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Richard Brown: Two cheers for Michael Gove’s housing speech

His bellicose threats to override the Mayor's powers did not appeal, but his recognition that helping London with housing will help the UK is welcome
Richard Brown

In the sense that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, Michael Gove’s big housing speech had some grains of good news for London and Sadiq Khan.

Sure, there was a slightly formulaic spot of Khan-bashing – the allegation that “the Mayor’s failure on housing, like his failure on crime and his failure on transport, undermines the vitality and attractiveness of our capital.” We are coming up to an election and presenting Khan’s mayoralty as a cautionary example of Labour’s inability to deliver was clearly just too tempting, especially in the wake of the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election.

But alternately attacking and ignoring London and its Mayor have been a consistent government theme in recent years. Gove’s predecessor Robert Jenrick took more than a year to agree Khan’s 2020 London Plan, describing his housing delivery as “deeply disappointing”, demanding he water down protections for the Green Belt, open spaces and industrial sites, and allow lower densities and more car parking in suburban locations. And two years ago, in articulating his “levelling up” agenda, London’s previous Mayor, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, spoke of the capital only as the engine for an overheated housing market and as a drain on talent in the rest of the country.

So, while Gove may have been stating the obvious when he said making the most of the capital’s potential is “critical to the nation’s success”, the statement was nonetheless welcome. What’s more, the Secretary of State committed to working with the Mayor to “unlock all the potential of London’s urban centre, while preserving the precious low-rise and richly green character of its suburbs such as Barnet and Bromley”.

There’s quite a lot going on there, both lofty principles and low politics. At one level, Gove’s was a classic urban renaissance prescription: focusing new development in highly accessible central locations, where infrastructure such as school places is already present. But there was also electoral calculation. Ever since Johnson ran for Mayor in 2008, pledging to save the suburbs from the encroachment of high-rise apartment buildings, protecting the suburbs – and London’s safest Conservative seats – from new development has been at the heart of Conservative policy.

To unlock potential, Gove proclaimed the launch of “Docklands 2.0”, invoking Michael Heseltine, the patron saint of urban renaissance (who lost the Conservative whip in 2017 as a result of his opposition to Brexit). This “mission of national importance” would see 65,000 homes built in east London’s riverside, from Beckton and Silvertown to Charlton and Thamesmead.

Such plans have a rich heritage as part of the original Heseltine vision for the East Thames Corridor, as the heart of London Thames Gateway, and as the focus for the City East scheme developed by my former colleagues in Mayor Ken Livingstone’s architecture and urbanism unit.

Current London Plan targets already suggest that 65,000 homes are achievable in these “opportunity areas”, but realising that potential has been slow. Many sites lack the infrastructure needed to develop at scale, or need investment in remediation to make them suitable for housing. In that respect, Gove’s commitment to look at the transport investments needed, and to invest government money where it can make a difference, will be welcomed.

There is a catch, though. Gove offered the carrot of working with Khan, but also issued an explicit threat in bellicose terms: “I reserve the right to step in to reshape the London Plan if necessary and consider every tool in our armoury – including development corporations.” It doesn’t sound as if these would be mayoral development corporations, such as those set up by Johnson to oversee the Olympic Park and Old Oak projects, but 1980s-style impositions from Whitehall.

Gove’s political jabs at the Mayor have been reciprocated. Tom Copley, Deputy Mayor for Housing, has defended Khan’s record and described the government’s commitments as “thin gruel”, with funding decisions for vital infrastructure lost in the long grass of Treasury tactics. London Councils housing lead Darren Rodwell, also leader of east London borough Barking & Dagenham, has called for more funding for affordable housing and a permanent relaxation of rules on using Right-to-Buy receipts.

But behind the point-scoring and alongside genuine arguments about resource allocation, the Secretary of State’s speech does seem to mark a dawning awareness that ignoring the UK’s capital when seeking to grow the nation’s economy is a dead end. If Gove can back his vision for Docklands 2.0 with funds and facilitation, and can resist the temptation to take over and micro-manage, he may find himself in an awkward alliance with Khan, even as general and mayoral elections approach.

Twitter: Richard Brown and On London. Photograph from Newham Council. If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to editor and publisher Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: housing, Michael Gove, Sadiq Khan, Tom Copley

Josiah Mortimer: East Sheen’s Valentina restaurant – home of Italian hospitality

Warm, generous and unpretentious, this is the kind of independent London eatery that deserves to survive our testing economic times
Josiah Mortimer

Get off the packed commuter train at Mortlake and you land in a quiet enclave of London suburbia: East Sheen. Hopefully, unlike me, you will go on a cool, non-strike day when other people’s pits aren’t a Rizla paper distance from your gaze.

Gone are the medium rises, in are terraces and a deluge of Union Jacks. The coronation might be over, but the leafy west London satellite has proudly declined the memo. Sheen, as it’s known, is largely white and well-educated, with a healthy smattering of delis.

It hints that in income terms it isn’t a million miles on the wealth charts away from its domineering neighbour, Richmond. There are, though, far fewer coach houses, the old outbuildings for horses that remain in bougier parts of Richmond-upon-Thames.

Hidden London provides the goods for the area’s historical high-points: East Sheen was home to the Whig Prime Minister Earl Grey, the birthplace of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, and the last dwelling place of 1970s rock star Marc Bolan – his, like others here, a large Victorian house with a walled garden. There’s one detached home for every two flats in Sheen.

I’m not here for the National Trust-owned Common, the high street shops or the many, many churches, but for the Valentina restaurant, a mid-priced, independent eatery founded by Bruno Zuccola in 1991.

It has weathered a lot of storms in that time. And judging by the enormous number of positive Google reviews, it has deserved to. I’m heartened that in London, if you look hard enough, you can still get a proper margarita pizza for just under a tenner. This isn’t “refined” or any of the other adjectives reviewers love to use for overpriced. The restaurant offers an experience that’s both heartening and unpretentious.

The first thing that catches the attention is the staff’s hospitality – hopefully not just put on for your On London visitor. It’s a touch of Italian warmth that feels genuine. The open patio, as in pretty much all of London, opens onto a road, but it’s not rammed with traffic. You’re not quite in the side streets of Verona, but there’s little need for any such self-deception.

As one can hope for a restaurant that’s tied to a decent local deli of the same name, the wine list stands out. The Gavi di Gavi, a fine Italian white for £33.95 is at the upper end of their price range, but it’s spot on, with a delicate but fruity profile. The kindly manager pushed the cocktails, but the sweet French 75 couldn’t compete with the bottle list.

I don’t think the phrase “carb-free” exists in Italy, and that’s fine by me. The starters are an indulgence. Crispy pesto arancini, and a mozzarella and red onion focaccia show up within a few minutes of ordering. The arancini were pitch-perfect, but the focaccia needed a bit of zing – properly caramelised onions and some balsamic flavours.

Screenshot 2023 07 23 at 19.55.35

Where was everyone, though? It was a Thursday night. Either this patch of Richmond is under-populated or lounge-bound, or this restaurant isn’t getting the custom its online reviews suggest.

And it does largely deserve our custom. The mains were ultra generous. A kilo of risotto was perhaps not the wisest order in mid-July, and while it was too diluted in flavour for me, the fritto misto my dining partner ordered was a seafood feast. You will, though, feel rude being unable to finish it in order to leave room for the far superior desserts.

They more than compensated for my slightly sad rice dish. The cannoli were crisp and rounded off the meal, with the tartufo al pistachio (main picture), an ice cream dessert, a sure-fire winner.

The plural of anecdotes is not data, but on a sunny summer evening we exited onto a largely empty street. People are saving their cash not for mid-week, casual dining but for experiences. And that doesn’t bode well for establishments like the family-run Valentina.

What to suggest? Can trying new, enticing deals and playing around with signature dishes come to their rescue? Perhaps they should make the most of the fact that this isn’t some tired chain but a lovingly-run haunt that keeps its cash in the local economy. A bit of non-cheesy Italian music and some local art might shake off the quasi-franchise vibe.

Screenshot 2023 07 23 at 20.14.38

Research published in RestaurantOnline this June showed that central London saw a net decline of 540 licensed premises in the three years between March 2020 and March 2023 – equivalent to one closure every two days. But there are hints that the closures are bottoming out.

Let’s hope so, because places like Valentina have great potential. It’s the generosity, the excellent wine and the staff that make it. It can and should rise above London’s slump and create an experience that people will want to come to East Sheen to enjoy.

Special offer: The Valentina restaurant is offering On London readers a discount on purchases from its online shop. When you get to the checkout, use the code VALENTINA10SUMMER. 

Josiah Mortimer is chief reporter for Byline Times. This is the first of his occasional food and drink reviews for On London on the side. Follow Josiah on Twitter and feel free to get in touch with him too. If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to editor and publisher Dave Hill’s Substack. Thanks.

Categories: Culture
Tags: East Sheen, Mortlake, Richmond upon Thames

Dave Hill: We might have to accept that Starmer won’t be London’s friend

The Labour leader surely knows he can't restore a broken country without strengthening its capital, but his priorities appear to lie elsewhere
Dave Hill

Keir Starmer’s response to Labour falling short of winning the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election was infuriating and depressing. Rather than recognise that his party had taken a large step towards gaining a historically stubbornly Conservative seat despite facing a single-issue scare story candidate who mobilised just enough core support in a low turnout contest to cling on, the Labour leader and his deputy Angela Rayner decided to use this very local disappointment as an opportunity to give London’s double election-winning Labour Mayor a national telling-off.

Their public interpretation of the result as purely a repudiation of Sadiq Khan’s plan – that of a Labour Mayor, not a Labour Party in opposition – to further expand London’s ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) to the whole of Greater London has also raised concerns about what a Labour government would be like, including suspicions that Starmer is backing ever further away from his green policy agenda and Jack Brown’s fear that he is going cold on devolution.

You have to wonder, too, whether Starmer has been tactically shrewd. He has excited political journalists, always thirsty for splits, by creating a public rift with Khan. Today’s headlines are full of it. Surely, this could have been avoided. Would it have been so hard to have said that gaining Uxbridge  was never going to be easy, unusual circumstances applied, the ULEZ policy is the Mayor’s for the whole of Greater London, it will directly affect only a small minority of motorists, and hostility to it will fade – all of which would have been true.

Instead, he has flapped, flip-flopped – what happened to the it’s-a legal-requirement line he took during the campaign? – and hacked off the wrong sorts of people. It’s his job to alienate Corbynites, that bovine barrier to a Labour government. It’s not so clever to pick fights with soft left progressives who’ve twice attracted more than a million votes.

Starmer has been rightly assiduous in avoiding handing his Conservative opponents ammunition to fire at him. And maybe he thought that by rebuking Khan he would reassure the voters he most needs in the seats he most needs to win. But if so, any advantage he might have secured by doing so looks outweighed by the furore he’s inflamed. He has set running a media hare that could keep going until next May, with Conservatives cheering it on.

So much for making a decent advance look like a bad defeat. What does Starmer’s stance post-Uxbridge tell us about his attitude to London as a city? Jack’s devolution point is well made: the MP for Holborn and St Pancras has moved a long way since the days when he talked about “a federal UK” and handing regional authorities more power.

Labour’s report about constitutional change, published in December, recommended “empowering Mayors”, yet recycled a string of tired, missing-the-point northern grievance tropes about London getting more than its fair share. Now, the one-time advocate of Whitehall giving more power to Mayors has turned on the Mayor of the UK capital for his use of the limited powers he has.

London has endured four years of Conservative government micromanagement from on high – an onslaught of spite, stupidity and “levelling up” posturing that has harmed the city whose economy the whole country depends on. We now have to contemplate the possibility that a Prime Minister Starmer would be just as bad.

Again, in most respects, the Labour leader’s overall caution and insistence on message discipline make sense. To adapt two old adages, why interrupt your enemy when it is destroying itself, and why risk dropping a Ming vase as you nurse it across a slippery floor?

But as well as abandoning the first one, Starmer’s centre stage panic over Uxbridge hints at a broader anxiety about being linked by the Tories and in the public mind with a London of the populist imagination they and he know some voters dislike: that fantasy London simultaneously composed of “metropolitan elite” professionals out of touch with normal life and rampantly “lawless” un-Britishness.

Rishi Sunak’s “north London lawyer” jibes may be preposterous coming from a Kensington mansion-dwelling multi-millionaire, but he uses them for a reason. You can see how he might relish painting Starmer as a “soft on ULEZ” down south trendy in the eyes of car-dependent residents of the red wall.

Polling tells us that many voters don’t know what Starmer stands for and find him dull, but that might not matter if the Tories keep on sinking all by themselves. Should the Opposition leader decide it would help him to stir a bit of breast-beating, patriotic excitement, he has the option of joining with Mayor Khan to make Britain’s already world-beating capital even more of a trailblazer, enhancing its environment and boosting its growth by giving City Hall greater powers. The golden goose could lay even more golden eggs for the whole country to share.

It doesn’t look as if that’s going to happen. We might have to accept that, just like the Conservatives, Keir Starmer doesn’t want to be London’s friend.

Twitter: Dave Hill and On London. If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to Dave’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Devolution, Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan, ultra low emission zone, Uxbridge & South Ruislip

Jack Brown: Starmer’s response to the Uxbridge result was wrong in more ways than one

Labour's leader overstated the significance of ULEZ expansion and in a manner that deepens concerns about his attitude to devolution
Jack Brown

Much has already been written and said about the result of the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election, most of it focused on the impact of the upcoming expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone. This could be bad news for Sadiq Khan, but not necessarily for the reason you might expect.

Both Labour and Conservative politicians claimed the result proves the policy is a vote loser. Angela Rayner said it showed the pitfalls of not “listening to voters”. Sir Keir Starmer has urged the Mayor to “reflect” on the policy. Government minister Grant Shapps believes it proves the Conservatives can win in London, and Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall believes opposing ULEZ expansion will be key to winning next year’s race for City Hall. For his part, Khan remains committed to his pledge.

But saying the ULEZ expansion plan produced a bad result for Labour is itself open to question. And Labour’s rebukes of the capital’s Labour Mayor could point to wider ramifications for London and the future of its devolved government.

Let’s look at what actually happened in Thursday’s trio of parliamentary by-elections. The governing Conservatives did terribly elsewhere and less terribly in Uxbridge & South Ruislip. A swing of 6.7 percent was not enough for a Labour victory there, but although the Tories clung on to the seat, their previous majority of 7,210 was reduced to just 495. They clung on rather than winning decisively.

The issue of ULEZ expansion clearly played a part in their survival. It was central to their campaign, and newly-elected MP Steve Tuckwell’s victory speech cited it as the main reason for his success.

But there are important caveats. Labour candidate Danny Beales also adopted an anti-expansion stance, so this was not quite a straightforward matter of “the Conservatives versus the ULEZ”. Dedicated anti-ULEZ independents ran, but accumulated just a handful of votes between them. And Tuckwell was a solid local candidate who ran a campaign almost entirely devoid of mentions of national issues. He should get some personal credit too.

There is also the political character of the area to consider. The last Labour parliamentary victory in a seat containing Uxbridge was in 1966. Lewis Baston’s excellent preview analysis of the current constituency showed that it might be difficult for Labour to take this time.

That this was former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s seat may have influenced the result in unusual ways. Turnout was low, at 46 per cent. The group of oddballs that tend to compete in any election garnering national coverage stood. From the sometimes-amusing Count Binface to the frankly quite dull Laurence Fox, those candidates won collectively over a thousand votes. Under other circumstances, they might have been cast differently and even changed the final result.

So was this really a single-issue election whose outcome damned the ULEZ expansion irrevocably? Or could it be the case that we saw a local campaign resulting in traditional Conservative voters continuing to vote Conservative, albeit in smaller numbers than previously? The Labour candidate attracted nearly 5,000 fewer votes than in 2019, but the Conservative lost more than double that amount.

None of this is to say that ULEZ was not a significant factor, just that it would be a mistake to assume from the Uxbridge & South Ruislip outcome that hammering ULEZ is, in and of itself, a guaranteed route to Conservative victory.

Sadiq Khan may actually view today as a good day. He and his team have surely calculated that ULEZ expansion will not be unpopular with Londoners as a whole when it comes to his election day in May, and that when it comes into effect on 29 August – barring a successful legal challenge – it will directly affect so few vehicles, and therefore voters, that things can only calm down as time goes by. He is also right that most of the poorest Londoners do not own cars at all. Additionally, those it will affect will disproportionately also be those unlikely to vote for him anyway.

But there is also a reason for Khan to worry. Labour’s national leadership seems to have accepted the view that this policy is a vote loser. Senior party figures have either claimed that a better scrappage scheme is needed, or that it is simply “not the time” for such a policy. And their suggestion that Khan is not listening to voters is alarming.

The Labour Mayor and the Labour leadership have different interests in the issue. Khan would argue that his policy shows he has been listening very closely to his electorate of Londoners as a whole. Starmer and his team have the different priority of gaining individual parliamentary seats all over the country, notably including Tory marginals in outer London which the ULEZ is set to encompass.

But more fundamentally worryingly for London is the wider context in which Starmer’s and Rayner’s comments were made. Labour’s national leadership is reportedly increasingly uncomfortable with devolution. With polling consistently suggesting a Labour government is on its way, Khan has warmly anticipated working with a Starmer national administration should he win a third term as Mayor. But Starmer’s remarks about the ULEZ suggest he might have to adjust to a new reality.

The Labour leader and his team are said to be concerned about the autonomy and lack of message discipline Labour’s big city Mayors enjoy. Despite early commitments to further devolution, the party in government looks as if it may well lean away from increasing the autonomy of Mayors and towards reigning it in instead. That would be a mistake, for capital and country alike.

Jack Brown is is lecturer in London Studies at King’s College and author of The London Problem. Twitter: Jack Brown and On London. If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to editor and publisher Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Danny Beales, Devolution, Keir Starmer, Sadiq Khan, Steve Tuckwell, ultra low emission zone, Uxbridge & South Ruislip

Uxbridge: Tory ‘ULEZ referendum’ ploy pays off as Labour falls short in by-election

Conservative Steve Tuckwell has confounded predictions to hang on in Boris Johnson's former seat
Dave Hill

The Conservatives have held off Labour in the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election, vindicating their strategy of framing the contest as a referendum on Sadiq Khan’s planned expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) and demonstrating again the area’s historic reluctance to change its political colour.

The seat vacated by Boris Johnson after the Commons privileges committee found he had deliberately misled parliament had looked there for the taking by Labour’s Danny Beales, even though he needing to overturn a substantial 7,200 majority.

Yet even as Labour was climbing a far higher mountain to win Selby & Ainsty in North Yorkshire, local Tory councillor Steve Tuckwell retained the outer west London seat by a margin of 495 votes despite an anti-Tory swing of 7.5 per cent.

Both Tuckwell and Labour’s shadow justice secretary Steve Reed, the MP for Croydon North, said the ULEZ expansion plan had been central to the outcome. Tuckwell said in his victory speech that “Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election” with his “damaging and costly ULEZ policy”, and Reed told the PA news agency it was clear that a lot of people “didn’t like the fact that ULEZ was going to cost people more to drive around at a time when there’s a cost of living crisis going on.”

The result also has echoes of previous Labour failures to capture Uxbridge, including at a 1997 by-election held shortly after Tony Blair’s landslide general election earlier that year. Previewing the by-election for On London last month, elections expert Lewis Baston noted the resilience of the Tory vote in last year’s Hillingdon Council elections and a core support in Uxbridge & South Ruislip that has been relatively little eroded by demographic changes in the area.

The salience of ULEZ is incongruous in the sense that vehicle registration trends in the area analysed by Transport for London suggest that close to 90 per cent of cars in the borough of Hillingdon as a whole comply with ULEZ standards, while 20 per cent of its households don’t have a car at all. The compliance rate for vans is much lower – though also probably rising, in 2022 it was only 58 per cent – but the number of such vehicles is much smaller.

Even so, the Uxbridge & South Ruislip result has shown the policy to have a formidable power to mobilise voters, which will encourage Susan Hall, the newly-selected Conservative candidate for London Mayor.

Congratulating Tuckwell on Twitter, Hall added, “Now we fight for the mayoralty”, and in an early morning statement, “Sadiq Khan and his disastrous ULEZ expansion have got to go. Next May, voters can make that happen and choose a better, brighter future for our city.”

The expansion is due to take effect from 29 August, some eight months before the election for London Mayor on 2 May, which might take the heat out of the issue. However, a legal challenge by five local authorities, including Hillingdon, could force a delay. A decision is expected by the end of this month.

Opinion polls about the ULEZ have indicated that Londoners favour the policy on the whole, but, especially in outer areas, have misgivings about Khan intending to enlarge it to cover the entirety of Greater London.

Steve Tuckwell was the man chosen to repair the damage done by  former Mayor and ex-Prime Minister Johnson, and he has done so – narrowly but triumphantly.

Twitter: Dave Hill and On London. If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to Dave’s Substack.

Categories: News
Tags: Conservativates, Labour, Steve Tuckwell, ultra low emission zone, Uxbridge & South Ruislip

Sadiq Khan and Tory rival Susan Hall clash over Met crime statistics

The Mayor and his Conservative challenger for City Hall traded figures and more at today's Mayor's Question Time
Dave Hill

Sadiq Khan warned today of a summer of increasing violent crime, particularly among young people, fuelled by “unprecedented levels of economic hardship” in the capital.

Speaking at this month’s London Assembly Mayor’s Question Time session, Khan said that growing financial pressures on Londoners could reverse progress on tackling violence, and announced that he was calling on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to provide emergency funding to keep young people away from crime.

Citing recent polling reporting that more than half of Londoners were financially struggling or “just about managing”, Khan said extra cash was urgently needed for diversionary schemes during the school holidays. “With the cost of living crisis getting worse week on week, I am concerned about this summer,” he said. “That is why I’ve written to the PM.”

The session also saw Khan clash with Assembly member Susan Hall, his newly-selected Conservative opponent at next year’s mayoral election, over crime figures in the capital, offering a foretaste of a key campaigning issue for Hall, who pitched for the candidacy using the slogan “Safer with Susan”.

“Crime has been increasing in London,” Hall  said, quoting Scotland Yard statistics showing that over a million crimes of all types were recorded by the Metropolitan Police during the 12 months to the end of June.

Khan had his own take on the Met figures, comparing the year to June 2023 with the equivalent pre-pandemic period to show that burglary, robbery, vehicle crime, knife and gun crime and murder rates were all down compared with 2019/20.

And the Mayor highlighted Met Commissioner Mark Rowley’s “New Met for London” plans, announced this week, which include a boost to neighbourhood and town centre policing across the capital, with an additional 1,300 warranted officers patrolling locally and 500 more police community support officers.

While police numbers were now at record levels, Khan added, London’s population was growing too, meaning that the current 3.7 officers per 1,000 residents is below the figure of 4.1 per 1,000 in 2010, the year the Conservative-led coalition government was elected and began cutting police funding. Those have meant “police have one hand tied behind their backs,” he said, adding, with another likely campaigning line, that “it is only because of our economic competence over the last seven years that we can invest in more police officers”.

Khan also leant his weight to growing pleas for government action on homelessness in the capital, calling for the recently announced moratorium on mortgage repossessions to be extended to two years, and repeating his demand for new powers to freeze and regulate private rents.

“The affordability crisis in the private rented sector is already leading to extremely troubling homelessness figures,” he said, backing the campaign to increase local housing allowance (LHA) benefit levels, which currently cover the full rent of fewer than three per cent of properties available in the sector.

“LHA rates are out of touch with the private rental market in 2023, and the bad news is that things are getting worse not better,” he added. “The government must act urgently. They need to step up and help families like they did during the pandemic. There is no reason they can’t do the same.”

With increasing concern that the government’s Rental (Reform) Bill, outlawing so-called “no fault” evictions of private tenants and increasing regulation in a sector which houses 2.7 million Londoners, could miss out on parliamentary time, the Mayor also announced that he was seeking a meeting with communities secretary Michael Gove to impress on him the need for action.

Today’s Mayor’s Question Time can be viewed in full here. Twitter: Twitter: Charles Wright and On London. If you value On London, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack. Thanks.

Categories: News
Tags: crime, housing, local housing allowance, London Assembly, London Mayor election 2024, Mayor's Question Time, Metropolitan Police, policing, private rented housing, Sadiq Khan, Susan Hall

Luke Raikes: Forget the ‘north-south divide’, regions must reduce poverty together

The final report of a Fabian Society commission argues that different parts of the country should make greater devolution their common cause
Luke Raikes

The “north-south divide” looms large in our national conversation. It describes a sense, for us northerners, that our region hasn’t been given a fair shot at success. But the regions with the highest working-age poverty, after housing costs, are the west midlands, the north east – and London. So, clearly there is more going on than a simple north-south divide. And when we look at the full picture, we find a reason to bridge our regional divides, not deepen them.

Last week, the Fabian Society published the final report of our Commission on Poverty and Regional Inequality. In A Good Life in all Regions, we focus on what we have in common: a desire to tackle poverty and improve living standards in all our regions. Our commissioners came from across England – from London, Newcastle, Manchester and Cornwall.

Our starting point was simple: to acknowledge that the UK doesn’t have just one regional economic problem, but two. Firstly, low growth in many parts of the country. Secondly, overheating in London and the south east. Neither is acceptable. Both result in poverty. They must be tackled together.

The first regional problem is real, severe and avoidable. We have a major problem of low economic growth and poor job opportunities that stretches from Cornwall, across a swathe of the Midlands, to the North, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The problem also affects coastal communities in the east and south east. Successive in-depth analyses have shown the UK to be the most regionally unequal country in the developed world.

This is incontrovertible. And it is fair to say most Londoners recognise the challenge: our survey found that respondents in the capital were twice as likely to say regional inequality has a negative impact on the economy of the country as a whole (54 per cent) than a positive impact (22 per cent).

The second regional problem is also real, severe and avoidable – the overheating faced by London and the south east. The concentration of economic activity in a small corner of the capital doesn’t benefit many Londoners, and comes at a price they will be well aware of: spiralling housing costs, which pull one million in the capital below the poverty line.

Again, this is incontrovertible. But it is rarely incorporated into a complete picture of regional inequality. It can be hard for those of us outside of London to look beyond its very conspicuous prosperity to the reality of people’s everyday lives. But we must.

Crucially, one problem doesn’t negate the other: we must avoid the trap of implying that the low growth problem is less important because Londoners are poor too. And neither should we suggest that London’s poverty is somehow less important because the rest of the country has a low growth problem. Instead of pitting these truths against one another, we should acknowledge them both and try and find common cause.

That common cause will come in taking power down from central government into the regions and nations where it can be exercised in the interests of the people living there – for example, by investing in new social housing, sustaining vital bus services, or ensuring childcare is available locally.

To solve these problems, we also have to tackle the ingrained idea that only London – and perhaps Manchester and Birmingham too – can grow. In fact, the evidence shows there are a range of different assets which places offer to an economy, including but not limited to the agglomeration effects that cities produce. Actually, places close to cities, more than the cities themselves, show some of the greatest potential – places such as Cheshire or the M4 corridor. Because, in reality, towns and cities work together, and they need to do so more effectively if the UK is to prosper in the future.

Some of our leaders have explicitly recognised the need to move forward. Responding to our commission, London Mayor Sadiq Khan said: “Devolution will be crucial to increasing prosperity, whether you live in London, Sheffield or the Wirral.” And Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham said: “It is critical that national, regional and local government continue to work together to extend and expand devolution across the whole of England.”

Hopefully this is the start of things to come. If all the regions and nations of the UK have more power in future, then perhaps they’ll use it to work together for the common good.

Luke Raikes is research director at the Fabian Society. Follow Luke on Twitter. Photograph from the cover of A Good Life in all Regions, written by Luke Raikes and Ben Cooper. 

If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Andy Burnham, Devolution, Fabian Society, poverty, Sadiq Khan

Dave Hill: Does Susan Hall have any chance of defeating Sadiq Khan?

There could be a narrow path to victory, but the Conservative candidate may struggle not to be her own worst enemy
Dave Hill

For ten years and more the Conservative party, which regards itself with some statistical justice to be the natural custodian of national government, has treated the nation’s capital as its unnatural foe.

As Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, a former two-term Mayor of the city, helped cement his reputation for opportunism and duplicity by feeding anti-London sentiment with “levelling up” signals, as his courtiers and cronies eroded the autonomy of his Labour successor at City Hall. The word “London” has been deployed much as a metaphor for things today’s Conservatives dislike.

But the roots of the Tories’ London problem go much deeper. At successive sets of elections – general, GLA and local – their few notable wins, including Johnson’s second mayoral triumph in 2012, have been isolated novelties amid a sustained swing towards Labour and others. At last year’s borough elections their share of seats fell to just 22 per cent compared with Labour’s 63. The most recent poll of Londoners’ general election voting intentions put Labour a gigantic 40 points ahead of them.

All the while, the pleas of a handful of realists for the party in London to find a distinctive voice with which to speak to the capital’s millions of voters – a voice more attuned to the majority of Londoners’ values, beliefs and desires – have gone unheeded. And now they’ve ended up with Susan Hall as their candidate for the next London Mayor election, scheduled for 2 May next year.

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Let us begin with the formidable list of glaring, screaming, bellowing reasons why Hall’s selection, with 57 per cent of votes cast, looks disastrous for the Tories. Hall is nothing if not direct with her opinions. Past offerings on social media and elsewhere include egging on Donald Trump in his attacks on Sadiq Khan for the purpose of riling up his core support in the US. Right up until she decided to seek her party’s mayoral nomination just a few weeks ago, Hall’s main Twitter profile photo was of herself standing with Johnson, whom she continued to speak up for throughout the partygate scandal and beyond, even after his own MPs had dumped him.

A staunch backer of Brexit, Hall appears frequently on right wing television channels Talk TV and GB News, where she and like-minded programme hosts agree to heartily agree that Sadiq Khan is rubbish. When she was placed on the original Tory shortlist of three, GB News presenter Dan Wootton congratulated her on Twitter, embellishing his tweet with two union jacks. Yesterday, Hall hailed Wootton’s return to his show following a break, only to delete the tweet soon after.

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That hurried row-back might not have been unrelated to the very adjacent publication of a story about Wootton by Byline Times that does little to enhance his reputation. As for Trump, having encouraged his supporters in their violent insurrection, he is now charged with serious criminal offences. To beat Khan, Hall will need to reach well beyond the shrinking London Tory base. It won’t help her that she has flattered so incautiously.

Hall styles herself a plain-speaking “common sense” politician, which is a retail way of saying she is firmly on her party’s populist hard right. She occupies the same ideological space as prominent national Tories such as her predecessor on the London Assembly Kemi Badenoch, Home Secretary Suella Braverman and Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson. In the past, she has told a former UKIP councillor and deputy chair “we agree on most things“.

How did the Tories get themselves into this position? The received wisdom remains that minister for London Paul Scully was left off the shortlist because the party’s high command deemed his service in that role under PM Johnson tainted him beyond salvation. Yet, having also preferred a tech entrepreneur who had to drop out after a past alleged incident predictably came back to haunt him and an unknown barrister who comes across as a bit weird, they’ve ended up with a “Boris” apologist. What is going on inside their heads?

Does a politician of Hall’s leanings have a cat’s chance in hell of getting elected to City Hall? Judicious friends wryly suggested I headlined this piece “Hall selected, Khan rejoices” or even “Khan to win third term”. And, fair enough, another win for the Labour incumbent looks on the cards. Even if Voter ID and the government’s imposition of the First Past the Post system on the mayoral election assist the Tory cause, as the latter in particular looks likely to, can Hall hope to overcome such giant odds?

Not everything is stacked against her. Redfield & Wilton’s recent poll found that Khan’s lead over a then-theoretical Tory opponent was substantial but not enormous, and that 17 per cent of those who gave him their first preference vote in 2021 were either undecided about him now (10 per cent) or intended to vote Tory (seven per cent). Some will simply be bored with him after eight years. Some, like national journalists who haven’t been paying attention, will ask, rhetorically, “what’s he actually done?”

Hall’s targets will be clear and amenable to trenchant messaging: transport, especially roads and curbs on private motorists; crime and policing, where she will blast Khan’s record and promise to be “tough”; and housing, where she will rail against tower blocks and call for low-rise family homes instead. And it’s important to remember that although London is triumphantly liberal in its human variety, many Londoners are conservative on social issues, perhaps making them receptive to a culture war narrative against “woke” – something else that greatly exercises Hall. Even on Brexit, a hefty minority of Londoners – 40 per cent – voted leave.

We can expect Hall to be direct, abrasive and, with the help of Khan’s planned expansion of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone, perhaps to try to revive the “doughnut strategy” of speaking to outer London grievances that helped Johnson beat Ken Livingstone in 2008. She will make the most of being a woman and potentially the capital’s first female Mayor. She might end up doing better than current evidence suggests she will.

Doughnut country, though, is not as Tory as it was. Even borough strongholds like Bromley have seen threatening incursions by Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Greater London’s own “blue wall” has weakened. On the face of it at least, Hall is the type of Tory least likely to rebuild it.

Twitter: Dave Hill and On London. If you value On London and its writers, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to Dave’s Substack.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Conservatives, London Mayor election 2024, Sadiq Khan, Susan Hall