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Haringey: Seven Sisters compulsory purchase order gets government go ahead

Council confirms it will press ahead with demolition of Wards Corner Latin Village and wider redevelopment scheme
Dave Hill

Haringey Council has said a major redevelopment scheme in Seven Sisters entailing the demolition of its indoor market known as the Latin Village will go ahead following the government’s recommendation that its compulsory purchase order (CPO) relating to land in the area be confirmed.

Council leader Joseph Ejiofor said in a statement: “The decision means that together with our development partner Grainger we can now move forward with plans to create a revitalised Seven Sisters. We expect this scheme to create hundreds of new jobs, quality retail space and nearly 200 homes alongside a thriving new market”.

A report for the government on the CPO compiled by planning inspector John Felgate set out a “compelling justification” for it to ahead, saying that the redevelopment of the Wards Corner site, which contains the Latin Village, “would have the potential to assist in spreading the benefits of the council’s regeneration initiatives more widely, and would act as a catalyst for renewal elsewhere around Seven Sisters and in adjoining areas”. He added: “Such renewal and regeneration has been shown to be badly needed in the public interest”.

Felgate’s decision will enable the council to take possession of those parts of the Wards Corner site Grainger has been unable to purchase for itself, enabling the redevelopment project to proceed.

There has been a long-running campaign to prevent the Latin Village in its current form from being closed. Grainger’s current planning consent was secured from the council in 2012 and a 2017 “deed of variation” made provision for its temporary relocation close by and a return to its present site later.

Ejiofor’s statement stresses that the council wants to assist a “successful and sustainable” Latin Village market to continue and that “Grainger has committed to free relocation to both the interim and permanent new markets, subsidised rents, business support and help with promoting the market”. The land the market stands on is currently owned by Transport for London, which has an agreement to transfer it to Grainger.

The council’s stance towards the market, which presently contains about 40 units, was attacked in an October 2018 Guardian article by its “senior economics commentator” Aditya Chakrabortty, who contended it “ought to be simple” to save the Latin Village as it is. His article made no mention of the CPO, the planning consent, a legally-binding development agreement between Grainger and the council reached in 2007 or the relocation provisions for assisting the Latin Village traders.

The following month, a group called the N15 Development Trust raised £9,230 from 353 people through a crowdfunding campaign to finance a “Wards Corner Community Plan” which it said would “buy back the building and put it under democratic control of local residents”. The text of its crowdfunding site claimed that Grainger’s project would mean “displacing this thriving local community”. It too made no mention of the planning consent, 2007 agreement, the relocation provisions or the pending CPO decision.

The council’s view, as set out for the inquiry, said there have been “many unregulated alterations to the electrical wiring and lighting systems” of the market, making the building “a danger to its users” and that rent levels there would have to rise in order to pay for significant repairs. It said that current traders are being provided with “an unprecedented level of protection and support”.

Objections to the CPO included invoking the European Convention on Human Rights to claim that the scheme would damage traders’ private and family life, their right to “peaceful enjoyment of possessions” and “freedom from discrimination”, but the inspector found that these did not apply. He concluded that the scheme “would not leave the traders materially worse off than they are now,” meaning that “the question of discrimination, indirect or otherwise, does not arise”.

Professor Alexandra Xanthaki of Brunel Law School, who gave testimony at the public inquiry, expressed regret at the outcome but said she believes, “this is the first time minority rights have been discussed in planning applications” and claimed the United Nations “may reprimand the UK over this”.

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Aditya Chakrabortty, Grainger, Haringey, Haringey Council, housing, Joseph Ejiofor, planning, regeneration, Seven Sisters, The Guardian

Shaun Bailey says London crime levels reminiscent of New York’s in 1990s. Really?

Emotive claims by the Conservative candidate do not enhance his leadership credentials
Dave Hill

Violent crime is a horrible thing and public anxiety about it eats into a city’s peace of mind, eroding its people’s self-confidence and troubling its soul. Politicians who make light of it, or even appear to, can pay a heavy price, and sometimes it serves them right. But the same goes for those who foster a climate of fear about crime with emotive rhetoric and wild claims. Conservative London Mayor candidate Shaun Bailey should bear that in mind.

Last week, Bailey claimed on Twitter that British Transport Police figures showing in increase in offences involving violence on the London Underground in the past two or three years are, “Reminiscent of crime levels in NYC [New York City] at their worst in the 90s – A lack of leadership above ground is resulting in violence spilling on to the Tube.” Leaving aside questions about the true meaning and significance of Tube crime data as a whole, is any such comparison with the New York of the 1990s valid?

Let’s begin at the start of that decade with the most stark violent crime figure of all – the total number of homicides. In New York in 1990 that hit a truly shocking all-time high of 2,245 (or 2,262 according to a different definition). There has been justified concern that the number of homicides in London last year was the largest since 2009. However, the London total of 132 in 2018 was nowhere near that of New York in 1990. The New York of the 1990s actually saw a steady and marked decline in crime across the board, but even in 1997 there were 767 killings – still nearly six times the number in London last year. Coming right up to date, reports from New York say there were 289 homicides there in 2018. That’s a record low, but still many more than in London, a city of similar population size.

Screen shot 2019 01 22 at 12.25.14

Comparing figures for other types of violent and crime and crime in general in the New York of the 1990s and the London of today is not as easy a task and might be practically impossible – another reason for politicians to be wary of making large generalisations. It’s fair to say, though, that New York’s violent crime story of that time was pretty grim, seen by police and others as closely tied to the state of the illegal drug market, most significantly the advent of crack cocaine in the mid 1980s. “It spread like wildfire,” said an NYPD police sergeant in charge of combatting robbery. The decline in crime during the 1990s is also linked to further changes in the drug market, as well as the interaction between that and new policing approaches introduced in New York during the same period (UK criminologist Ben Bowling’s work on this is well worth reading).

London today has good reason to be perturbed by the evolving role of its drug market in some violent criminality, including the exploitation of children by gangs. It is right that politicians debate this and it can be difficult for them – and for journalists – to find the right way to express concern without being unhelpfully alarmist. The assertion by Tory AM Susan Hall at Mayor’s Question Time last week that, “Everywhere is dangerous now in London,” fell on the wrong side of the line. And Shaun Bailey making scary comparisons with a past New York, still synonymous with urban jungle mean streets despite nowadays being ranked one of the safest big cities in the world, is a clumsy approach to put it kindly.

Bailey is perfectly entitled to criticise the Mayor he hopes to replace. But if he wants better leadership on crime, he should perhaps get round to showing some himself.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Ben Bowling, British Transport Police, Conservatives, crime, New York, Sadiq Khan, Shaun Bailey, Susan Hall, youth crime, youth violence

How clean is London’s bus fleet? Could the Mayor be doing more?

There's been a lot of progress, though not enough for one London Assembly Member
Dave Hill

Sadiq Khan’s Central London Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) will launch on 8 April, covering the current congestion charge zone (but operating round the clock) and imposing an additional daily charge on vehicles that fail to meet a set of emissions standards governing the disgorging of nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM). Mayor Khan intends to expand the ULEZ to the North and South Circular roads from October 2021, prompting London Assembly Conservatives to put forward alternative ideas for improving air quality and claim that the Mayor’s approach is an attack on the worst off.

Plenty more on all that to come. But whatever you think of the Mayor’s approach, it has concentrated minds on cleaning up the capital’s bus fleet, whose contribution to fouling the capital’s atmosphere has been considerable for many years. The 2015 bus strike was reckoned by King’s College to primarily account for a big drop in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels on Oxford Street on the day it took place. You can’t expect your ULEZ to be credible if your own buses break its rules.

A Central London ULEZ was a Boris Johnson policy, but he had it scheduled for 2020. Mayor Khan has brought it forward, entailing Transport for London ensuring that all buses operating in Central London are up to the Euro VI mark – the highest one set – by the time it opens. TfL says it is on track to achieve this and also to have every one of the roughly 9,300 buses in Greater London as a whole up to at least the same level of cleanliness by some point in 2020. This has been helped by an £86.1 million retrofit programme announced in 2017 to upgrade the exhaust systems of around 5,000 buses already on the streets and all new double deckers added to the fleet now have to be diesel-electric hybrids or cleaner

The Mayor and TfL are pretty proud of this progress and their creation of a network of low emission bus zones stretching across the city, of which there should be a dozen by the end of this year. But could they be doing better still?

Liberal Democrat AM Caroline Pidgeon, who chairs the London Assembly’s transport committee, has produced a report in which she argues that the Mayor should be more ambitious. Her focus is on electric buses, which produce no nasty emissions at all from their tailpipes (as with all electric vehicles there is a debate about how “green” they are in other ways).

TfL says there are currently 165 zero-emission buses in the fleet, all of them electric except for ten powered by hydrogen fuel cell. From next year all new single-deckers added to the fleet will have to have zero emission engines as will all single decker buses operating in Central London.

But although Pidgeon acknowledges that the Mayor and TfL have been in a “concerted effort” and made a “significant impact” on cleaning up London’s buses, she describes progress towards to electric and other zero-emission vehicles as “going at a snail’s pace”. The Mayor’s transport strategy sets the goal of the entire bus fleet being zero-emission by 2037, but that’s not quick enough for the Lib Dem.

At present, all but a handful of the electric buses in London are single deckers and Pidgeon proposes that more should be phased in more quickly as existing single-deckers age or contracts for their routes come up for renewal. Pointing to the falling costs of electric battery technology, she urges the Mayor and TfL to look at innovations abroad, such as in Eindhoven and Shenzhen. And, she boldly asks, how about looking in to putting electric bendy buses on some of Outer London’s roads?

The Mayor, though, is likely to keep on talking up his cleaner bus endeavours. He made a fast start on implementing his air quality policies after his election and is likely to give short shrift to any suggestion that he is slowing down.

 

 

 

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: buses, Caroline Pidgeon, Liberal Democrats, pollution, public transport, Sadiq Khan, Transport for London, ultra low emission zone

Fiona Twycross: Let’s get the full measure of London’s shameful food poverty

It is clear that the problem has grown in the capital but its full extent is not really known
Fiona Twycross

Last week, the London Food Strategy was launched at City Hall. It was easy to miss this amid the furore of Brexit, but its pages contain a number of policies that are new or controversial. This spilled out during Mayor’s Question Time (MQT) on Thursday, with Conservative London Assembly Members still insisting on trashing the idea of banning junk food advertising on the Underground. With obesity in London’s children on the rise, I would argue that any measure experts think could help should be tried. At the very least, banning junk food ads will do no harm.

Since being elected to the Assembly in 2012, I have campaigned on the issue of hunger – particularly of child hunger – first with Boris Johnson and now with Sadiq Khan. Even one child in our city going hungry is a scandal, but the half a million at risk of it over the school holidays is simply shameful.

Twenty-eight percent of families in London live in poverty, more than in any other region of the UK. Many of these families have at least one adult in work, but simply don’t earn enough to put decent food on the table. In the face of persistent food price inflation, it should come as little surprise that food poverty is on the rise too. UNICEF estimates that one in 10 British children live in severely food-insecure households. This is set to get worse and Bank of England governor Mark Carney has warned that food prices could rise by at least 10 per cent if there is a “no deal” Brexit.

There has been no greater symbol of the rise in food poverty than the proliferation and normalisation of food banks. There were comparatively few of them ten years ago. Yet in a sox month period during last year more than 658,000 emergency food packages were supplied by the Trussell Trust in the UK, of which 72,239 were in London. These figures reveal a picture of a voluntary welfare system desperately trying to fill the ever-expanding gaps in what is now an often-inadequate benefits system. And that is even before you add in the soup kitchens, lunch clubs and other less formal ways of providing Londoners with food aid.

What is less clear is the absolute number of people living in food insecurity – people who cut back on the amount of food they eat, or have poor diets because of the need to buy cheap food, such as the woman I met on my first ever visit to a food bank run by Pecan in Peckham. A single mother whose outgoings could never be matched by her income, she knew if she had a pound it would be healthier to spend it on a bag of apples than a packet of sausages, but a sausage casserole could feed her and her son for three days.

How many people are there like her? We simply don’t know because all we have to go on are estimates based largely on the numbers of people living in poverty, children entitled to free school meals and the proxy measures of food insecurity from organisations like the Trussell Trust. This lack of information matters, not least because not measuring the numbers of people living in or at risk of food poverty says something about what the government thinks is important.

The organisation End Hunger UK has argued that the cost of measuring and understanding food poverty right across the country would be negligible and make a significant contribution to tackling the crisis we now face. It’s demoralising, though unsurprising, that a government whose policies have triggered such widespread food insecurity is unwilling to address it.

At MQT, the Mayor dropped in to his answer to my question about child hunger that his food strategy committed to quantifying food insecurity in London. This marks a major step forward. We will finally, in London at least, start to get a better understanding of the true scale of the problem. What matters gets measured and what’s measured gets done. Maybe, armed with this knowledge, we can start to reverse the hideous upward trend in food insecurity and food bank use in London.

Fiona Twycross is a Londonwide London Assembly Member, deputy mayor for fire and resilience and a member of the Assembly’s economy committee. The image is from the cover of the Mayor’s London Food Strategy document.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Boris Johnson, Brexit, child poverty, Conservatives, Labour, London Assembly, London Food Strategy, poverty, Sadiq Khan

How much crime is there on the London Underground?

The Conservatives have highlighted a rise in recorded violent offences though, as ever, crime statistics can be deceptive
Dave Hill

London’s Conservatives are energetically criticising Sadiq Khan over his approach to violent crime and it was London Assembly Tories who obtained figures showing an increase in recorded offences of violent crime on the Tube network in the last few years. Supplied by British Transport Police (BTP), they showed that violent offences were 43% higher between November 2017 and September 2018 than in the slightly longer period between November 2015 and October 2016.

The statistics, which were reported by the BBC and City AM, also showed that crimes categorised as weapon offences saw the biggest percentage increase during that time (125%) followed by robbery (77%) and that recorded crimes of every kind, including sex offences, public order and criminal damage, have gone up by 25%. What do the figures mean and what action should be taken in response to them?

There are particular reasons to be wary of crime statistics, but the first point to be made is a more general one about percentages. A big percentage rise in anything at all does not necessarily mean a significant increase in the number of whatever that thing is. The total number of crimes categorised as violent recorded by BTP in the 2015-16 12 month period was 1,980 and in the 11 month 2017-18 period it was 2,838 – an increase of 858. That still feels big enough to be concerned about. So does the numerical rise from 10,450 crimes of every kind to 13,101.

Even so, the numbers are also worth evaluating in a couple of other relevant contexts. One is the likelihood of your becoming a victim of a violent crime when using the Underground. Do the police figures mean that possibility has gone up significantly? BBC London’s transport and environment correspondent Tom Edwards has calculated that one violent crime takes place on the Tube network for every 478,659 journeys. One chance in around half a million feels rather reassuring after “up by 43%”. So does the roughly one in 100,000 chance of being a victim of any sort of crime when using the Underground. BTP assistant chief constable Robin Smith described that rate as “incredibly low”, and the comment does not seem out of place.

Smith also provided another relevant piece of background. Referring to the big hike in weapons offences recorded, he stressed that these included the seizure of knives in what he called “our targeted, intelligence-led operations” of the past year. What happens when additional resources are devoted to tackling any specific sort of offence, be it online fraud or fare-dodging? Hopefully, more incidents are reported and more culprits apprehended. Result? The recorded crime figures for that type of offence go up, perhaps not because more such offences are being committed but because more of those committing them are being apprehended.

But, of course, there is another way of looking at that interpretation, which is that it demonstrates how much of the type of crime in question goes undetected. Transport for London illustrates this point in its latest business plan in relation to what it terms “unwanted sexual behaviour”. A campaign has been running to encourage more reporting of such behaviour by its victims. TfL forecasts that, because of this, it will see the “upward trend in recorded sexual offences continue”. TfL also anticipates the rate of overall crime increasing until 2023/24, when it will “begin to level out and fall” due to technological changes and enforcement efforts. The business plan also notes an increase in the amount of pushing, shoving and “altercations” related to overcrowding.

So there are different ways of reading at least some of the Underground crime numbers. The City Hall Conservatives accept that general point, but even so contend that the rise in the number of recorded violent offences on the Tube network give grounds for upbraiding the Labour Mayor, who does acknowledge that violent crime in London as a whole has been going up.

Conservative AM Susan Hall said he should reduce what she called the “millions he is spending on City Hall waste” and put “more officers on the street”. If that sounds odd, given that the Underground is, by definition, not “on the street” but beneath it, the City Hall Tories explain that they believe diverting money from other areas into hiring more officers would help to reduce crime in every part of the city, the Tube included.

At present, there are 860 British Transport Police officers (including 100 community support officers) patrolling TfL’s rail network as a whole, including the Docklands Light Railway, London Trams and London Overground as well as the Underground. These officers have been paid for with £76 million of TfL’s money during 2018-19.

More BTP officers could in theory be paid for by TfL, whose board the Mayor chairs, but that, of course, would mean less money for everything else TfL does, and they already have a budget gap to bridge. TfL currently devotes £172.3 million to the policing of the entire transport system, providing £94.3 million to the Metropolitan Police, which primarily looks after non-rail transport areas, and £1.99 million to the City of London Police. The overall figure is projected to fall to £163.9 million in 2019-20 before starting to rise again towards £189.4 million in 2022-23.

The Assembly Tories, including their mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, are making an ongoing case about “waste” that could be cut enabling more Met officers, who sometimes support BTP colleagues, to be recruited, though what counts as “waste” and what does not is, of course, often a matter of political opinion. The argument will continue to be frequently aired from now until May 2020, as will the Mayor’s counter narrative about government spending cuts.

There is also a much broader question about what difference “visible policing” really makes to crime levels, though it is one few politicians are eager to address.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: British Transport Police, Docklands Light Railway, London Underground, Metropolitan Police, Sadiq Khan, Shaun Bailey, Susan Hall, Transport for London

Charles Wright: What is the future for London local journalism?

Community papers and websites are battling to fill the gap left by the decline of the old local press
Charles Wright

A common feature of London council meetings over recent years has been the almost complete absence of local newspaper reporters.

Just a couple of examples: in July 2017, the Haringey Advertiser closed (along with six other London local papers); a year later the Hampstead and Highgate Express, covering Haringey through its Broadway edition, saw its editor made redundant, a new editor also overseeing the Hackney Gazette, Islington Gazette and Brent and Kilburn Times, and a merged news team based in Stoke Newington.

It was a sad outcome for the “Ham and High”, which in the 1980s (when I worked there), had something like eight NW3-based reporters covering Camden, Haringey and Barnet councils comprehensively.

The story of the decline of local newspapers is depressingly familiar: falling revenues, falling circulation, low pay, less training and a squeeze on staffing. Across the country some 200 local papers have closed since 2005, some London boroughs have no weekly newspaper at all and by some accounts the number of local paper journalists has halved in the last decade.

While the London local paper market has proved relatively resilient, this has been largely due to consolidation, job cuts and consequent reductions in “on the ground” reporting despite online growth, as detailed in the London Assembly’s comprehensive 2017 report The Fate of Local News.

The result, according to contributors to the Assembly report, is a growing democratic deficit.

Eric Gordon, veteran editor of the independent Camden New Journal, told the inquiry that fewer journalists inevitably meant less investigative reporting, while Linda Quinn, Editor-in-Chief, Brixton Bugle, warned that if people “do not know what is happening in their name, it is very difficult to form a judgement to hold the council to account”.

With traditional local press  in decline though, the gap is increasingly being filled by community newspapers and websites, some of them, such as Inside Croydon, specifically seeking to offer “a real voice in your community, so often missing from council events or the established media”.

A veteran in the field is the Hackney Citizen, which celebrated its tenth year in print last summer.  “The focus has always been on readers,” editor Keith Magnum told Press Gazette. “We thought there was space for something that provided more informed debate and in-depth analysis”. Without local journalism, he added, “there isn’t any democracy”.

Further north, another survivor is the Waltham Forest Echo, launched in 2014 by Social Spider community interest company, which has gone on to launch the Tottenham Community Press and, in October last year, the Enfield Dispatch, following the 2017 closure of the Enfield Advertiser, chronicling its progress in a Medium blog here.

South of the river, online and print titles include London SE1 and 853, covering Greenwich and “doing the stuff the local press gave up doing a long time ago”, and the Peckham Peculiar, Lewisham Ledger and Dulwich Diverter series.

The independent Community News Network facilitated by the Cardiff University Centre for Community Journalism now has more than 100 members. There’s an interactive map of titles here, many of them in London.

Can they survive, run as they often are by committed individuals and kept going through advertising, subscriber schemes and unpaid contributors?

While the government-commissioned Cairncross inquiry into how to safeguard independent news in the digital age is yet to report, the BBC has thrown a lifeline both to the community and the traditional sector through its Local News Partnership scheme, funding reporters across the country to “fill the gap in local democracy reporting”, and Facebook is funnelling £4.5 million for community reporters via the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

But, as the Assembly report concludes, viability remains a major problem: “Without addressing the challenges that the industry is facing, and finding solutions, we are at risk of losing one of our most important democratic functions”.

Categories: Culture
Tags:

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 74: the disappearing River Tyburn

It once cradled Westminster on its way to the Thames, but now its flow is less fragrant
Victor Keegan

Nothing in the metropolis is more lost than the historic rivers that once fed the Thames. And none is more historic or more lost in geography or imagination than the River Tyburn, which once flowed openly from Hampstead’s hills across Regent’s Park and Green Park to form an eyot called Thorney Island. On these few acres stood Westminster Abbey and its monastery, the royal palace (until Henry VIII moved out), the emerging Houses of Parliament and Westminster School. No parcel of land in Britain, and maybe anywhere, contains more history in such a small space.  

I say “once flowed” but, of course, the Tyburn still does until it goes underground and gets swallowed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s amazing sewer system and its interceptor channels, which pipe what is left of the Tyburn to sewage works in East London at a point shortly before it used to empty itself into the Thames. The only bit of it that occasionally reaches the Thames now is the western extension from around Buckingham Palace to a few hundred yards west of Vauxhall Bridge, where you can still see the outlet through which surplus water enters the Thames during storm conditions. You can also still see the sluice gate keeper’s house, now converted into a des res called Tyburn House close by the exit. 

Archaeologists are still arguing about the eastern route of the Tyburn after it leaves Buckingham Palace to flow roughly under Tothill Street to old Westminster, as new archaeological digs throw up new evidence of the mix of Thames and Tyburn waters which spawned lots of small eyots. But if you walk from the Embankment opposite Victoria Tower Gardens along Great College Street, the original medieval wall along which the Tyburn route ran is still there on your right. 

And when you get to the entrance to Dean’s Yard, you are passing over the remains of an ancient bridge near which the remains of a 14th Century pillar can still be found in the bowels of Church House. Thereafter, the Tyburn skirted the walls of the old monastery, along what used to be called Longditch (today’s Storey’s Gate) and partially up Whitehall before turning right into the Thames before reaching Downing Street. 

Whether the Tyburn can still be called a river when it contains so much sewage and doesn’t properly reach the Thames is a matter for linguists as well as archaeologists, but there is no doubt that waters still emerge from the Hampstead hills and, in storm conditions, produce a lot of water that in olden days would have been part of the Tyburn. You don’t need much imagination to sense that it is still there. 

 

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags:

London EU citizens ‘scared’ to seek Brexit advice from government, says Sadiq Khan

Mayor says 'hostile environment' and Windrush scandal have added to concerns
Dave Hill

Sadiq Khan has renewed his criticism of the UK government’s attitude to non-UK European Union citizens living in London and said he relishes the prospect of debating Brexit and its implications for the capital with his Conservative challenger in the 2020 London Mayor election campaign.

Speaking at his monthly Mayor’s Question Time session (MQT) at City Hall today, Mayor Khan said that Londoners from other EU countries are “scared to to go the Home Office or UK Border Agency” for advice about their status when and if Brexit takes place having seen the treatment of the Windrush Generation and their descendants in the context of UK immigration policy.

The Mayor described his Tory mayoral challenger Shaun Bailey and the rest of the eight-strong Conservative Group on the London Assembly as sharing the opinion of David Kurten of the Assembly’s Brexit Alliance Group that a “Brexit will be a fantastic thing for this country,” ideally on a “no deal” basis. Kurten was elected to the Assembly as a member of UKIP, but recently left the party. Khan said that Bailey has described Brexit as “a fantastic opportunity”.

The Tory mayoral candidate, who did not contribute to today’s discussion of Brexit, was reported in September on securing his nomination to have said he is “not a Brexiteer in that crazy sense of, ‘let’s just leave'”. In July, he wrote in the Jamaica Observer that he was “excited” that the British public was “brave enough” to believe there was “bright future” outside the EU and that, “By improving our relationship with the Commonwealth, we will create a fantastic opportunity for countries like Jamaica” to play a bigger part on “the global stage”.

London’s population of nearly nine million people includes approximately one million who are citizens of other EU nations, of whom roughly 600,000 are employed in the capital, largely in its construction and hospitality sectors along with the NHS and the tech industry.

At MQT Labour AM Joanne McCartney said she had learned from a body representing East Europeans that people seeking settled status are being told they will be expected to provide “documentary evidence of every month of their previous five years living here,” such as tenancy documents or formal employment contracts with many will not possess.

Mayor Khan, who said he had discussed such issues with a Portuguese minister at a meeting yesterday, said it was imperative to make sure EU nationals “are welcome in our city” and that national government “has got to recognise some of the concerns people have” in the context of controversy over the government’s “hostile environment” policy.

He recommended City Hall’s EU Londoners Hub as “a safe environment” for them to find information and said they should be able to vote in any second referendum in a widening of the franchise to also include 16 and 17-year-olds. The Mayor said in December that the Greater London Authority will pay the £65 fee “settled status” application fee for all of its staff and those of Transport for London and the Metropolitan Police affected by it.

 

Categories: News
Tags: Conservatives, David Kurten, Joanne McCartney, Labour, Sadiq Khan, Shaun Bailey, Ukip