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Lewisham East: Labour wins with ease but its internal struggles continue

Dave Hill

The outcome of yesterday’s Lewisham East by-election is being subjected to as much fevered interpretation as was the process by which Labour selected its candidate Janet Daby. She comfortably held the seat formerly occupied by Heidi Alexander, taking 50.2% of the vote, but there was big swing of 19 points from Labour to the Liberal Democrats compared with last year’s general election result, enabling the latter’s candidate Lucy Salek to secure second place with 24.6% of the vote. By contrast, the Conservatives slumped to third (14.4%).

Most post-result scrutiny has been conducted through the lens of Brexit, with the latest bewildering goings-on in parliament as the backdrop. In her acceptance speech, Daby said her win showed that Lewisham East “will not tolerate an extreme Brexit”, but Lib Dems will surely claim that their explicitly anti-Brexit stance and unequivocal support for a “peoples’ vote” on the final deal cut through the tactical ambiguity of the Labour leadership’s pro-Brexit position in a part of London that voted strongly to Remain in the European Union.

It’s a gloomy result for the Tories as they seek to revive their fortunes in the capital by picking a 2020 mayoral candidate early, and Conservative London MEP Charles Tannock, a staunch Remainer, has urged London Conservatives to “look closely at this result and understand [that a] hard Brexit policy is not a winning policy in the capital”. UKIP, represented by London Assembly member David Kurten, came nowhere, as did the For Britain Movement, whose candidate Anne Marie Waters was “not ratified” as UKIP general election candidate last year following her description of Islam as “evil”.

Daby’s emergence as the candidate from an all female ethnic minority shortlist was seen as a win for “moderates” within Labour locally, notwithstanding her having twice voted for Jeremy Corbyn to be party leader. Unlike the novice councillor backed by Momentum and its associated media to represent the party, Daby had a track record as a council cabinet member and the founder of a community food and support project – in short, she has done rather more in London politics than shout a few Corbynite slogans.

Even so, Labour in Lewisham as a whole continues to be influenced by the priorities of Momentum. As On London has documented in some detail, the borough’s new Labour Mayor Damien Egan was among those local Labour politicians stampeded by a succession of exceptionally flimsy Guardian articles about the New Bermondsey regeneration scheme. This resulted in his withdrawing his support for action to move the project forward in the face of a public relations campaign by Millwall Football Club, which culminated in a claim that the scheme might force it to move elsewhere.

Yesterday, Egan wrote on Twitter that he would be meeting representatives of the football club and New Bermondsey’s prospective developer Renewal with a view to agreeing on “a development the community gets behind” and that ensures Millwall FC stays in the borough. The backstory here is that Egan has got himself into a difficult position. Renewal has planning consent for the scheme, and no amount of public pandering to Millwall and its media allies is going to take that away.

And who does Egan mean by “the community”? Millwall supporters, many of whom live in Kent? Residents of the development area, of which there have never been more than a handful throughout the whole controversy? Or the sort of theoretical “community” habitually constructed in the ideological imaginations of Momentumites and sympathetic journalists? More on this to come.

 

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Charles Tannock, Janet Daby, Lewisham, Liberal Democrats, Millwall FC, New Bermondsey, Renewal, The Guardian

Duncan Bowie: where is the planning in Sadiq Khan’s new London Plan?

Duncan Bowie

Described at Municipal Dreams as “an esteemed figure in housing and planning circles”, Duncan Bowie is a long-standing academic in his field and advisor to London government, including Ken Livingstone when he was mayor. This is his first piece for On London. 

There are two main ways in which Sadiq Khan’s proposed new London Plan is significantly different from those produced under Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson. The first is the assertion that the draft Plan is based on the principles of “good growth”. The second is that it is design led. Both of these concepts are problematic.

Firstly, the difference between “good” and “bad” growth is not established in the document. The principles set out, such as “making the best use of land”, “building strong and inclusive communities” and “creating a healthy city” are, though worthy ambitions, somewhat abstract and fail to acknowledge that plans and planning decisions have differential impacts on different interests – communities, households and individuals may be affected in very different ways.

There is no evidence given to support the assertion that the policies will “work for everyone” and the separate integrated impact appraisal fails to provide a satisfactory assessment. Despite the Mayor’s opening rhetoric, there is in effect no explicit social policy agenda – planning could and should actually have a role in making London a more equal city in which lower income households have better access to good facilities and a better quality of life. There is a perspective that development is of benefit to all Londoners, without thinking too much about what kind of development and for whom. Much recent development in London has contributed to increasing social polarisation and spatial inequities in the city, and the draft Plan does not acknowledge that this trend needs to be reversed.

The focus on design is equally problematic. Definitions of good design are largely subjective, and it is unlikely that any group of design advocates will necessarily agree on what constitutes it. This is why we need standards which can be measured. Moreover, design needs to be set within a planning policy framework. Local authority led plans and policies need to be based on both an evidence base for what development is required and a decision about the most appropriate use for a specific site. Design should be a servant of policy, not its determinant.

The most explicit evidence of the Mayor’s new approach is the abandonment of the policy of sustainable residential development, based on a matrix setting appropriate density ranges for different locations, one which reflect transport connectivity, the existing neighbourhood character and the location of key public services in local centres.

The previous policy sought to ensure that both the built form and mix of new homes were appropriate to meeting the full range of housing needs – so including family homes and homes which were affordable by lower or middle income households. Mayor Khan is proposing dropping this framework and saying instead that in order to maximise housing output, developers can build at as high a density as they like – including high rise residential buildings – subject to convincing planners that their design is “good”. This will lead to developers making higher bids for sites and the resulting higher prices they pay for land will make it more expensive for all developers, public and private alike, to build on.

Rather strangely, and despite all the research available, the draft Plan does not comprehensively set out what London’s requirements will be over the period it is intended to cover. There is no assessment of either existing land use or the space needed for the required development, other than in relation to housing. We have projections of population and household growth, the Strategic Housing Market assessment and the Strategic Housing Land Availability assessment, but there is no quantifying of how many more schools or doctors’ surgeries are needed, nor any calculation of the additional land needed for employment activity or for transport provision or schools or health facilities.

There is also no consideration of alternative development options in terms of built form or spatial distribution. Some of the policies appear to be ideologically driven, such as the presumption that all required development must be undertaken within the existing administrative boundary and that absolute protection be given to the Green Belt. We are presented with a densification strategy on the basis that There is No Alternative.

The Mayor’s team respond that the new Plan has to be realistic in recognising political obstacles and funding constraints; that, given the limitations of mayoral powers and public sector resources, it is not possible to set targets based on an assessment of London’s actual development requirements, due to the Mayor and the boroughs being largely dependent on the private sector (and private investment) to  deliver. Most development management (what used to be called development control) is actually reactive – a developer proposes a specific development on a site and the planning authority seeks to negotiate a scheme which either complies with policy requirements or, if it does not, provides a compensatory payment through planning obligations.

So, in striving to be realistic, the Plan understates requirements and sets low targets – so the overall affordable housing target is 50% (and only 35% on private sector sites) when it should be at least 65%, and the social rent target within that is only 15% (with an option for boroughs to add in 20% more if they want to) when it should be close to 50%. The notion that plans should be based on an assessment of the needs of the current and projected population, rather that what is most viable (ie profitable) for developers and investors, seems to be history. While Mayor Khan has to work within the current national planning framework, so far as such a framework actually exists, he could do much more to challenge current preconceptions and constraints.

The draft new London Plan is inadequate as a response to the challenges London and Londoners face. In the terminology used by planning inspectors, it is “unsound”. The Mayor’s team needs to have a serious rethink.

Read more by and about Duncan Bowie here, here and here. His work on housing policy is largely gathered here and on planning thinking here.

Categories: Comment
Tags: affordable housing, Boris Johnson, Green Belt, housing, Ken Livingstone, planning, Sadiq Khan, social housing, The London Plan

Haringey: Labour branch rebukes Sadiq Khan over NHS devolution deal

Dave Hill

Health professionals in the capital and politicians from across the party spectrum have long argued that the NHS would serve the city’s people better if more control of it was devolved to London level. Sadiq Khan subscribes to this view. Last November, he signed up to a devolution deal with the government, arguing that, “It is vital that the capital has the powers to plan and coordinate health services that meet the needs of local communities and ensure Londoners have proper access to them”.

This move by the Mayor has displeased some Labour members in Haringey, where Momentum activists and assorted non-Labour allies arranged the creation of what one activist has termed the nation’s first “Corbyn Council” by driving out a string of sitting councillors they disapproved of. A motion was proposed at two recent ward branch meetings, which stated that it “deplores” the memorandum of understanding setting out the devolution plan, considers that the Mayor “may have been wrongly informed and advised” and “therefore calls upon Sadiq Khan to reconsider his position as signatory to the document”.

Only one branch, Stroud Green, passed the motion, albeit overwhelmingly, and although this means it will now be sent up to the Hornsey and Wood Green constituency party for consideration, perhaps too much should not be made of it. Furthermore, the deal is an aspect of the government’s wider NHS reorganisation programme which health think tank the King’s Fund concluded last year had become increasingly influenced by financial considerations.

That said, Khan’s fellow signatories included London Councils and all 32 London clinical commissioning groups. As well as containing plans to bring health and social care services closer together, the deal encourages the NHS to sell its unused land and buildings in the capital, potentially freeing it up for housing. Whatever views are held among the signatories about the NHS reforms as a whole, the devolution proposals were clearly thought worth embracing in the interests of improving Londoners’ health and getting new home built.

Such possible benefits do not figure in the motion passed by the membership of Stroud Green branch, which disparages devolution as “fragmentation”, derides the disposal of unused NHS buildings for possible better use as a “sell-off”, complains that the deal “accommodates private providers” and asserts that it is “in direct contravention of Labour party policy”. Two key themes of Corbynite orthodoxy there: one, preserving the power and property of the central state is paramount; two, going against the leader’s wishes is unacceptable. The interests of patients and those requiring better social care in London are, perhaps, less of a priority.

The motion also indicates, in its small way, why Khan’s inner circle is, by all accounts, continuing to be very watchful of the political mood of Labour members in London as the Mayor’s reselection procedure approaches. No Momentum-backed challenger has yet emerged, but the Stroud Green motion shows why a measure of anxiety about that possibility might be justified.

 

 

 

Categories: News
Tags: Devolution, Haringey, Hornsey, housing, King's Fund, Labour, London Councils, NHS, Sadiq Khan, Stroud Green, Wood Green

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 45: the Thames watermen’s seat of power

Victor Keegan

This tiny bit of masonry on the wall of the Real Greek restaurant on Bankside near the Globe Theatre is all that remains to remind us of what was once London’s biggest workforce and one of the most successful trade unions ever seen on the planet. All that is left is part of one of the seats where the watermen used to rest in Shakespeare’s time – though it would have been nearer the river then.

The watermen earned their bread by ferrying people across the Thames in their wherries – small, passenger boats – to visit the theatres or engage in some nefarious pursuit. It was the only way of crossing the river apart from the narrow, congested and expensive London Bridge or the ferry at Lambeth, which was for horses.

There are reckoned to have been about 2,500 ferrymen operating along the Thames for hundreds of years. Their longevity was helped by the City of London, which had a monopoly on the revenues from London Bridge and was therefore happy with the status quo. This combined with the consequent massive industrial power of the waterman to prevent the construction of any new bridge across the Thames until 1750, when Westminster Bridge was built. 

Watermen were tough, rough-hewn men, often veterans of overseas campaigns, who could be press-ganged into the navy at any moment and vied with each other when jostling for business at the foot of one of the numerous landing points on the river.

The most celebrated of watermen was the people’s poet John Taylor, who fought for the democratisation of the watermen’s guild and is one of the first people to have written of Shakespeare’s death, in a 1620 called The Praise of Hemp-seed where he noted: “Spenser, and Shakespeare did in art excel”. 

Among Taylor’s other achievements was travelling in a paper boat from Central London to Queenborough in the Thames estuary and penning one of the earliest palindromes: “Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel”. 

In another book, Taylor backed the watermen’s disputes with the theatre companies when from 1612 they moved their premises from the south bank to the north, thereby depriving the ferries of traffic. He harangued the coachmen who were taking business from the wherries too.

The prevention of bridge building on the Thames was undoubtedly a restraint of trade, which ought to have been removed. It stands as a unique example of capital – the City of London – joining forces with labour – the wherrymen – to preserve a lucrative monopoly.

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

Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Bankside, City of London Corporation, Globe Theatre, John Taylor, Lambeth, London Bridge, River Thames, Westminster Bridge, William Shakespeare

Daniel Moylan: how Conservatives can challenge Labour’s claim on London and its values

Daniel Moylan

Karen Buck, Labour MP for Westminster North and my distinguished On London fellow-contributor, spoke up for Sadiq Khan’s first two years as Mayor of London recently. Writing in City A.M, she did her best with the thin gruel of endless selfies and constant blame-shifting that have characterised the first half of his term. But she also made a striking claim:

Londoners are also having to contend with the most anti-London government in memory. The Tories just don’t understand our city or our values and only offer more of the same austerity and cuts.

“The Tories just don’t understand our city or our values.” This is more than taking Londoners’ support for granted. It appears to stake out a claim to Labour’s ownership of Londoners. Given the iron grip that identity politics now exerts, will it be long before those Londoners who don’t share Labour “values” are characterised by the Left as aliens, non-Londoners, outcasts? Just as the Left now believes that it is impossible to be Conservative and gay, will it become for them a contradiction in terms to be a Tory Londoner?

The challenge issued to Conservatives was put more analytically by Sebastian Payne in the Financial Times:

The next generation of Tories have five significant challenges to overcome if they are to have a hope of beating Labour: secure the future of the National Health Service; define a new immigration policy; stimulate more economic growth; fix the housing market; and restore some trust in capitalism.

He was speaking of the country as a whole, but the challenges apply if anything more acutely to London. Payne overstates his case. One clear lesson of the London borough council elections was that London voters do worry about the quality of public services and their costs and have serious reservations about handing control of their part of London to Labour if they know they are getting good value and efficiency from the incumbents. And national polling numbers, for what they are worth this far from an election, contain much encouragement for the Tories.

But let’s take Payne’s challenges in turn and consider what the Conservatives might offer that could speak to Londoners. What follows shouldn’t be taken as a draft manifesto for the next Mayor of London: that person will not run the NHS, the economy or immigration policy and the Mayor’s powers over the housing market are limited to what can be achieved through planning law and the disbursement of government-provided subsidies. But here are five ideas in response to Payne that might offer a starting-point for a new Conservative approach to London.

The London Health Service

For London, there is an obvious new approach to the NHS. Under Boris Johnson, there was talk of transferring the NHS in London to the remit of the Mayor, and that idea should now be back on the table, with a long term fixed per capita funding formula and a new name – the London Health Service. Devolution to the capital should find support from all parties, as a logical next step in a broader process initiated by Labour and continued by the Coalition and Conservative governments.

A limited devolution of health services to Greater Manchester was pushed through by George Osborne. But there should be a proviso when it comes to London: none of the civil servants who currently run the NHS should be transferred to the new service. The Mayor needs new approaches, new answers, new flexibilities, and these will not come from the people who have made our hospitals and GP services the most bureaucratically micro-managed in the world. And there is a further proviso: the Mayor must not accept financial responsibility for the inherited deficits of the London health trusts. If they cannot bear their own financial burden, then their creditors must carry the loss.

Londoners need the chance to shape and own their health services. We are now mere passive objects of its attentions, a status wholly unattenuated by the occasional bogus “consultation” exercise. Under an elected Mayor, our health services could be adapted to our needs and our priorities. That would be a huge prize.

Immigration

Thanks to Brexit, immigration policy will be entirely under the control of our elected parliament. It will be a matter of normal politics again, not imposed by a supra-national law. So while Sebastian Payne is right to say that the Conservatives need to define an immigration policy, so too does Labour. This will perplex them even more than it might the Tories, with a London-based Labour leadership that seems to believe in open doors and a national electorate that wants controls. What Conservatives can and must offer is the removal of the current injustice of an ethnically discriminatory immigration policy that overwhelmingly favours white Europeans and the restoration of fairness and non-discrimination to our system. Londoners, with their natural sense of fairness, will appreciate this, those of non-European heritage particularly so, since they have been the Londoners most unfairly treated by “freedom of movement”.

But there is a larger question: not merely what future immigration policy should be, but what Conservatives can say and do to appeal to immigrant voters who are already here, and to their children, who often inherit an assumption that Labour are “for” immigrants and Conservatives “against”. The answer to that must fit into the wider social narrative that Conservatives need to develop as the Government completes the delivery of Brexit. But it will not be achieved by a facile adoption of an identity politics approach centred on making candidate selection more diverse and imagining that voters will be happy with that.

Stimulate more economic growth

The word “more” is important there, since Payne was fair-minded enough to concede that the economy is and has been growing: the lowest unemployment rate on record is evidence that the economy is, in broad terms, working for most people. But the word “stimulate” is more worrying, since it implies that economic growth is the result of government action. Nothing could be further from the truth. All governments can do is set the parameters in which economic actors can flourish. And on that we have been following a cross-party consensus that has not been delivering as well as it should.

What the economy needs in order to thrive is normal interest rates, low taxes and a predictable legal and policy environment. What we have at the moment is artificially low interest rates (that have driven up the prices of assets, including housing), a tax and benefit system that is riddled with disincentives to work (for the low-paid and middle-earners alike), damaging meddling with the pensions regime that deters savings, and constant new policy gimmicks that increase the burdens on employers and so enhance the attraction of the gig approach to recruiting staff.

It’s not difficult to fix these things, but it will require something of a revolution in Conservative thinking. George Osborne effectively adopted New Labour economic policies in a panic reaction to the 2008 banking crisis and there has been little evidence of change since. Londoners, with their canny vitality, will respond positively to an environment in which there are more rewards for working and saving and more encouragement for businesses to innovate and challenge each other.

Fix the housing market

 This needs an essay in itself. But in brief:

  1. The market in “second-hand” housing works well: the biggest threat to it is the absurdly high level of stamp duty that is now biting on an ever wider swathe of London, deterring sales and preventing people from up-sizing and down-sizing as family needs require. That has to go.
  2. There is no real “market” in new housing (which is in any case a tiny sliver of homes compared to the existing housing stock) since it is already “fixed”, but in the wrong way – fixed by regulation and planning restrictions that reward large house-builders, freeze out small ones and ensure that new supply remains restricted. There needs to be a wholesale change to the system that will let the market actually operate for the first time in decades. Then Londoners will start to get the homes they want and need.
  3. That there is a fluid and flexible private rented sector is a good thing. Who wants to go back to the 1970s, when new private rentals in London had been reduced to almost nothing by rent controls and unbreakable tenancies, and the only option for the newly arrived Londoner was to be a lodger in somebody else’s home? But the current state of affairs needs improvement. Agents should be legally prohibited from taking fees from both landlord and tenant and obliged to act for one side only. And there should be a legal presumption of a nil-fee continuation of all shorthold tenancies provided a rent has been agreed and both sides want to continue the arrangement. Measures such as this would offer at least some alleviation to Londoners reliant on the private rented sector.
  4. Subsidised housing. Is there enough of it? Actually there is too much. Something like a quarter of Inner London housing is in the council or social sector. Don’t we need this for the low-paid? Maybe we do, but we don’t rent it to the low-paid. The great bulk of council housing is occupied on lifetime inheritable tenancies irrespective of the financial circumstances of the occupants. Don’t we need it for the homeless? Again, maybe we do, but very few homeless people get into it, since only a fraction of it becomes “void” every year – very few people move out voluntarily. And, of course, councils and social housing providers never have enough money to maintain it properly and are generally hopelessly inefficient at doing so anyway. Perhaps Right to Buy was insufficiently radical and we should have a policy of giving Council housing away to its occupants, with a share of the local authorities’ historic housing debt allocated to each unit and secured by an amortising mortgage. We would then see the stock condition improve dramatically as the new owners were allowed to contribute their own labour to its improvement and upkeep. There could be a very large group of Londoners who would support a housing policy based on this approach.

Capitalism

The problem with rebuilding trust in capitalism is that we don’t really practise it very much any more. The essence of successful, wealth-enhancing capitalism is competition. But capitalists don’t like that, not a bit of it. What they want to achieve, even more than the maximisation of profit, is the reduction of risk. And the best way to do that is to collaborate with the state in increasing regulation. Regulation (the more detailed, the better) may be a burden on big firms but it is an absolute killer for the small businesses they fear as competitors – the disruptors and the innovators.

The EU, with its instinct for minutely detailed regulations, all written in close co-operation with large producers, is a paradise for these anti-capitalist capitalists and it is no wonder that their advocates in the Confederation of British Industry are squealing at the prospect of leaving. But we can’t blame it all on the EU: successive British governments have adopted an even more zealous approach. That now needs to stop and Conservatives must take an approach to the real economy that recognises that businesses need to be forced to compete against their will and that it isn’t merely visible monopolies that prevent that.

Does this add up to a programme that would answer Sebastian Payne’s challenges in a way that would appeal to Londoners? One that would allow them to break free from the “values” (the most visible of which are currently vicious in-fighting and anti-semitism) that Karen Buck claims they share with Labour? That would appeal to their willingness to look at the world afresh and see the failings of the current system in a new light? That would allow the Conservatives to approach the capital with a bold programme of reform that would win Londoners’ confidence? I think so.

Copyright © 2018 Daniel Moylan. Daniel was a senior advisor to the Boris Johnson mayoralties, primarily on transport issues. His previous pieces for On London are here, here, here and here.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Boris Johnson, Brexit, Conservatives, Devolution, Financial Times, Karen Buck, Labour, NHS, Sebastian Payne

Oxford Street pedestrianisation debacle shows that Nimbys have more power than the Mayor

Dave Hill

Westminster Council’s decision to dump plans for the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street following two years of painstaking consensus-building designed to finally rescue the capital’s premier shopping street from polluted, congested decline has exposed with depressing clarity how the power of parochial and local political interests can make that of the capital’s elected leader, backed by one of the largest personal mandates in the world, look very small.

Until the recent borough elections drew near, a goal that has eluded Sadiq Khan’s two predecessors as London Mayor appeared to at last be within reach. This has never been just a matter of banning motor vehicles and putting a few plant pots down. Far from it. The potential knock-on traffic effects are daunting, and such a massive alteration to the spinal avenue of the West End requires the reconciliation of an array of competing interests, the weighing of a range of sometimes conflicting priorities and an alignment of political wills resilient enough to overcome remaining objections.

In the end, it is the latter that has failed. The pre-election departure of Robert Davis as Westminster’s deputy leader following hostile media focus on his copious acceptance of property trade hospitality had the unfortunate effect of depriving the pedestrianisation project of one of its more influential advocates. Wider tensions over the speed and effects of the development of the West End became a big campaign theme. Westminster made known before election day that they were going to halt the scheme, though that didn’t prevent Labour winning a seat in the barely marginal West End ward for the first time and coming close to winning more.

The party locally, seeking to tap in to a more general opposition among residents to the prospect of changes they think will damage local character and lessen quality of life, had declared itself opposed to the Labour Mayor’s plans. The four seats they took from the Tories on 3 May, were nothing like enough for a majority, but they gained enough ground in enough wards to make the ruling powers fret about the future. “In the recent council elections, local people essentially rejected pedestrianisation through the ballot box,” says Westminster’s still relatively new leader Nickie Aitken. Neighbourhood pressure groups have been implacable, conservative and Conservative, opponents of pedestrianisation for decades. Once again, this time with encouragement from Labour, they have got their way.

Aitken nonetheless insists that “doing nothing is not an option”, but what worthwhile alternative might she now propose? The scheme she has scuppered, pieced together by Transport for London, business groups, the now former deputy mayor for transport Val Shawcross and Westminster itself, had much to recommend it, combining the huge potential benefits of humanising the street with a more general rationalisation of bus services to and through the area. The vision was of a slow-paced, accommodating linear space, liberated from motor vehicles and rightly free of cycle tracks too.

With the Crossrail Elizabeth Line due to open at the end of this year, many more people are soon to be disgorged onto Oxford Street’s often impossibly overcrowded pavements. This huge impending shift in the ecology of the West End, an area that accounts for three per cent of the United Kingdom’s economic output, had heavily underlined the need for the fundamental change to Oxford Street that is so obviously required. Now, it’s back to the drawing board.

What can the Mayor do? Writing in the Guardian, experienced transport journalist  and erstwhile Labour mayoral hopeful Christian Wolmar berates Khan for not demonstrating enough commitment to pushing ahead with the scheme. He makes an unfavourable comparison with Boris Johnson’s imposition of “cycle  superhighways”. Leaving aside the heretic question of whether Johnson’s bicycle  infrastructure has actually achieved its aims, Wolmar’s critique does not mention that Oxford Street is not part of TfL’s road network and therefore not Khan’s to control – it’s Westminster’s road, so any changes to its design are Westminster’s alone to sanction.

Westminster Tories have made it clear that no scheme will be acceptable to them unless it is acceptable to those Westminster residents to whose wishes they defer. Labour’s stance during the election looked identical. Meanwhile, the Labour Mayor of this city, theoretically elected to take big, strategic decisions about London’s future, can do little but ask Westminster’s Tories if they would mind letting him play some periforal part in their next round of neighbourhood deliberations. Local opinion about big planning decisions matters, but what the capital is stuck with now regarding Oxford Street looks very much like a case of government by nervous Conservatives and Nimbys. Can that really be what is best for London?

Categories: Comment
Tags: Boris Johnson, Crossrail, cycling, Nickie Aitken, Oxford Street, Sadiq Khan, Transport for London, Val Shawcross, Westminster

Huge mismatch between demand for social housing and availability in London, Shelter reports

Dave Hill

London boroughs as diverse as Newham, Merton and Kingston are at the top of the national list of local authorities with the largest gaps between the numbers of households on their social housing waiting lists and the number of such homes that become available, according to figures compiled by Shelter.

Analysis by the housing charity found that Newham had by far the largest mismatch between demand and availability in England, with a 2017 waiting list figure of 25,729 households compared with 588 social rent lettings that became available during the 2016/17 financial year, a ratio of 44 households for every dwelling.

In second placed Merton the ratio was 35 and in Kingston it was 32, though the numbers for these two boroughs were much smaller than in Newham: Merton had 9,581 households on its waiting list for 270 homes that became available, while in Kingston the figures were 9,732 and 300.

Kingston is placed fourth in the national and London league table, just below the City of London Corporation, where the ratio was 33, but the numbers relatively very small, with 853 households on its list and just 26 lettings available in a local authority with a historically small population. Redbridge completes London’s domination of the English top five, with 26 waiting list households per available home (8,335 households, 318 homes).

One other London borough, Islington, also features in Shelter’s national top ten, coming in ninth below Brighton & Hove, Fylde and Medway local authorities. Shelter says the north London borough had 18,033 households on its list during 2017, with 884 social rent lettings becoming available, making a ration of 20. The four boroughs with the next highest ratios for the period concerned were Greenwich, Lambeth, with 20,438 on its waiting list, Ealing and Tower Hamlets, with 18,616.

Not all boroughs operate waiting lists in the same way, with some restricting eligibility for inclusion on it, and boroughs differ in their capacity to deliver social housing and the priority they give to building it. Even so, Shelter’s figures indicate how large and widespread is the mismatch between demand for such homes and their supply as the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire approaches, with many of the survivors of the blaze yet to be rehoused by Kensington & Chelsea.

London as a whole has had a comparatively high rate of replacement of council homes lost through Right to Buy compared with the rest of England, but it was still less than 50% in 2016/17. A steady loss of council housing has continued in the capital as part of a net loss of social housing overall between 2016 and 2017, with the construction of new homes by housing associations during that year unable to prevent a net loss of 1,710 social rented homes of all types.

Categories: News
Tags: City of London Corporation, council housing, Ealing, Greenwich, Grenfell Tower, housing, Islington, Kingston, Lambeth, Merton, Newham, Redbridge, social housing, Tower Hamlets

Philip Glanville on Hackney: what does it take to improve a place?

Philip Glanville

Philip Glanville has been Hackney’s directly elected Labour Mayor since September 2016 and before that was a Labour councillor in the borough for ten years, the last three of them as cabinet member for housing. 

The London Borough of Hackney is, in many ways, the poster child for place improvement. There are few places in the UK that have undergone such wholesale change in such a short period of time. In about a decade and a half, Hackney has gone from being one of the least to the most desirable places to live in the UK. There’s no doubt the place has changed, and most people would agree that it has changed for the better, but this of course brings with it new challenges about how we respond to and shape change to keep benefiting everyone.

I’m the last person to see the quality of a place through the prism of property adverts or an estate agent’s window, and deeply dislike the clumsy rebranding of areas of our capital that often comes with regeneration. However, any London estate agent will tell you that the two things that drive “desirability” in the capital are good schools and public transport infrastructure. Those two things were in very short supply in Hackney at the dawn of the new millennium, until the transformation of education and the birth of the London Overground changed everything. But for politicians and decision makers improving a place shouldn’t be about making it more desirable; it should be about transforming the quality of life and the life chances of the people who live there. That has been the driving force behind improving Hackney, both under my predecessor Jules Pipe and since my own election in 2016.

In the early days, improving Hackney was all about getting the basics right; street cleaning, waste collection, benefits processing, council tax collection, financial management – the fundamentals of municipal duty that had been all but abandoned in the late 1990s. Hackney back then was literally and metaphorically struggling to keep the lights on. Correcting those mistakes and taking our services, and in turn Hackney the “place” from the worst in London to amongst the best, wasn’t easy and required painstaking political and organisational change, as well as real investment. It is on that bedrock of financial stability and excellent local services that Hackney’s success as a place has been built. After that it was about ambition, about never being satisfied with being “just OK”, never making excuses for poor services, about taking full advantage of every opportunity that came our way, about being ambitious for Hackney and its communities.

There has also been an element of good luck. Hackney was in the right place at the right time. We had a Labour government willing to support the council’s leadership in turning the ship around, and to quite substantially put its money where its mouth was. We had a decade, under that government, of unprecedented investment in public services and infrastructure. We had some freedom to spend that money creatively, finding new ways to tackle ingrained inequalities such as teen pregnancy and infant mortality. We had the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on the horizon as a catalyst for change, investment and civic pride. And Hackney has always been lucky in that underneath the grime, the crime, and the service dysfunction, lay the bare bones of a fantastic place: street after street of high quality Victorian housing stock close to central London, high volumes of good social housing, acres of parks and green space, miles of waterways, plenty of state schools, a large hospital in the heart of the borough, quiet residential roads and vibrant town centres.

But there was a lot more to it than luck. Turning Hackney round was a labour of love for many people in the council, in our partner agencies and organisations, and most of all in our communities. So much needed to change: the council, its services, its relationships and its reputation. And the reputation of Hackney itself needed to change to attract jobs, investment, and visitors, to grow the local economy and create opportunity for local people. Perhaps the best thing we had to work with was our residents, people that believed in Hackney, even when many others had given up. There was a sense that Hackney and its numerous communities and neighbourhoods was a real place, not just invented by the stroke of a Whitehall pen in the 1960s or by a Town Hall bureaucrat; a Hackney of migrants, radical pioneers, campaigners, entrepreneurs, active citizens, and organisers; most of all a diverse and tolerant place where change was welcomed, shaped and embraced.

A key element of success was in tapping into that underlying, often hidden self belief, curating it, rebuilding and sustaining a cohesive, shared, pride of place. The I Love Hackney campaign, now in its twelfth year, is still a vital tool in maintaining that shared notion of place, and more and more we are using it to celebrate the diverse and inclusive nature of our communities. It wouldn’t still be relevant now and embraced by residents and visitors alike if it had been a cynical act of rebranding disconnected from what people really felt. Most recently it has been reworked to highlight the borough’s new digital economy, to celebrate Pride and the contribution of the LGBTQI+ community and to show solidarity with the 40,000 Hackney residents who are EU nationals in the wake of the Brexit vote.

Since I was elected Mayor in 2016 and re-elected this year, it has also been about reasserting and holding true to our own values, which many of our residents share: a commitment to council owned social housing, keeping services in-house where possible, investing in public infrastructure, a role for the council in education, training and skills, a commitment to the idea of a borough that belongs to all who live here. As Mayor it was about being proud to say we are a campaigning council, which acts when these values are seen to be under attack, standing up not just for services, but also a collective sense of Hackney. All of that has built a shared sense of place that is, I believe, amongst the strongest in the country. I Love Hackney was born out of the Council’s response to a Channel 4 property programme calling Hackney ‘The Worst Place to Live in the UK”. It’s hard to believe that was little more than a decade ago when you look at how far we’ve come since then. Back then, wearing the badge was often met with quizzical looks or even derision, now they are collectors items and I often have to take off my own to give to people when I am out and about in Hackney and beyond.

However much Hackney has changed though, it is still home to some of the UK’s most deprived communities and the challenges facing us now, whilst different, are as acute as they were 15 years ago. The streets are clean, the schools are outstanding, estates and council homes renewed, and crime is significantly lower than it was in the days of “Murder Mile“. But after eight years of austerity, with its devastating impact on individuals as well as services, it can feel as though we are running to stand still.

How can we keep delivering first class public services when money is draining away from councils and demand for them is rising rapidly? How can we maintain our work in school improvement with a government hell-bent on fragmenting the education system? How can we keep our streets and estates safe when police numbers have been decimated? How can we keep our communities strong and cohesive, and make sure that people aren’t excluded from the benefits of change? How can we make an impact on the huge, complex areas of policy that affect our residents, such as air quality, violent gang crime and childhood obesity? And how can we make sure that as Hackney changes it remains true to the values on which our communities were built? These are the challenges we are facing every day, for which we are having to find ever more creative solutions.

The truth remains that for many people in Hackney, life has got harder as the borough has improved around them. House prices have risen more here than anywhere else in the UK. Rents have increased by 20% in five years. As it has improved, Hackney has also become closed to many who in the past would have made it their home. Living here has become a struggle for others as the cost of living in the borough has increased, and many residents are concerned that their children will be forced to move away. Some residents feel displaced or excluded by the new demographic, and by the changing face of our high streets. That emotional impact of change should not be underestimated. It’s why we have to work doubly hard to say whose side we are on and what we believe in. It’s why I’m so passionate about retaining the economic, ethnic and social diversity of the borough and especially our markets and town centres like Dalston, which can often feel at risk from gentrification.

Some residents of Hackney, even those who may have gained financially from rocketing house prices, feel ambivalent about the notion of improvement. They are benefitting from many aspects of the change, but feel that something fundamental about the place and its values may be under threat – that “gentrification” may have edged out “regeneration”. Hackney is still changing rapidly. Some of that change is driven by the local authority, and some is beyond our control. Local people don’t make that distinction. It is easy for communities and individuals to feel quickly overwhelmed and threatened by the pace of change, and it is the responsibility of local government and elected politicians to make sure they are engaged, empowered and informed. If communities feel left behind by change, if they cannot access the benefit it brings, then any improvement narrative is a hollow one.

Change at a local level must be locally driven. Time and again, national governments have tried to create blueprint solutions to local issues, and failed. Each place faces a unique set of challenges, and only strong local government that is fully engaged with the people it serves can properly meet those challenges. Improving a place takes leadership, it takes investment and it takes time. It takes an in-depth understanding of the place, a shared commitment across agencies, business, and the third and voluntary sector (like organisations such as Renaisi which itself grew out of the Council), and for local people to be part of the change. Only with strong local government can we ensure that regeneration delivers a social dividend for communities, not just a financial dividend for developers. Whilst we remain the most centralised country in the developed world, and whilst local government is continually marginalised, under-resourced and over-controlled by Whitehall, genuine, positive, place change will still happen in some places, but there will be a far greater risk of people and communities being left behind in others.

Mayors, councillors, officers and organisations come and go. Although in Hackney people tend to stick around longer than in some other places, we are all but temporary custodians of the places we serve. If there is one lesson to be learned from Hackney’s story it is that, in that time, each of us can make a real difference. There is something about Hackney, both as a physical place and as a construct of values, that inspires passion, loyalty, commitment and creativity in those who live and work here. It is that which is the real driver of positive change in a place, and it is that which gives me confidence that Hackney’s future is bright.

This article was originally published by Renaisi, a Hackney born and based social enterprise that helps communities benefit from neighbourhood change. Thanks to them and to Philip Glanville for their permission to re-publish it here. Follow Renaisi on Twitter here and Phil here.

Categories: Comment
Tags: 2012 Olympics, Brexit, Hackney, Pride, regeneration