,” but said doing so “also relies on a strong private sector,” and that you “leverage more [affordable homes] by doing so. It’s that blend that gives you that additionality and gets you into that place of delivering on those rightful social policy objectives in parallel.” He said he believes the Mayor is “earnest” about wanting more homes built, but that the issues is “ultimately about leadership”.

Though insisting he wanted to work collaboratively, Brokenshire also reminded his audience that has “raised concerns” about the Mayor’s [draft] London Plan, and said his department will be pursuing these by way of its formal “examination in public”, which has recently got underway. Last summer, Brokenshire wrote to the Mayor, arguing that the 65,000 overall target for housing delivery in the draft Plan is too low.

There was criticism in the speech too of the Mayor’s recently-announced intention to draw up proposals for giving him powers to regulate private sector rents. While saying he welcomed the Mayor’s “commitment to a better private rental market,” Brokenshire said that under the last Labour government, in which he [the Mayor] was a minister, the treasury were crystal clear in their reporting – rent controls don’t improve the market. They damage it.”

Brokenshire also said the government’s recent decision to remove the cap on local authority borrowing for housing “could unlock around 10,000 homes in London” and highlighted his provision of a £9 million fund through government-funded housing agency Homes for England towards building new “modular homes” on top of existing building on five London sites.

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: affordable housing, council housing, housing, James Brokenshire, London First, Sadiq Khan

Would penalising London help close the ‘north-south divide’?

Arguments for a "rebalancing" of the UK economy at the capital's expense sometimes have an important bit missing
Dave Hill

The view that a wounded, disunited UK would be better healed if national government took steps to lessen London’s economic dominance seems to get aired a lot lately, revving up the decades-old “north-south divide” debate and informing both the “left behind” Conservatism of Theresa May and the wish lists of the populist Left.

It is only 18 months since the Tory election manifesto pledged that “significant numbers” of civil servants would be relocated from the capital along with Channel 4, while Labour’s document, whilst promising London far more, cited “historic underinvestment in infrastructure” as “a major contributor to the disparity between the south-east and the rest of the country”.

Meanwhile, commentators ranging from former Evening Standard editor Simon Jenkins to Grace Blakeley, recently signed up by the New Statesman, to Oxford economist Paul Collier have argued for a government-led “rebalancing” of the UK’s economic scales away from London so that North of England can recover the lost glories of its industrial prime. There seems no lack of public support for this sort of argument. “London gets everything”, social media pundits rage.

But while successful northern cities are to be desired and the plight of “forgotten” northern towns should be addressed, is giving less to London so that more can be given to everywhere else the best way to make everywhere else better off?

The bit often missing from “rebalancing” theses is that London’s economy is also the enabler of a major wealth redistribution process. Blakeley has taken exception to the capital being characterised as “subsidising” the rest of the country, but it’s just a terser term for the same thing.

The Office for National Statistics has calculated that London provides the lion’s share of a huge tax export to everywhere north of Watford, as well as to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, with each Londoner on average contributing £3,698 more to the exchequer in 2016-17 than they benefited from in public spending, helping to fund schools, hospitals, libraries, parks and policing everywhere from Sunderland to St Ives to the tune of £32.5 billion in total (that’s up by around £7 billion on the previous year, by the way). When Sadiq Khan, like the previous two London Mayors, says that when London is doing well, the rest of the country does too, he isn’t wrong.

What would happen if the government – any government – decided that London does indeed receive too much investment and decided to direct much more of it northwards instead? Look at it this way. There are reasons why London pumps out some 30 per cent of the UK’s total tax yield, and one of them is the billions sunk into it.

Investment in London is a safe bet, perhaps especially when the purse strings are tight. Put a taxpayer pound into the capital and you get your pound back in taxes of assorted kinds quicker than if you put in anywhere else: you know it will help London to keep growing, help its economy grow, help its housing supply grow, help it attract private investment and do so rapidly. It means you will get another pound on top of the first pound quicker too, and a chunk of those two pounds can be helping out Burnley, Dudley or Tintagel all the sooner. It would also help Manchester. Would putting that first pound into Manchester instead of London help Manchester more? Would it be more use down the line to Bolton or Kilmarnock?

The answer might depend on how you do the sums and much else besides, but the point is that if you want a government to embark on a public investment “rebalancing” programme, you can’t avoid those questions and the conundrums they present. It also depends on what you mean by “better off”. Even if investing more in Manchester (or Nottingham or Sheffield) and less in London didn’t assist Manchester as much financially, it might still be better for Manchester in other ways – in terms of civic pride, perhaps. But if by giving less to London you ended up with a national tax cake that’s smaller than it might have been, Manchester’s gain, however defined, might end up being pretty limited.

London’s dominance and the rest of the UK’s dependence on it is not a good thing. But reducing it might take rather more than reductive assertions that penalising London and rewarding other places will automatically help those places thrive.

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags:

Lambeth: Labour group chooses new council leader

Lib Peck has been succeeded by her former deputy
Dave Hill

Jack Hopkins has been elected the new leader of Lambeth Council, following a vote by members of the majority Labour group last night. He succeeds Lib Peck, who stepped down to take a job combatting violent crime with Sadiq Khan in City Hall.

Hopkins, who was Peck’s deputy, finished ahead of three fellow cabinet members, Matthew Bennett, Jennifer Brathwaite and Claire Holland. He said he was “absolutely delighted” to be chosen after a “fantastic contest with wonderful colleagues”.

Under Peck, Hopkins, who represents Oval ward, had cabinet responsibility for jobs, skills and performance. Peck had led the borough since January 2013, succeeding Steve Reed after he became MP for Croydon North and taking Labour to consecutive huge victories in the borough elections of 2014 and 2018. The party currently holds 57 of the 63 council seats, with the Green Party group having five and the Conservatives one.

The success of the Greens in becoming Lambeth’s second largest group reflects opposition in some parts of the borough to the Peck administration’s housing and regeneration policies and to measures to reorganise council services, notably libraries, in response to budget pressures. It might also indicate the failure of the Corbynite wing of the party in the borough to make significant inroads into the ranks of Labour councillors.

In November, Peck warned that Lambeth and other boroughs were already seeing troubling signs of the impact of Brexit, with a fall in planning applications, in increase in local skills shortages and a reluctance by local business to investment commitments.

Categories: News
Tags: Claire Holland, Croydon North, Jack Hopkins, Jennifer Brathwaite, Labour, Lambeth, Lambeth Council, Lib Peck, Matthew Bennett, Steve Reed