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Why is London public transport use still falling?

Dave Hill

Along with tracking the capital’s economic and population trends, Centre for London’s latest London Intelligence statistical bulletin brought us up to date with bus and Underground ridership levels. The news is that both have continued to fall, maintaining the pattern of the past two or three years.

The figures, supplied by Transport for London, show that for the twelve weeks to the end of May journeys made on the Tube fell by 0.6 per cent compared with the same period the previous year, the equivalent of nearly 8,000 a day. Over the same period by the same comparison, bus ridership dropped by 1.8 per cent.

Neither are calamitous falls in their own right, but a fall of any kind contrasts sharply with the year after year of increases of the recent past. The rise of public transport use has been seen as an aspect of the rise of London, both as a thriving global city and as a progressive one that put efficient and sustainable transport modes before private car use. What do these sudden declines in the numbers signify?

The London Intelligence quotes experienced transport campaigner and consultant Nick Lester-Davis, who says they are likely to be the result of a combination of factors. He cites government policy since 2010 making public transport “progressively more expensive compared to driving”, population growth in London adding to congestion, which make bus travel slower and less attractive, and knock effects of rail franchise disruption. He thinks the ridership downturns might continue at least in the short term.

Other arguments are in circulation. Changing work cultures and the advent of Uber are often mentioned, as is anxiety about terrorism (the London Intelligence has a separate section showing that fewer overseas visitors have been coming to London since last year’s attacks). The approach of Brexit has been cited too, characterised as a dampener on economic activity. And anyone who uses the Central Line during the morning peak will be only too aware of what an ordeal it can be simply to squash into a carriage let alone endure the crush for several stops. No wonder alternative ways of getting around the city hold appeal.

The situation has done nothing for TfL’s finances, coinciding as it has with the curtailment of the transport body’s operational grant from the government. The Mayor’s TfL fares freeze is blamed by political opponents for adding to these budgetary strains, though supporters will contend that it has helped limit the damage by encouraging people to keep using public transport when they might otherwise have avoided it.

But whichever side of that argument you take, it is hard to imagine Tube and bus riderships returning to their former upward paths without more capacity in the former service and less road congestion to hamper the latter. Where will the money for the first of these keep coming from and where will the political will for tackling the second be found?

LONDON AND BREXIT DEBATE: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

Categories: News
Tags: Brexit, buses, Central Line, Centre For London, London Underground, Nick Lester-Davis, Transport for London, Uber

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 53: Cardinal Wolsey’s wine cellar

Victor Keegan

The Tudor wine cellar of Cardinal Wolsey – later snatched by Henry VIII along with the rest of Wolsey’s York Palace when the cardinal failed to get the monarch a divorce – is one of London’s spectacular buried treasures. Sadly, very few people get to see it because it is below ground in the bowels of the Ministry of Defence on Horse Guards Avenue, to the right of the main entrance. Special permission is required to view it and tough security procedures must be gone through. 

The amazing thing is that it is there at all, having survived several serious fires over the centuries and, more critically, the 1940s plans for the new Ministry of Defence building which included its destruction. Only after protests by Queen Mary (widow of George V) was it saved. I hope they gave her a decent drink. The rescue involved encasing the cellar in steel and concrete and lowering it by six metres so it didn’t interfere with the contours of the new building. It is the last intact piece of Henry VIII’s Palace of Westminster, once bigger – though much uglier – than Louis XIV’s Versailles. It was the main palace of the admittedly peripatetic English monarchs for 200 years.

When visiting, what struck me after negotiating a series of stairways was not just the unexpectedly large size of the cellar itself but the way it is presented. It is done in museum style, with large reproductions of paintings and maps, and numerous boards explaining the historical background to it as you walk around the outside of the mausoleum-style structure that now encases it. This was an impressive bit of engineering for the time. It took 90 men 18 months, but provided the ministry with an extra 1,335 square feet of office space. The justification for doing this was that otherwise the cellar would have protruded 10 yards into Horse Guards Avenue. What would have been so wrong about that?

Stepping into the cellar is like entering a time capsule. In the depths of a building where battles are planned and nuclear tactics discussed are the intact remains of a piece of Tudor times. It is just as it was 600 years ago bar a few replacement stones, a lick of white paint on the walls and some more recent wine barrels installed at each end to recreate part of the atmosphere of a bygone age. There is a stark beauty to the columns and the vaulted ceiling made of sculptured bricks, which come together in “V” shapes. 

There has been speculation about what sort of wines were stored here to slate the Cardinal’s thirst. England – and London – were not short of vineyards in those days, but it is presumed that Tudor snobbery – sorry, taste – would have ensured that most of the wines came from France including, possibly, from the then white wine region of Champagne. A memorable experience.

There is also a bit of unfinished business. The wine cellar was very close to one of the halls of Wolsey’s Palace where, in later years, some of Shakespeare’s plays were produced. I read somewhere that part of the wall of that hall can still be seen. Does anyone know where it is? 

Find previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London here.

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Horse Guards Avenue

Is London floating above Brexit or about to be brought down?

Dave Hill

Centre For London’s latest facts and stats bulletin on the capital’s vital signs offers cherries to pick for protagonists on either side of the Brexit divide. The anti-Brexit Evening Standard highlights a slowing of the capital’s population growth – yes, it is still going up – and the Centre’s observation that this might, in the longer term, “significantly damage our economy” rather than reducing pressure on infrastructure and public services. The Independent grabs the chance for another of those house price-related “exodus” stories.

Conversely, champions of Brexit can seize on the Centre’s reporting that “London’s economy continues to expand, with lower unemployment levels and job numbers in the capital reaching new highs”, adding that this is “particularly encouraging against the background of continuing uncertainty around Brexit.” The Financial Times has led on this part of the research, reporting that London’s economy is growing slightly faster than that of the rest of the country.

So what is the true story here? It is, of course, that both main themes of the fifth edition of The London Intelligence are important, and their significance to some degree unclear or open to interpretation. And much of the detail is intriguing.

The cheering news on the economy takes a different forms. An important survey of business activity – the purchasing managers’ indices – produced an overall score in June that is its highest since last October. The number of jobs in London went up to 5.9 million in the first quarter (Q1) of 2018, a rise of 1.9 per cent compared with the same period last year. The rise was pretty evenly spread, though there were strikingly large hikes of seven per cent in the real estate and creative sectors and in civil service posts, principally in – wait for it – the Department for Exiting the European Union. And unemployment has kept falling, with its Q1 figure of 255,000 described by the Centre as “close to a record low”.

It isn’t all optimism, though. Productivity in London, though still far higher than in the rest of the country, has dropped a little, and new entrants to the job market have seen a seven percent fall in their wage levels since the 2009 financial crisis. Meanwhile, the Centre underlines that in-work poverty in London is getting worse.

The population story derives from a considerable fall in the net increase in people moving to London from overseas combined with a net rise in the number moving out of London to other parts of the UK. The estimated net gain in overseas migrants to mid-2017 was just under 83,000 people, and the estimated net loss domestically was about 107,000 (336,000 left compared with 230,000 who arrived). The reason the population kept growing anyway was that the number of births continued to substantially exceed the number of deaths. It all boiled down to a small increase in the number of Londoners than was expected.

How important are these changes and why have they occurred? Centre For London’s research manager Silviya Barrett provides the measured view that it is too early say whether the levelling out of population growth is “a temporary blip, perhaps reflecting post-EU referendum uncertainty, or the beginning of a longer term trend”. Vicky Pryce from the Centre for Economics and Business Research warns that “any loss of EU workers and the likelihood of [financial] services not being covered by any Brexit deal would leave the City particularly vulnerable.”

What about The Independent’s population “exodus”? We need to be a little careful with that idea, whether in relation to past claims about “white flight” from London’s ethnic diversity (which have been persuasively challenged) or of Londoners being “pushed out” by rich foreigners buying all the houses. Bear in mind that net outward internal migration has been a routine feature of the capital’s demography for decades. The overall outflow of 107,000 is higher than the 93,300 of the previous year, continuing a trend of increases. But it is still not as high as in 2004 (110,200) and not much higher than in 2003 (103,133).

High housing costs might not tell the whole story, though they have always been a driver for such population movement. And while the numbers in their late twenties and thirties heading out probably reflect how tough the current situation is, it could be that part of the increased outflow is down to people who’d been delaying selling up and heading for Hertfordshire or Kent while London property prices were soaring now getting round to it as they’ve stabilised and in some boroughs even fallen (see the map below for what’s happened in, or example, Brent and Southwark).

Is the housing situation looking up at all? Not really. The housing supply pipeline remains “relatively stable”, says the report, but the year to March 2018 saw 24,000 homes completed – quite high compared with recent years, but very far short of the 66,000 needed, according to Sadiq Khan’s draft new London Plan. Permissions for a quarter of the 145 large housing schemes proposed were not granted planning permission by the boroughs concerned. “This may indicate that many councils are coming under pressure to ensure high levels of affordability in new developments,” the report remarks. The Mayor’s “threshold” approach seeks 35% of homes in new schemes to meet his definition of “genuinely affordable”.

There’s lots more valuable information in the latest London Intelligence, so take a look for yourselves here. All the graphs and charts here originated there.

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

 

 

Categories: Analysis, Intelligence
Tags: affordable housing, Brexit, Centre For London, demographics, employment, Evening Standard, Financial Times, housing, planning, population, Sadiq Khan, Silviya Barrett, Southwark, The Independent, The London Plan, Vicky Pryce

TfL funds more cycling schemes for under-represented groups

Dave Hill

Transport for London is investing nearly a quarter of a million pounds in encouraging social groups under-represented in the capital’s cycling population to take up travelling by bicycle.

Up to 30 community and not-for-profit organisations have until 17 September to bid for grants from TfL, aimed at broadening a demographic currently dominated by affluent white males.

Initiatives that might be funded include cycle training, bike loan schemes, guided rides and maintenance courses. This is the fourth year of the Cycle Grants London scheme, which is administered by environmental regeneration charity Groundwork London.

TfL says that over 14,000 Londoners have been encouraged by the programme to take up cycling to far. Schemes supported in the past include the Ilford-based “Brothers on Bikes“, which sought to persuade young Asian Londoners to ride, and the Limehouse Women’s Cycling Project, aimed principally at local Bangladeshis but also open to others.

Boris Johnson’s 2013 Vision for Cycling in London described a goal of getting more women, older people, black and minority ethnic Londoners and Londoners from all social backgrounds to cycle by means of changing street designs to increase safety and the perception of it.

However, a 2011 study commissioned by TfL had indicated a range of cultural factors that dissuade women, poorer and ethnic minority Londoners from embracing cycling as a way to get around the city, bound up with social status and gender identity issues.

Sadiq Khan’s cycling and walking commissioner, Will Norman, has acknowledged the need to break down such barriers if London’s still small but increasing number of cyclists is to grow more quickly.

Surveys conducted for TfL have suggested that the introduction of segregated “cycle superhighways” has not produced an increase in the percentage of woman cycling, as some activists had predicted.

Applications for funds from Cycling Grants London should be made here. Photograph of Limehouse Women’s Cycling Project from Groundworks.

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Boris Johnson, cycling, Sadiq Khan, transport, Transport for London, Will Norman

Grenfell Truths: do they interest the Protest Left at all?

Dave Hill

Even before the flames were out, the Protest Left had assigned blame for the Grenfell Tower fire: it was the Tories, it was austerity, its was racism, it was “social cleansing”, it was inequality, it was pandering to “the rich” that had made those people die. For example, journalist Jack Monroe (the Guardian), surmised from someone else’s completely naive reading of an online document that the cladding through which the fire spread had been put there “in order to appease luxury developers nearby”. Another journalist, Giles Coren (the Times) responded to this with mock amazement: “You mean local rich people wanted it covered in something pretty to improve their view? Can that be? Surely not?”

Some might have been glad that a pair of prominent food writers were so swift to spread their expertise in planning regulations among their many thousands of Twitter followers. However, I take the broader view that people of influence should keep their ignorance about what caused the horrible deaths of 72 people to themselves. This aversion to leaping to fatuous conclusions places me in a minority, of course. The majority stance is that prejudice, presumption and premature judgements are the essence of unarguable truth. At least, it often feels that way when venturing into the hermetic world of Grenfell-related activism and “radical” commentary.

I recently attended a meeting of the Kensington & Chelsea Council committee that scrutinises the borough’s Grenfell recovery programme. It was well attended by residents, including, I am told, some survivors, some who lost family members and friends, and many who live in the vicinity of the tower. Tears were shed during a minute’s silence. Consistent with the council’s pledge to increase transparency, an open invitation had been extended to anyone with questions for its deputy leader Kim Taylor-Smith, who heads the recovery programme, and the council officers who work with him. All too predictably, that part of the evening was effectively run by those we might call the usual suspects.

I won’t name names, many of them familiar from TV appearances and claims reported by the written media, because they get too much attention as it is. Suffice to say that they set about dominating the meeting, just as they have dominated previous ones, seizing their chance to once again heap insult and contempt on whoever is present from the local authority in the hope of provoking a response they can exploit.

Many points were raised, some of them quite valid, but those raising them seemed more interested in getting on to their next one than in listening to the answers they were given. Answers, after all, tend to disrupt the delivery of lists of denunciations. At times, I wondered if the committee’s Labour chair was too indulgent of the chuntering, nit-picking and grandstanding, but I can see on reflection that I might have handled things in the same way. In a no-win situation, low key loss limitation can be the wisest course.

I felt the same but more so for Taylor-Smith and his colleagues, obliged to address demands that were variously petty, irrelevant, spiteful and inane with elaborate deference and great forbearance. The implacable hostility of their accusers was such that any opportunity to proclaim that local people were being lied to, silenced or ignored would be seized upon with glee, used to sustain a cycle of triumphant self-congratulation, generate outrage through social media and prompt phone calls to tame journalists. There were even demands to be co-opted onto the committee, with those making them professing to know better than council officers how to conduct their delicate and demanding business. But did any of these self-appointed champions of the bereaved and dispossessed encourage quieter souls present to step forward and make their voices heard? No chance.

There were arcane sub-plots too, with claim and counter claim from the floor about which local grouplet should control a certain building, the rights and wrongs of which I could not fathom. But the overwhelming impression left by this particular exercise in local democracy was of a sort of high stakes ritual being played out in the Royal Borough’s Small Hall, with the ascendant antagonists relishing the licence the fire has given them to torment and denigrate those who have accepted the task of trying to heal the hellish harm that has been done, and the latter obliged to warily indulge them, the better to deny them further scope for impugning their trustworthiness and goodwill.

It was all pretty depressing, and the more so when considered against the quietly unfolding picture of fact and evidence that has weakened the instant Grenfell charge sheet listed above. Remember how quickly it emerged that council-owned high-rise blocks in Labour boroughs had been clad in the same way, deflating assertions that only a Tory administration would allow such a situation to occur. Even the Guardian, which has insisted that the fire was a product of inequality, has reported that more private high rise housing blocks have been found to be wrapped in “Grenfell-style” cladding than local authority or other social housing ones.

The case that RBKC is endemically neglectful of its social housing was lately made in The Independent on the basis that 133 social rented properties there stand empty. Is that exceptional? There will always be some such homes unoccupied in any borough, perhaps due to refurbishment or impending sale or demolition. I asked two Labour councils to give me their empties figures: 150 in one case, 450 in the other. The figures for the three boroughs are not precisely comparable, but the latter two at least put the first into some perspective.

One of the most dismal things about all this is that no amount of inconvenient reality seems to deter purveyors of the Protest Left’s Grenfell narrative from continuing to perpetuate it in its purest form: not disclosures about failings in the regulatory system that point to the possibility of landlords of all types and under the control of different political parties and none taking decisions on the strength of bad information in good faith; not the evidence of distressed firefighters that the scale and ferocity of the Grenfell blaze was more than they could cope with. None of this must interrupt the populist cry against RBKC Tories and “the rich”. Even if, at the end of all this, the heads of five Kensington & Chelsea Conservatives were removed and stuck on poles in Exhibition Road there would be howls of outrage because there were not six.

The official inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire still has a long way to go, as has the police investigation. In time, it might emerge that elements of the Protest Left narrative, albeit a crude ideological construct built from animus, ignorance and bias, do have some credibility. But if so, the hecklers and disruptors will deserve no credit for it. They had decided within hours who and what is guilty over Grenfell, without troubling themselves with evidence. Does the truth really interest them at all?

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Conservatives, Diane Abbott, Grenfell Tower, Jeremy Corbyn, Kensington & Chelsea, Kim Taylor-Smith, Labour, The Guardian

John Vane: street begging scenes

John Vane

John Vane is a citizen of London who walks a lot and often makes things up, though that doesn’t mean they are untrue.

Street begging creates a moral dilemma for Londoners – for some of us at any rate. Those who beg are a familiar feature of my neighbourhood, encountered when walking along its shopping street. Their faces are familiar. I even know the names of two of them.

One, a young woman, rake-thin, strides up to passing fellow females addressing them as “Mum”. This might not be intended as a guilt-tripping shock tactic, but it has the same effect as one. I am told she sells sexual services to supplement her income. She has addiction written all over her.

Another, also female, is older with missing teeth and filthy clothes. She is known to a hostel for the homeless not far away, though she sometimes seems to sleep in the front yards of local houses, concealed by low hedges and walls. There is an obvious mental health mess at play here, and just the sight of her produces a heavy hopelessness in me. Heaven knows how she must feel.

Should you give to street beggars or not? Some people do as a matter of course, confident that their generosity helps the homeless, but not all beggars are rough sleepers, just as not all rough sleepers beg. And leaders of some homelessness charities, urge us to do no such thing. Most street beggars, they say, are in the grip of ruinous dependencies, which our pounds and pennies only help sustain.

I can see what they mean. One day, walking home, a friend of mine spotted a fiver on the pavement ahead of her. A saintly soul, she was looking around for who might have dropped the note even before she’d reached it. She picked it up. As she did so, a man came up behind her, a tall, stooped, ragged-arsed man with a desperate look in his eyes. She’d often seen him around, soliciting passers by: “Any change, guv? Any change?”

My friend gave him the fiver and he was gone. Gone back along the pavement. Gone back to where a betting shop was. Gone through the door of that betting shop door where, my friend surmised, he might well spend most of his days, stepping out now and then to scrape together what he needed for his next wager. My friend felt conned. I would have felt the same.

Perhaps we need to take a broader view. Perhaps the real problem is indifference. Most Londoners, I think, would like to see street begging gone, some out of compassion, some out of loathing – not everyone feels pity, even in the abstract, for those sorry and sometimes cunning figures who sit on our city’s pavements with their hands out – and some just to be relieved of the conflict in their consciences.

We could do a lot by doing more. We could dial 101 and ask the police to intervene. Some beggars really are just fraudsters, some are in desperate need of help and some are a bit of both. The police can treat each case accordingly. Homeless charities have helplines. And if you don’t want to give money to deserving cases, given them food if that is what they say they want.

If more of us acted in these ways, the pressure for more action from the authorities would grow. Street begging will never leave London completely, but we can do a lot of good if we stop just walking by. I wonder if I will.

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

 

 

Categories: Culture
Tags: begging

Roger Evans: can a Conservative defeat Sadiq Khan?

Roger Evans

Roger Evans is Senior Counsel at Barndoor Strategy and a former Conservative London Assembly Member and Deputy Mayor of London.

London is now over half way through Sadiq Khan’s term of office. The months have flown by, the Mayor has racked up lots of photo opportunities with celebrities but his record looks less glamorous. Transport for London struggles with a deficit caused by falling passenger numbers and an ill- considered fares freeze. Housebuilding figures remain stubbornly low. The most urgent problem is spiralling violent crime, manifesting itself in the growing number of murders, moped thefts and acid attacks.

Mayor Khan’s response is always to blame government cuts and there is certainly more that ministers could do. However, the buck passing and blame laying at City Hall indulges and even encourages a culture of low expectations. The fear is that if Sadiq actually got the money he demands, he wouldn’t know what to do with it.

A former Labour councillor recently confided that in his view Sadiq is there for the taking if the Conservative campaign focuses on his record.

With this in mind the Tories are selecting their candidate early and the process has already reached the shortlist stage. The intention is for a round of hustings over the summer followed by a vote of members to select a candidate in time for the autumn party conference in Birmingham.

The original list of applicants was never made public but I understand there was considerable interest, with over 30 names entering the fray. The lack of traditional big hitters leaves the contest wide open, but the winner will have more than 18 months to raise their profile in what is traditionally a gruelling campaign.

The three finalists are all London politicians – two members of the London Assembly and one borough councillor. The lack of MPs is a good thing, showing that London government has come of age and mayoral hopefuls can stand on their London experience without a national profile. There is no clear favourite – anyone could win this.

 

SHAUN BAILEY

Shaun grew up in a Ladbroke Grove council house, the son of a single mother. He was a youth worker for many years and did a stint as a policy advisor to David Cameron. Currently a list member at the London Assembly, he has established a reputation as a thoughtful scrutineer.

Shaun recognises that there are no easy long term answers to the knife crime epidemic. He plans to increase police resources by cutting waste at City Hall and in the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime. On housing, he describes Sadiq’s record as “abysmal” and wants to alter the London Plan to free up industrial land for residential development. He is a good media performer and has produced a decent video to introduce his campaign.

Shaun is an energetic and resilient politician with a valuable ability to motivate people, though he has yet to develop a strong policy programme. Hopefully this will emerge during the hustings.

 

ANDREW BOFF

Andrew was born in Hillingdon where he was a councillor at the start of his political career and leader for two years, before moving on to Hackney and then the London Assembly, where he is another list member with eight years experience under his belt.

He was a tough scrutineer during Boris Johnson’s time as Mayor, opposing a number of initiatives including the ill-fated Garden Bridge. This independent streak meant that the move to opposition in 2016 was easier for him than for many other Assembly Members. He is known for ferocious questioning, which often exposes Sadiq’s weak points and causes the Mayor to lose his temper.

Andrew tried for the candidacy in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2016. Perhaps it will be a case of fifth time lucky. He wants to take the campaign to unexpected places and espouses policies which can sometimes be outside the Conservatives’ comfort zone. In fact, his ideas can challenge Labour’s comfort zone as well.

He wants to treat the crime wave as a public health emergency, using techniques that have been pioneered in Scotland. Controversially, he believes that regulating cannabis use would cut off gangs from a major source of cash and reduce levels of violence. Thinking like this could find favour with younger voters who are not traditional Conservatives.

Andrew sees the need for a swift solution to the housing crisis and he wants to encourage modular building and self building to speed up the construction process. He has stated that for most of London he wants a height limit of six storey’s for residential properties, with tower blocks largely prohibited.

His ideas are libertarian and challenging to the traditional Conservative base, but they will also challenge Sadiq Khan, a Mayor not known for making brave or original decisions.

 

JOY MORRISSEY

Joy has been a British citizen for a decade, although she hails originally from the USA and did some acting in Hollywood. A councillor in Ealing, she also works for the Centre for Social Justice, a Conservative think tank.

Her campaign aspires to be inclusive, seeking to engage voluntary groups and residents’ associations across the capital. This is a smart move and probably the best way to raise her profile with over eight million Londoners. There is a lot of ground to cover and never enough time to speak to everyone.

To fight crime she wants to engage more police cadets and raise stop and search activity at neighbourhood police team level. Greater use of GPS tagging would be deployed to reduce reoffending.

To build more houses she wants to see investors and pension funds working with London’s local authorities to match money with available construction sites.

Interestingly, she wants to see more decentralisation of power to London’s government and is in favour of the Greater London Authority having wider tax raising powers. The hope is that greater power will encourage greater responsibility at City Hall.

*

These are three credible candidates with valuable experience gained in the city they hope to run. Only one can be selected, but the winner could do worse than co-opt some of the unsuccessful contenders into their team. The real journey will start in Birmingham, but there is a long way to go before then.

Many thanks to Roger Evans for this, his debut piece for On London. Roger Tweets here.

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Andrew Boff, Joy Morrissey, Shaun Bailey

Jack Brown: We need to bridge the gap between London and the rest of the UK

Jack Brown

London needs more than £35 billion of investment in its five biggest infrastructure projects, according to a recent Mayor of London-commissioned report by Greenwood Strategic Advisers, Mind the Gap. This investment could boost the UK’s economy by nearly £34 billion a year by 2050 and increase HM Treasury’s tax take by almost £10 billion a year over the same time frame.

Plugging this investment gap, the report argues, is therefore vital, both for London and for the UK as a whole. Failure to invest would result in a less prosperous and productive London, and less tax money raised for the national purse to redistribute and invest across the country. Put like this, funding these projects sounds like a no-brainer.

But is this the only gap we need to watch out for? The perception of a “gap” or divide between London and the rest of the UK is just as concerning. Research by the Centre for Cities and Centre for London in 2014 found that only 24 per cent of UK adults felt that London had a positive effect on their local economy and 64 per cent felt that political decisions were too focused on London. Recent Yougov analysis found that nearly a third of Brits have an unfavourable overall view of the capital. As part of Centre For London’s London and the UK project, I’ve been travelling the country, speaking to political, business and cultural leaders about how we can bridge this divide between the capital and the rest of the country, to the benefit of both.

There has been a great deal of discussion about how infrastructure spending is distributed around the UK, and particularly in the case of rail. Differing approaches to measuring regional investment, time frames, and the inclusion or exclusion of local government and private money, have come up with different results. For example, the government claimed that there was more per capita spend planned for the North than the South (including London), and others, including IPPR North, argued that London is to receive over two-and-a-half times as much funding per person as the North of England in the years following 2017.

But the dispute over the figures is not as important as the perception of imbalance. The very fact that a regional approach to measure investment has been adopted is evidence enough of a problem. London is seen by many as a distinct and self-interested place, sucking up investment as well as talent and focus, rather than the capital of a united nation. The YouGov poll mentioned above also found that, of the almost one third of UK citizens found to hold unfavourable views about London, 80 per cent believed that the capital ‘gets more than its fair share of public spending’.

Perhaps more surprisingly, even amongst pro-Londoners, a narrow majority agree that this is the case. It has also been argued that London’s current dominance is the product of years of historic over-investment, while “roads and railways outside the capital have been left to rot.” The poor timing of positive announcements by national government regarding Crossrail 2 last year, coinciding with cancellations of several rail projects outside the capital, has only helped to build a divisive narrative.

London is actually a significant net fiscal contributor to the rest of the UK – regularly “paying in” between £10-20 billion a year more in taxes than it receives in public investment – but this is not in itself enough.

The Brexit debate has also made its mark: some parts of the UK that voted most strongly to leave the European Union were among the greatest recipients of EU funding. Economic arguments alone clearly have their limits.

A change in tone is now detectable in the capital. The Mayor of London’s press release for Mind the Gap called for national infrastructure spending to be increased, emphasising that UK investment should not be seen as a “zero-sum game” between regions. Jasmine Whitbread, chief executive of London First, added that, “the problem isn’t that government has over-invested in London, it’s underinvested across the UK.”

Our research is looking at how London is perceived outside of the capital, and seeking new ways for its institutions to collaborate better with the rest of the UK. Bridging the gap between London and the rest of the UK is essential, and must be addressed by boosting the country as a whole, rather than by bringing London down.

This subtle change of messaging by the Mayor, and by London First, is a welcome step in the right direction. In an increasingly polarised and partisan global political climate, we’re looking for further ways to ensure that the UK grows together, and not apart.

Jack Brown is Senior Researcher at Centre for London, who originally published this article. Previous pieces by Jack Brown for On London are here, here, here and here. You can follow him on Twitter.

LONDON AND BREXIT: Will leaving the EU be good or bad for the capital? On London and the illustrious London Society have jointly organised a debate about this crucial question. Anti-Brexit campaigner Andrew Adonis, former Boris Johnson adviser Daniel Moylan and Lib Dem AM Caroline Pidgeon have already been booked to speak. Buy your tickets here.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Brexit, Crossrail 2, Jasmine Whitbread, London First, Sadiq Khan, YouGov