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Enfield: Should the council build homes on the Green Belt?

The north London borough's plans to tackle its housing shortages have sparked an intense local debate about its statutory Local Plan
James Cracknell

Local plan examinations are long, complex and – let’s be honest – often pretty dull to sit through.

A council will draw up hundreds of pages of evidence and analysis to justify how and where it intends to provide new homes and employment space to meet its targets for the next two decades or more. News interest is usually limited to a few concerns here and there over the odd plot of land. But in Enfield – the borough I cover for my paper Enfield Dispatch – the council’s proposals for 9,651 homes on the Green Belt have provided endless controversy to write about, going back several years.

My first story on the topic was a splash in December 2018 carrying the headline: “Council set for showdown with mayor over new homes”. The opposition Conservatives had failed to win Labour backing for a motion calling on the council to ban housebuilding on the Green Belt. The next day, Sadiq Khan was asked about it at Mayor’s Question Time. He said he would object to any plan in breach of his planning policies and that it was “important to protect the Green Belt”.

Two public consultations on the Enfield Local Plan, one in 2021 and the other in 2024, generated huge levels of opposition. Going into the start of the public examination this year, therefore, I was sure these were going to be a very newsworthy set of hearings.

***

I was not wrong. On day one, in January, the “showdown” with the Mayor I had predicted six years earlier came to pass – but not exactly in the way expected. Khan sent his top planning official, Lisa Fairmaner, to speak on his behalf. She announced the Mayor had concluded that building on Green Belt was now necessary since the new national government’s target of 88,000 homes per year in the capital could not be “achieved wholly within London’s urban extent” and that “the Green Belt should be reviewed and alterations proposed”.

This statement came with a caveat, however. Even with the U-turn, the Enfield Local Plan was proposing homes on Green Belt sites that City Hall deemed “unsustainable”, thanks to their lack of existing public transport links. For that reason, the Mayor would still be objecting to them.

Reacting to that news at the hearing, council barrister Matthew Reed KC tried to seize the initiative. “There was much in that statement that was supportive of the approach we have taken,” he insisted. “I take the point about [the need for] sustainable development, but it [the U-turn] does alter the landscape in which the local authority will need to consider things. It does suggest our approach is aligned with the future.”

Long-time local campaigner Carol Fisk countered: “Given the Mayor has announced a London-wide Green Belt review, is it not jumping the gun to be including the Green Belt in Enfield when the review could find sites [elsewhere in London] without the need for Enfield?”

Vicarage farm (1)

This exchange essentially set the tone for the rest of the hearings. On the one hand, the council wanted to show it was being progressive by proposing to build on the Green Belt and was ahead of the curve – as both the new Labour government and Mayor of London were now open to the idea. On the other hand, local campaigners and opposition Conservatives maintained the council was rushing to build on Green Belt and had still not done its homework properly, such that, even now, it had failed to win City Hall support.

Later during the first stage of hearings, the council admitted there would be “high harm” caused to some of the Green Belt sites chosen for new housing. Government-appointed inspector Steven Lee pressed the council on whether it had taken “all reasonable steps” to find alternative locations for the number of new homes needed, which it insisted it had.

But local community groups disputed this, mentioning examples of brownfield sites omitted from the plan and pointing out the borough’s flagship housing site on ex-industrial land – Meridian Water in Edmonton – was supposed to be accommodating 10,000 homes, but had instead been earmarked in the Local Plan for only 6,700.

This led Richard Knox-Johnston, chair of the London Green Belt Council, to speculate. He told the hearing: “I think, frankly, they [the council] weren’t keeping their brownfield register up to date. We might say that was on purpose – the Green Belt housing will help them make up a financial shortfall.” The claim was robustly denied by Reed.

***

Stage one of the Enfield Local Plan examination concluded at the end of January. Stage two – looking more closely at individual sites – began in June and concluded earlier this month. Stage three is now scheduled for October, with several modifications likely to be discussed.

Might these include reductions to the number of homes proposed for Green Belt land? It seems a distinct possibility, given the flaws in the council’s plans highlighted during the second stage of hearings over the summer.

First up for debate was Crews Hill, the largest Green Belt housing area proposed, with 5,500 homes. The area has a railway station, but only a single, twice-hourly bus service, and very few people live there at present. Instead, Crews Hill (top photo) is largely commercial, known primarily for its horticultural businesses, including several garden centres and plant nurseries. As well as many such sites along the main road, the council also wants housing on some of the surrounding farmland, plus a golf course, which it owns.

Several affected businesses have already sold up to developers in anticipation of this change, but many more have not, and fragmented ownership remains a big obstacle. Asked by Lee how the civic centre would enable new housing on land where businesses refuse to leave, Reed admitted: “The council will consider the exercise of CPO powers as necessary.” Later on, Lee asked if such an approach was “justifiable”, to which Reed responded: “It is a process of last resort […] but it is exactly what the government wants to see happen to facilitate the delivery of sites and enable the scale of delivery.”

The council was also asked if its plans for Crews Hill would lead to a net loss of jobs, but was unable to give a straight answer. In terms of public transport, a new bus service is proposed, but Transport for London’s position remains that Crews Hill is unsustainable as a location.

The second biggest Green Belt housing site proposed is a number of adjoining greenfield sites used predominantly for farming and grazing which the council has collectively named “Chase Park”. It has proposed 3,700 homes being built there.

Although situated between two stations – Oakwood, on the Piccadilly Line, and Enfield Chase, operated by Great Northern – Chase Park (above) is within walking distance of neither and is again opposed by TfL as a housing site for this reason.

During the debate on the proposals, another rift emerged between the council and one of the major landowners. Comer Homes, owner of Vicarage Farm, was previously supportive and offered up part of its land for an extension of neighbouring Trent Country Park, which would be used to offset the loss of Green Belt.

But the developer has since U-turned – the farm is now making money, and it wants to maintain it for agriculture after all. This revelation irritated Lee, who said: “The policy as a whole keeps coming back to the country park. It is a crucial part of the vision. If it can’t be delivered in the way the council envisage it, it will have an affect on the planning balance.”

On the issue of “high harm” being caused to the Green Belt at Chase Park, Philip Russell-Vick, a chartered landscape architect commissioned by The Enfield Society to study the impact of new housing on the area’s undulating farmland, told the hearing: “It’s not the foothills of the Lake District or the Yorkshire Dales, but in terms of a London context it is a recognisable and highly valuable piece of landscape, and it should be considered as such.”

***

Curiously, the subject of the Green Belt also arose during a later debate on Meridian Water. Ikea – whose Edmonton store opposite Meridian Water Station closed in 2022 – wants to build 3,000 homes on the site. But the council disagrees, allocating 1,750 instead (below).

Closed ikea

Rebecca Burnhams, representing the Swedish furniture giant, questioned why the council was advocating thousands of homes on the Green Belt in the west of the borough, when brownfield sites in the east could accommodate more. “There is a brownfield site here that is ripe for development,” she said. “While you have pressure being put on Green Belt sites, it is unclear to us why this site is not being maximised.”

Later on, during the same debate, the council again appeared to frustrate Lee by admitting it had neglected to include around 700 extra homes on another site within Meridian Water. The council denied, however, that adding these extra homes would have any bearing on the rest of the plan – such as the exceptional circumstances needed to justify Green Belt development. Whether the inspector agrees remains to be seen.

A discussion event about the Enfield Local Plan, the Green Belt, and the borough’s housing crisis will take place at Dugdale Arts Centre in Enfield Town on the evening of 15 September. It has been organised by The London Society and the Enfield Dispatch. On London editor Dave Hill will chair it. Buy tickets here.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Enfield Council, Green Belt, housing

News: Headphones on please, says Transport for London

A new poster campaign is being launched urging public transport passengers not to play music or videos out loud on their phones
Dave Hill

Posters will appear on the Elizabeth line from today, asking passengers to wear headphones when listening to music, watching videos or having phone conversations during journeys.

Backed by Sir Sadiq Khan, the Transport for London initiative, which will be extended to the Underground, Overground, Docklands Light Railway, London Tram services and buses from October, follows TfL research conducted in June suggesting that 70 per cent of public transport users in the capital dislike being exposed to other peoples’ phone speaker noise while travelling.

The issue has become more prominent as the availability of 4G and 5G has increased across the rail networks and since April, when the Liberal Democrats proposed an amendment to the Bus Services Bill to ban people playing music and video out loud on public transport or in stations or while waiting for buses.

A YouGov poll at the time found that 65 per cent of Londoners “strongly” or “somewhat” supported the Lib Dem idea, which included fines of up to £1,000 for transgressors. The Conservatives have now suggested a similar measure in relation to Labour’s  forthcoming railway reforms.

It is already a breach of national railway by-laws to create such noise or play musical instruments in a way that can annoy people, and TfL has adopted these, but the rules are infrequently enforced. The rail service posters will appear on trains themselves, not at stations.

The poster campaign is described as an addition to TfL’s long-running Travel Kind campaign, which encourages considerate behaviour on public transport.

Emma Strain, TfL’s Customer Director, said, “Most people use headphones, but even just a small number of people not doing so can create an unpleasant or even stressful environment for others. That’s why we’re reminding people to put their headphones on if they don’t already, to give others the stress-free journey they’d expect for themselves.”

Seb Dance, Deputy Mayor for Transport, said, “The vast majority of Londoners use headphones when travelling on public transport in the capital, but the small minority who play music or videos out loud can be a real nuisance to other passengers and directly disturb their journeys. TfL’s new campaign will remind and encourage Londoners to always be considerate of other passengers.”

Updated at 07:51 on 26/8/2025.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: antisocial behaviour, Sadiq Khan, Transport for London

Julie Hamill: Return of Arthur the parrot – a story of modern London

Scared by a cat, a much-loved pet took flight - but the good people of Willesden got him back home
Julie Hamill

Posters of a striking, emerald-green, missing parrot with beautiful round eyes began appearing on my feed. His name was Arthur, and something about him seemed to radiate personality. I am always sad when I see a pet is lost, and immediately felt for Arthur’s owners, who I was sure must have been frantic.

I was transported to the time when our family dog, Sandy, went missing in Bellshill, Scotland, during my early childhood. Sandy had soft white curly fur (probably part poodle), pointy pink ears and a sandy-coloured stripe down his back. Our street neighbours joined in the search, calling his name, checking gardens, knocking on doors. In the end, it was my sister, Louise, who trusted her instinct, knocked on the right door and found our beloved pet (he’d been stolen).

Arthur the parrot’s story unfolded decades later in London. He wasn’t stolen, he was startled. One afternoon, a cat jumped on top of his outdoor cage, bending the netting just enough to open a small gap. Terrified, the four-year-old parrot launched himself skyward over the top of the cat and vanished beyond the rooftops.

Christy Zetta King, his owner, was at home at the time. “I was working on my laptop when Arthur was in his outer cage, getting his vitamin D,” she says, when I visit. “It was all over so fast. Before I could react or yell, it was too late. Arthur flew off. I knew he’d be disoriented. Parrots don’t have a homing instinct, like pigeons. He wouldn’t know how to get back. Immediately we went into rescue mode, calling for him loudly, even with a megaphone, as the first thing we taught him was to come to us when called.”

Christy and her partner, Michael Zmahar, like her a successful author from Slovenia, moved to London only two years ago with Arthur and Lexi, their incredibly elderly and wonderfully sprightly 19-year-old “golden something” rescue dog. What happened next surprised them.

“London is nothing like Slovenia,” Christy explains. “There, if you lose a pet it’s just: good luck! But here, everyone helped. People put out seeds and water, texted us, called his name in the streets. Kids rode off on bikes to look for him. We were shocked, in the best way.”

Michael agrees: “Our neighbours on this street are Ukrainian, French, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian — everyone came out. First, they thought, who’s yelling with a megaphone? But then they joined in.”

While the couple scoured the streets and posted online, neighbours spread the word on WhatsApp and Nextdoor. Christy notified parrot-alert groups, and posted flyers on trees. “We received about 100 calls that day,” says Christy. “Arthur was spotted up a tree in the park, then over on Willesden Lane, a mile away.”

Unnamed 15

After nearly 48 hours, salvation came from a young Brazilian couple, Liz and Rafa, who lived in a flat five storeys up beside a towering tree. They heard squawking at their window and saw a vivid green bird with red feathers perched about a foot away. They offered him a banana, which he ate. The ever-sociable Arthur eventually climbed on to an arm and was brought inside.

“Rafa and Liz don’t speak a lot of English, so didn’t even know he was missing,” Christy adds. “Arthur is an Eclectus parrot from the Solomon Islands, a special bird, not something you usually see in Willesden! He’s vulnerable to cats, foxes and other birds. Liz had done so much research on parrots, what to feed them, how to behave around them. She contacted the parrot society that I had previously notified. They told her to identify the ring around his leg and ask me for the ID number. Once she knew we were the owners,  she sent a video of him eating the banana. We were so happy our boy was with good people.”

Arthur was soon returned. “He got lost on Saturday afternoon, he was at their flat by 8pm that night, and we were reunited Monday,” Christy says. Meeting Arthur in person, I understand the attachment. He’s great with me, very playful, just as Christy and Michael trained him to be – familiar and friendly with people.

At one point he tries to nibble my earrings before giving me a kiss and sticking his tongue out. He even poses for photos by bending his head from side to side. As well as an ear-splitting loud squawk, he boasts a wide vocabulary in both Slovenian and English, and happily shouts phrases like “Good bird!”, “What’s up?”, “How are you?” and of course, his own name. “He’s such a goof,” Christy laughs.

Michael points out that although people meet him, love him and then want to own a parrot as a pet, they don’t realise the commitment required. “It’s like caring for a five-year-old who could live for 40 years. They’re super smart, demanding and full of personality. People don’t realise the level of work, expense and responsibility.”

I am touched to hear that the search for Arthur also involved one very special neighbour, who was the first to hear him after his escape. “A woman four doors down, who is blind, spends her days listening to birdsong in her garden,” Michael says. “She heard a strange-voiced bird and contacted us. ‘Does your bird call his own name?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ we replied, ‘that’s him, that’s King Arthur!’”

The ordeal left Christy and Michael with more than relief. “It was stressful, of course,” says Christy, “but also uplifting. We’ve never felt this kind of support anywhere we’ve lived before. London gave us kindness, good energy, protection, and we got Arthur back.”

After another parrot kiss goodbye, I head home. I think of the day Louise brought Sandy home in her arms. I visualised him jogging up our hallway to greet me, his tail wagging, my fingers in his furry curls.

Foll0w Julie Hamill on Instagram. Enjoy Christy and Michael rejoicing in Arthur’s return here. It’s just as well that Arthur wasn’t stolen: very few pets reported stolen in the capital are recovered.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Willesden

Lewis Baston: Hounslow by-election hold gives Labour little to cheer about

The Conservatives were never likely to win, but secured one of their best London swings since the general election despite competition on the Right from Reform
Lewis Baston

Labour successfully defended Hounslow Council’s Cranford ward in a by-election on Thursday, but looking beyond the headline there is little for the party to celebrate – it was one of the Conservatives’ best results in London since the general election.

The by-election was caused by the death in June of Labour councillor Sukhbir Singh Dhaliwal. He served as a councillor for the Cranford or Heston West wards in two periods, from 1994 to 2010 and then again from 2016 until his death. Dhaliwal worked on the buses, first as a conductor and then as a driver, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of London’s bus network, which his friends would test him on. Transport was one of his top political interests. He was a proud trade unionist. The leaders of both of the main Hounslow Council parties praised Dhaliwal’s dedication and personal warmth, and commented on the respect in which he was held in the Cranford community and the borough more widely.

Cranford’s name indicates that the old village was a ford over the River Crane, which flows from Yeading into the Thames near Twickenham. The Crane is a boundary river, demarcating the line between Hounslow and Hillingdon and, further downstream, between Hounslow and Richmond-upon-Thames. It also separates Feltham from Heston. Cranford Park and the parish church of St Dunstan’s are in Hillingdon, but the centre of the village and modern residential development are in Hounslow. The ward lies between Hounslow West and Hatton Cross on the Heathrow branch of the Piccadilly line, and contains the triangle of roads at the meeting point of the A4, A30 and A312.

Heathrow’s proximity is impossible to escape in Cranford. Planes fly low overhead on their way in, and many local residents work at the airport or in jobs that supply it or the airlines that use it. Like much of the Heathrow hinterland, Cranford has a large Asian population (57 per cent of residents according to the 2021 Census). It is a working-class community, with few professionals or managers resident in the area, and very religious – only eight per cent claimed no religious affiliation in 2021 (37 per cent did so in England as a whole). The plurality religion is Christian (38 per cent), with significant Muslim (20 per cent), Sikh (18 per cent) and Hindu (10 per cent) presences too. The Sikh community seems particularly prominent in local politics.

Cranford’s housing is a mix of owner occupied (37 per cent), privately rented (35 per cent) and socially rented (28 per cent). Much of it consists of family houses built in the inter-war period, though one will see the occasional older house left over from when this was market gardening country. The major roads physically divide the community, and the residential areas are slightly bleak, with treeless avenues and front gardens converted into parking.

The ward is host to some of London’s quirkiest street names, thanks to the presence of the council-built estate known variously as Beaver, Beavers or Beaver Farm – the official renaming to “Meadows” in the 2000s never caught on. The main loop through the estate is called Chinchilla Drive and the other roads are also named after rodents and small mammals – Raccoon Way, Opossum Way, Marmot Road and so on. The estate has had a troubled history, with problems arising from the system building techniques used in the late 1960s and, in the 1990s, from antisocial behaviour. It remains a rather insular community.

Candidates for the by-election came forward from the five main parties. Labour’s Hira Dhillon (pictured) was in the tradition of Sukhbir Dhaliwal in being a long-standing local resident and a transport worker – in his case on the London Underground and railways rather than the buses. There have been ructions within Hounslow Labour, and currently Labour candidates within the borough are being selected by a panel of the National Executive Committee. The Conservatives contrasted this with their own more local methods, and selected young activist Gurpreet Singh Siddhu. Businessman Khushwant Singh stood for Reform UK and Miruna Leitoiu stood for the Liberal Democrats. Neither party fought the seat in 2022.

The Green Party nominated Gurpal Virdi, who has an important place in the history of London policing. He was the first recruit to the Met from the Hounslow Asian community when he joined in 1982, and became a high-flying detective sergeant in the 1990s. Then, in 1998, he and other ethnic minority officers received racist messages. Instead of conducting a proper investigation, the Met falsely alleged that Virdi himself had sent the notes, and in 2000 he was dismissed.

The Virdi affair was the subject of an official inquiry. This reported in 2002, when Virdi was reinstated, and again in 2004. After retiring in 2012, Virdi aspired to a political career and in 2014 was selected as a Labour candidate for Cranford ward, only to suffer further injustice. He was accused of a historic sexual offence during the campaign, suspended from Labour, elected anyway and eventually acquitted of all charges in 2015. The Labour whip was then granted, but Virdi left the party in 2017 and stood down from the council in 2018. He ran for election in Cranford as an Independent in 2022, polling a respectable 489 votes but still coming last, just behind the Green.

Cranford has long been a safe Labour ward. The Labour slate won well over half the vote in 2022 (the usual method of calculation of percentages rather understates how dominant Labour was) and the party has won consistently large majorities for decades, lapsing only in the Tory annus mirabilis of 1968. One of the Cranford Labour winners in 1982 was Harbans Kanwal, one of the first two Asian councillors in Hounslow.

The issues of the by-election were familiar ones to the observer of local politics – standards of street cleaning, fly tipping, antisocial behaviour and the feeling of neglect which sometimes takes hold in communities such as Cranford due to their lying at the outer edges of their boroughs. The August polling day made for a torpid campaign and a low turnout, which at 21.6 per cent was well down on the itself unimpressive 30.6 per cent participation in Cranford in the 2022 full borough elections.

Hira Dhillon retained the seat for Labour, with 951 votes (40.7 per cent). This was by past comparison a very poor result in Cranford – the Labour vote share was down 12.6 points on where it was in 2022 on the standard basis of calculation, and this arguably understates how big the fall in support really was. Calculated on an alternative basis, the Labour share collapsed by 25 points.

The Conservatives finished a good second, with 679 votes (29.1 per cent). That was up by 10 percentage points on 2022, making the Cranford result their third-best in London since the general election on that metric. The meaty 11.3 per cent swing from Labour to Conservative was the highest since Fulham’s Lillie ward in February.

The Tories achieved this despite the arrival of competition on the right from Reform UK, whose 405 votes (17.3 per cent) was not a bad showing for a ward with Cranford’s demographics. The Greens (156 votes) and Lib Dems (145 votes) were far behind. Overall, there was a large swing from Left to Right.

One should not read too much into a low-turnout summer local by-election, but some conclusions can be drawn from Cranford. One is that there is a bit of a malaise about Hounslow Labour. This is indicated not only by the NEC involvement in selections but also internal rumblings becoming public and poor by-election results earlier in the year, in Brentford.

The swing in Cranford would, if replicated across the borough next May, be enough to switch perhaps 10 or more seats to the Conservatives, though the tide would have to rise higher to threaten Labour’s control of Hounslow, as its majority in 2022 was an enormous 52 seats to the Tories’ ten.

Cranford is another piece of evidence that the Conservatives are picking up support among Hindu and Sikh voters, on top of the 2022 elections in Harrow and Brent and several results in the 2024 general election, including Harrow East and the isolated Conservative gain in Leicester East. If this is indeed a general trend, the Conservatives could make significant gains in Hounslow, Ealing and Brent and perhaps on rather high swings, even if they struggle elsewhere.

Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. 

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters. For £5 a month or £50 a year they receive in-depth newsletters and London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: Conservatives, Hounslow Council, Labour, Reform UK

Richard Brown: Will London be the government’s place of refuge from its ‘asylum hotels’ problem?

The capital has been accommodating more and more claimants and the Epping ruling could see that trend grow stronger
Richard Brown

At the time of writing, no London borough has formally announced plans to challenge asylum seekers being housed in hotels. And while there have been recent protests at hotels in Canary Wharf and Islington, protestors objecting to “asylum hotels” in the capital have often been outnumbered by counter-protestors.

This might seem typical of a city characterised by diversity, one which has welcomed people fleeing persecution through the ages – from Huguenots, to Jews, to Ugandan Asians, to Vietnamese “boat people”. London is already doing its bit, and more besides, in accommodating asylum seekers. But any shift in national policy in response to this week’s Epping court ruling could have big impacts.

According to a Migration Observatory briefing issued last week, the number of asylum seekers in London grew more than fourfold between 2018 and 2024. Its share of the UK total rose from nine to 19 per cent, part of a broader shift to southern England from the rest of the UK. Any connection to the distribution of marginal seats may be coincidental.

Use of hotels and other short-term “contingency accommodation” (rather than “dispersal accommodation”, including rented houses and flats) increased from five per cent to 45 per cent of asylum seekers from 2019 to 2023, but has fallen back since then, to 30 per cent at the end of last year. The big exception is London, where hotels still housed approximately 12,000 asylum seekers, 60 per cent of the city’s total, in early 2025.

Both the total number of asylum seekers and the proportion housed in hotels are highest in Hillingdon and Hounslow. They are the London boroughs closest to Heathrow Airport, one of the UK’s most important ports of entry (though less popular than the Kentish coastline as a location for performative blimpism by the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe). These boroughs are two of the six in the UK where the number of asylum seekers housed locally is higher than the maximum specified in national agreements.

So London, as ever, is something of an outlier. Meanwhile the government is clearly in a fix. It has pledged to phase out the use of hotels to house asylum seekers and may be forced to speed up the process in response to court cases and protests. What part is London likely to play in their thinking?

The government could decide that “London can take it”, and load more asylum seekers into the city. This would encourage those who want trouble to stir it up, not helped by the fact that the Epping court judgement took (cautious) account of local protests. On the other hand, the move away from hotels could be accelerated, raising questions of where 12,000 temporary Londoners are to live.

The problem is that until claims are processed housing asylum seekers really is a zero-sum exercise. If they are not accommodated in hotels, where do they go? Military camps have been tried but proved controversial, as did the now-abandoned Bibby Stockholm barge. Aside from raising questions about their humanity or lack of it, such proposals are complex to put into effect – camps need to be fitted out and barges need to be procured. There are few obvious quick fixes.

Outside London and the wider south, the last two years have seen a shift away from hotels towards longer-term “dispersal accommodation”, often private rented sectors homes in multiple occupation (HMOs). But these are in short supply in London. Asylum seekers would be lining up alongside homeless families, who number 70,000 (half of the English total) in the capital. It is also notable that some local authorities (outside the south east) are already reported to be tightening controls on using HMOs in this way.

So the risk is that local authorities, already struggling with the costs of homelessness, would be left to support any asylum seekers evicted from hotel accommodation. Hillingdon Council has already written to MPs to protest about the Home Office planning to “evict 2,300 asylum seekers into the borough without secured accommodation or support” and has claimed that supporting asylum seekers is adding £5 million a year to already-stretched budgets. The BBC has reported a rise in rough sleeping and a spread of tented encampments in the borough, and Hillingdon is now reported to be reviewing the Epping decision.

London has the capacity to welcome and absorb thousands of people, and it does so, year after year. I do not think the capital is about to erupt in protest. But there is a question of how much the nation asks of it. London is the economic engine and the fiscal float for the UK. Should its boroughs also be expected to support an ever-growing share of people in urgent housing need, while funding is diverted to other parts of the country?

Follow Richard Brown on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters and bargain London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Hillingdon Council, housing, immigration, refugees

Patrick Hess: The Right’s attacks on London misrepresent reality

Reform and the Conservatives have been portraying the capital in ways unrecognisable to Londoners and ill-supported by facts
Patrick Hess

I didn’t know I had it so bad. For all of my 30 years living in London, I have thought my home city to be, while flawed and having been to some extent misgoverned over the years, a pretty good one. Yet listening to some recent the commentary about the city from the right-of-centre you would think I am practically living in Third World conditions.

There has been an increasingly relentless campaign waged from the British political Right against London. The pundits and politicians enlisted on this project, who often moan about political opponents “talking the country down”, appear determined to portray the nation’s capital as some kind of crime-ridden modern Gotham City. Which, as I say, is news to those of us who have lived here for all or most of our lives.

In a press conference the other week to launch his Britain is Lawless campaign, Nigel Farage was asked by a Sky News journalist whether, in doing this he was, in fact, stoking fear to gain political traction. Farage responded that people were already afraid, because of the issues of crime he is raising. “I dare you to walk through the West End of London after nine o-clock of an evening wearing jewellery,” he replied. “You wouldn’t do it. You know I’m right, you wouldn’t do it”.

The interaction was appropriately ridiculed. If Farage wanted to choose an example of an area of London to portray as a lawless, gang-controlled no-go zone, he could have done better than the West End, which is literally bustling with people – many daring to don their jewellery and even openly use their smartphones – until the early hours of the morning on most nights. Perhaps Farage wouldn’t dare venture into this supposed warzone, but thousands of ostensibly reckless hotheads do.

Another prominent voice in this anti-London campaign is the heterodox professor-come-GB News pundit Matt Goodwin. In June, Goodwin posted on X/Twitter a long list of grievances he apparently experienced on a visit to London, which included paying “nearly £8 for a pint”, buying a tin of instant coffee with a security tag on it, and being asked three times for money by homeless people. Some of which I can sympathise with. But if the professor happened to notice anything remotely nice about the capital on his day trip, he didn’t mention it.

In an essay posted on his Substack shortly after this X post, entitled “London is so over”, Goodwin expanded on his grievances about the capital. In it, he complains of “mass, uncontrolled migration”, high rents and house prices, endemic crime and demographic change, concluding that “a toxic cocktail of demographic change, mass migration and economic stagnation push our once-great city into managed decline and make it completely unrecognizable”. What I find unrecognisable is his portrayal of London.

Then there is the failed Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick, whose quest to stay relevant has included releasing footage of himself accosting fare-dodgers on the Tube. During his vigilante video, Jenrick similarly bemoaned the “bike theft, shoplifting, drugs in town centres, weird Turkish barbershops”.

As with much punditry and hyperbole, there are some grains of truth in this highly partial characterisation of London as an ungovernable hot-bed of crime. So, leaving aside the Turkish barbers – what exactly these poor guys are being charged with other than generic “weirdness”? I can’t quiet tell – did Jenrick have a point?

Some categories of crime, covering things such as phone-snatching and shoplifting have indeed risen for a period, and figures for knife crime and violent crime have gone up since dipping during the pandemic. However, the most recent Met figures have shown month-on-month reductions in theft from the person, robbery and knife crime compared with 2024. The murder rate is slightly down since the pandemic to approximately the same level as ten years ago. Admittedly, it is too high. Yet it is half what it was in 2003.

Other stats show that increases in certain crimes over the past decade have not been unique to London, where trends have been roughly in line with an overall increases in crime in England and Wales as a whole, while the Metropolitan Police area has a lower crime rate per 1,000 population than other forces in the country, like Merseyside, West Yorkshire, or Greater Manchester.

The narrative of London’s decline and ghettoisation also ignores how much of the city has been lifted up by gentrification. A host of formerly downtrodden areas, like King’s Cross, Spitalfields, Elephant and Castle, Stoke Newington and Peckham, have been transformed into flourishing visitor destinations over the last 20 years, replete with food markets, hipster coffee shops and pubs serving craft beer. It is partly why rents have shot up in such areas, and why the angry Goodwin had to pay £8 for a pint. Some of the economics that come with gentrification are of course not ideal. But there are trade-offs with such things, and on balance, I can’t say I regret them.

The proof is also there in the tourists, who, not getting the memo about London’s “managed decline”, continue to create footfall here. London was named the best destination in the world in the 2025 Tripadvisor Travellers’ Choice Awards. A friend of mine from Brazil utterly adores the city – so much so that she comes back every few years to spend time here. When I’m abroad, I often hear similarly positive impressions of London made on non-Brits, who have been charmed by some specific part of the city. I have yet to meet a tourist who has visited London and said they hated it.

Nor, frankly, have I met many Londoners who believe this. The distortion of London as a degenerating hellscape seems to be a peculiarly British one, pushed by those living in the UK, but outside London itself. Of course, like any city-dweller, we Londoners moan about our city plenty – it would be un-British not to.

We moan about the gridlock, the crammed Central line, the £5 croissants and £1,500-a-month rooms in shared flats. But most of us are careful not to misrepresent the broader picture. London is flawed and has serious issues that need serious attention. But, on balance, it’s a great city and far nicer than it used to be. London-haters can avoid it if they want – it’s their loss.

Patrick Hess is a London-based writer who covers politics, culture and international relations.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters and bargain London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: crime, immigration, Nigel Farage

Stephanie Pollitt: The building safety process is blocking homes in London. That has to change

New regulations introduced after the Grenfell disaster aren't being applied quickly or efficiently, making the capital's housing crisis worse
Stephanie Pollitt

Even those of us already familiar with the extent of London’s housing crisis have been shocked by figures released in recent weeks highlighting the scale of the challenge.

Fewer than 1,000 new homes were registered in the capital in three months to June according to the National House Building Council, down by more than half on the same period last year. That follows no new housing starts taking place in 23 out of 32 London boroughs in the first quarter of 2025.

These figures follow the setting of a revised 88,000 new homes a year target for London by central government. Ministers have rightly prioritised planning reform and improved funding for affordable homes, but their vital interventions are yet to translate into shovels getting into the ground more quickly.

That is because although revamped legislation and direct funding are a must for accelerating housebuilding, a creaking regulatory system that is causing significant delays and confusion is another key issue holding back developers.

The Building Safety Regulator was established in 2022 following the Grenfell tragedy, a move wholeheartedly welcomed by the industry. No developer wants to build an unsafe home. It quickly established a “gateway” approval process for any residential project more than 18 metres or seven storeys high, consisting of three stages. The first relates to obtaining planning consent, the second to starting work on site, and the third to approving full completion.

Unfortunately, this approach rapidly ran into several problems which have been allowed to fester, meaning the gateway process is now one of the biggest blockers of new development across the city.

The absence of fully rubber-stamped guidance around what information homebuilders must provide to make it through the process has been a problem from day one. The result has been many applications for approval being delayed way beyond the BSR’s self-imposed 12-week deadline for decisions – stretching into months and even years – or simply rejected.

The BSR says delays have been caused by poor quality applications, but developers highlight the lack of formal guidance about how to navigate this arcane process. The Construction Leadership Council has now stepped-in to provide guidance in this area with input from the BSR. Their efforts are very welcome but will take time to bed in.

Another big difficulty is insufficient provision of resources. Even if all applications received by the BSR were of the standard it is seeking, the regulator lacks the capacity to turn around large volumes of complex approval requests efficiently. Before an application is considered, the BSR assembles a unique “multi-disciplinary team” to assess it. Just bringing together one of those teams, which draw on external building, fire and safety experts, can take weeks. As such, delays to the decision-making process have been inevitable.

The government has now promised to increase funding for the BSR, shake up its leadership and bolster in-house expertise. It’s another welcome move, but will take time to yield results. And time is of the essence: close to 30,000 homes are currently stuck at the second stage of the gateway process.

That logjam is a particular concern for the capital, where building at density is the only way to solve our housing crisis. The risk, already in part reality, is that developers that would have delivered 18 metre or above projects decide not to do so, further slowing down the supply of desperately needed homes. Urgent action is needed now. That’s why we at BusinessLDN are calling for a three-step process to accelerate decision-making and housing delivery.

The first relates to engagement, specifically prior to applications formally entering the gateway process. To date, the BSR has not entered into conversations with developers prior to submissions, an approach that has served to widen an existing information gap. That needs to change.

The second centres on getting shovels in the ground. With so many homes stuck in the works there’s a clear case for allowing foundations to be laid at sites whilst non-crucial elements of delivery plans are finalised. The BSR must take a pragmatic approach and allow more applications to be “approved with requirements”, ensuring that non-essential design aspects do not stand in the way of progress.

Thirdly, the legislation that sits behind the BSR, and the way it is being interpreted, is not fit for purpose. A thorough review of the Building Safety Act should be undertaken, potentially with a view to mandating improved engagement by the BSR, establishing greater scrutiny of turnaround times for applications, or expanding its remit to include housing delivery.

Developers across London stand ready to provide thousands of new homes that meet the highest safety standards. Only if the BSR’s gateways are unlocked can they can deliver.

Stephanie Pollitt is programme director for housing at BusinessLDN. 

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. Nearly all its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters and bargain London event offers. Pay via any Donate link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: BusinessLDN, Grenfell Tower, housing

Earls Court Special: The Story So Far

A compilation of in-depth coverage of ambitious plans to renew a famously wondrous part of London, including a new long read
Dave Hill

I’ve been writing about attempts to redevelop the heart of the Earl’s Court area since 2009. Like any large project of that kind, it was never going to happen quickly. But it has taken a very long time for truly constructive progress to be made.

The main achievements of the first set of plans for transforming the famous and distinctive inner west London neighbourhood were to provoke local opposition to them and to demolish the Earls Court Exhibition Centre complex that had defined the neighbourhood’s character for decades, without building anything in its place.

So when a different developer came on the scene, the Earls Court Development Company, it was encouraging to learn that it was taking a very different approach – not only to the use it wished to make of the land, but also to the people who lived near it and to the area’s remarkable history.

My continuing interest has been expressed in a variety of forms and, with a new vision for Earl’s Court’s future set to reach a crucial stage in the planning process later this year, this article pulls together the most substantial recent examples.

The very latest has been to embark on writing what I hope is a pretty definitive account of the evolution of the current plans, put together in collaboration with the developer’s chief executive, Rob Heasman. The first instalment of that account, entitled Earls Court: The Story So Far, has now been published. I’m pleased to reproduce the first section of it below:

In 2020, at the end of the first year of the pandemic, the Earls Court Development Company opened its office next door to one of London’s most sadly abandoned spaces.

For well over a century, the site in question had been the core of one of London’s most beguiling neighbourhoods, a place of imagination, excitement and entertainment, known across the globe.

Until as recently as 2014 it had been home to one of the world’s most famous exhibition centres, a London landmark that drew entrepreneurs, innovators and visitors from far and wide.

But now it was a levelled domain of ghosts. How could it be brought back to life?

For chief executive Rob Heasman, envisaging a new tomorrow for this forlorn part of Earls Court meant marshalling his and his team’s powers of imagination.

London, still absorbing the impacts of Brexit, had been hit first and hardest by Covid-19. From the start, the pandemic had damaged its economy, wreaked havoc on its cultural venues and institutions, underlined the importance of green space and green technology, and shone a sobering light on health, wealth and housing inequalities across the city.

Any major new development scheme in London would need to be alive to this new chapter in the capital’s history – a chapter only just beginning to unfold.

What would planners, investors, employers, workers, visitors and local communities be looking for that they hadn’t been looking for before? What would London as a whole – and, indeed, the whole of the country – need from the future, new Earls Court?

As well as getting to grips with these big, new international themes – to which have since been added the uncertainties caused by the invasion of Ukraine and the outbreak of trade wars – the development company team had to seek answers to some large practical questions located quite literally outside their office’s front door.

The development area was large and some of it was flat, but it was also a bit awkward. Since the 1930s, it had spanned a cat’s cradle of London Underground and other railway lines. They would still have to be accommodated. In addition, it was partially bisected by a linear raised platform above the north-south train tracks. That wasn’t going anywhere either.

A section on its western side contained the Lillie Bridge London Underground maintenance depot, where Tube trains were serviced and repaired. The A4 Cromwell Road roared past it to the north. The Old Brompton Road-Lillie Road continuum bounded it to its south.

Though the largest mostly-cleared site in the capital, it was also a peculiar shape, a rogue rectangle with a bulge and an offshoot, its contours tethered at three points to West Brompton station at the south, Earl’s Court station at the east and West Kensington station at the north-west.

A structure of particular significance stood just outside its south western boundary, next to a bus depot on Lillie Road. The 31-floor Empress State Building, completed in 1962, was one of London’s earliest skyscrapers. It had been built as a hotel, replacing an ice rink called the Empress Hall, but ended up being used by the Admiralty and the UK security services. Its name was a tribute to New York’s Empire State building.

It was a striking but perhaps incongruous presence amid an otherwise low and medium-rise residential landscape, some of it 1970s council housing, some of it Victorian terraces. However, like the rail tracks, it wasn’t for moving. And, because of its size, its presence would influence the developer’s thinking.

The local political landscape presented another sort of challenge. The site straddled the boundary between two borough councils, both of them planning authorities. One was under Labour Party control, the other was run by Conservatives. Both wanted something to fill the Earls Court void, but each would have their own priorities.

There would also be a range of views among Earls Court residents and businesses about the best way forward. They had seen an earlier redevelopment project come and go, leaving behind only a wasteland. Its failure was hastened by objections ranging from anger about demolitions to concerns about architectural design.

Such was the panoply of issues facing the Earls Court Development Company, or ECDC for short, as its personnel got to grips with their task – issues ranging from the implications for London’s development sector of a worldwide health emergency, to the peculiarities of the Earl’s Court development site.

Read rest of Earls Court: The Story So Far HERE.

After you’ve done that, and if you haven’t already heard it, listen to what was the very first episode of The London Society’s London Explained documentary podcast series, which I research write and present. Produced by award-winning BBC Radio producer Andrew McGibbon and released in September 2023, it drew heavily on archive material that captures the area’s vivid and varied cultural life, going back at least 100 years, along with the voices of local people. Listen to it HERE.

And for an excellent update on the Earls Court Development Company’s plans, enjoy the recent Talk About London podcast, co-hosted by me and London Society chief executive Leanne Tritton, in which our guests were the Earls Court Development Company’s Rebekah Paczek and Sharon Giffen. Listen to it HERE or watch below.

Still wanting more? Try a piece I wrote last October about an event at ECDC HQ, featuring cultural commentators Peter York and Travis Elborough. Read it HERE.

And then there’s my vast back catalogue of coverage of the previous redevelopment scheme, some it quite bad-tempered, for the Guardian. Find that HERE.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Pay using any “donate” link on the website or by becoming a paying subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s personal Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: Earl's Court, planning, regeneration