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Dave Hill: Good hospitals are vital, but just one part of improving Londoners’ health

A better NHS in the capital city will depend just as heavily on building faith in the institution as a whole
Dave Hill

The National Audit Office has fully exposed yet another lump of Boris Johnson bullshit. It is one of the most malodorous yet. The Conservatives’ 2019 general election pledge to build “40 new hospitals” had a big whiff of hubris about it from the start. In October 2020, Johnson said the job would be done by 2030. A year later, this was judged unachievable. It is now confirmed as a stinking fib.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting is leading Labour’s told-you-so anthem, riffing hard on Hillingdon hospital. Visiting it three weeks ago to support Danny Beales’s by-election challenge in Uxbridge & South Ruislip, the parliamentary seat Johnson abandoned when his partygate hangover hit home, Streeting dubbed it a “monstrosity”. Today, he has repeated his promise that a Labour government would deliver a replacement by the end of its first term.

No wonder Hillingdon councillor Steve Tuckwell, the latest unlucky soul to get lumbered with clearing up a scarpering Johnson’s mess, has admitted that keeping the constituency blue will be “very difficult”. A contest he has sought to frame as a “referendum on ULEZ” – a policy of the Mayor of London, not the national government – might turn out to be about other things instead, with health well to the fore.

But while there’s no dispute that Hillingdon hospital is in urgent need of treatment – and the same goes for other NHS facilities in London – rebuilding the health service in the capital will be about more than bricks, mortar, new technology and A&E. It will also require the renovation and renewal of its entire relationship with Londoners, especially those in greatest need of it.

A new risk assessment by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has found that an outbreak of between 40,000 and 160,000 measles cases could occur in London due to low uptake of the vaccine for preventing it – the measles, mumps and rubella jab, better known as the MMR.

The risk assessment confirms that 17.5 per cent of the capital’s two-year-olds have not received their first dose of the vaccine, and that 25.9 per cent of its five-year olds have not had the two doses they need to be safe from the three diseases. Vaccination coverage has been falling all over England, but the situation is at its worst in the capital. Two thirds of the country’s 128 measles cases in the first half of this year – more than twice as many as in the whole of 2022 – have been here.

This is alarming, but it’s been coming for a while. The UKHSA highlighted London as having the lowest vaccination rate of any region in England in February of last year too, showing that one in four London children had not had their second dose by the time of their fifth birthday. This compared with slightly over one in ten who hadn’t nationally.

Towards the end of 2022, research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), published by the British Medical Journal, said that in no part of London was the 95 per cent vaccination target recommended by the World Health Organisation being hit. “In north east London there are now more neighbourhoods than before the pandemic where fewer than 60 per cent of children receive the first MMR vaccine on time,” QMUL said. It added: “These ‘hotspots’ – which are at highest risk of a measles outbreak – are clustered in the region’s most deprived neighbourhoods.”

The QMUL study found that the proportion of children receiving their first MMR jab, offered when they are between the ages of 12 and 18 months, fell by four per cent during the pandemic. But a decline in take-up was already happening in London even before Covid-19, with its considerable “hesitancy” about immunisation against the new coronavirus seeming to increase anxiety about vaccines in general.

What has been going wrong? What has created a situation where tens of thousands of young Londoners are in danger of catching measles, a highly infectious, unpleasant and sometimes very dangerous illness we thought we had under firm control?

The new UKHSA assessment identifies an “urgent need” for a vaccine catch-up with London’s teenagers and other young people, as well as small children (efforts are already underway). The agency says “susceptibility is particularly high among 19 to 25-year-olds, affected by unfounded stories in the early 2000s” – a reference to studies published around the start of the century alleging perilous MMR side effects.

These studies’ claims, given credence by right-wing media at the time, were later exposed as fraudulent. Yet today many parents whose children haven’t had MMR jabs mention their fear of serious side effects as a reason. The swirl of conspiracy theories surround Covid vaccines cannot have helped, and the greater reluctance of some groups of Londoners to come forward for theirs during the pandemic revealed a more general lack of confidence in the NHS that is long-standing and deep-seated.

The fall-off in MMR take-up in London has its particular causes, often rooted in the complex and varied character of the capital itself. But it might also be seen as reflecting a more general spread of doubts about institutions of the state, even the most revered. We are seeing it most of all among those whose health tends to be the poorest and therefore need the knowledge and compassion of the NHS most of all. Building new and better NHS hospitals in London is important. But so is building greater faith in the health service itself.

Photograph: Gov.uk. 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: health, Hillingdon Hospital, NHS, Uxbridge & South Ruislip

Charles Wright: The London of Mick Herron

Our best modern spy novelist makes a character of the city in which his stories are set
Charles Wright

In a long line of British espionage fiction writers, Slough House series author Mick Herron (“foremost living spy novelist in the English language,” New Statesman) takes London as his prime setting. And his rich portrayal of the contemporary city, not so much a backdrop as almost a character in its own right, is a large part of his stories’ appeal.

Herron’s city shares with John le Carré’s familiar elements of the capital’s spyscape: the anonymous service HQ; the safe house in an inner-city back street; the clandestine canal towpath and Thames-side meeting places; the restaurant, a very recognisable Fischer’s on Marylebone High Street. where classified documents are exchanged.

There are Dickensian and Conradian echoes too: the shop on Brewer Street where “old Miles” sells “Russian tobacco, Polish chewing gum and Lithuanian snuff” while hosting get-togethers for Cold War veterans and émigrés on the fringe of the espionage world in an upstairs room; Reginald “Dancer” Blaine’s seedy stationers near St Paul’s, also purveying guns and fake IDs.

But Herron has an insightful feel for the ordinary city we live in too: “Bookmakers and bed shops, bridal boutiques and barbers”; nighttime streets “unfurling…the gauzy reflections in puddles and windows that turned after-hours London into a kaleidoscope, made fast-food outlets and minicab offices brief flashes of wonder.”

Or take his description of the huddle of retail premises at Old Street tube station…“bookshop, card shop, coffee shop, key cutters…the flower shop, whose brief fragrance was a shower of light in the dark”. And above ground…“a familiar London medley of the weathered and the new; the social housing estate, and the eye hospital…the complicated façade of an office block straight from an SF comic.”

Not a Londoner – he spent years commuting from Oxford to a sub-editing job – Herron is ambivalent at best about the Square Mile (“the glass and steel world of money”) and, it seems, no fan of the Barbican, near where he worked. One of his characters describes it as an “Orwellian nightmare…a concrete monstrosity”, somehow managing to overcome being a “brutal piece of shit” to achieve “iconic” status, like “Ronnie and Reggie Kray before it”.

It’s a startling simile, highlighting that other London, whose sounds include the “tumbling wet slap of money being laundered”, where for those who “buy and sell and own and build, the past is simply a shortcut to what’s yet to come, and what’s yet to come offers magpie riches to those prepared to embrace the changes demanded. Or so the promises run”.

This is also Herron’s city: “an impermanent thing, its surface ever shifting, like the sea. And like the sea, a city has its sharks.” On a “normal day”, one of his characters muses, “London was bright and busy, full of open spaces and well-lit squares.” But “it was also trap streets and ghost stations; a spook realm below the real…a coded text beneath an innocent page”.

In this city, things aren’t what they seem. Fischer’s Viennese-style café has a “pleasing pre-war feel”, says one character. “Yeah. It opened in 2014,” is the reply. A gentleman’s club on Wigmore Street, sporting a plaque marking its founding “fifty-odd years ago” by a chap with a Victoria Cross, is actually the 20-year-old creation of someone very different.

The biggest fiction of all is Slough House itself on Aldersgate Street, the MI5 outpost at the heart of the novels and home to the “slow horses”, a band of failed spies relegated to mundanity under the Rabelaisian Jackson Lamb, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, wise-cracking, rule-bending old school spook, and at the same time pretty much the moral centre of Herron’s uncertain universe (perfectly realised by Gary Oldman in the TV adaptation).

Three storeys of run-down space above an “ailing Chinese restaurant and a desperate newsagents”, presenting a false front as a solicitors’ office, it is, pleasingly, a real building (with tourist walking tours surely coming soon). It’s one of those many city spaces you walk past, and wonder what exactly it is that goes on there – as Herron himself must have done.

This is Herron’s London then: satisfying layers of complexity and simulation, where suspicion thrives on seemingly familiar crowded streets. As one character says, “There were people everywhere – London, London – but nobody was paying attention, or if they were, were doing so in a successfully covert way.”

If there’s a message here – that nothing should be taken at face value, that money rules, that the corporate world and the contracted world of private security are the new threat, seducing our hapless or simply venal politicians while playing with the fires of extremism – it is imparted with humour, through satire rather than sermonising. Perhaps even some hope, that slow horse persistence might just win out. And all set in a London we know well – or do we?

Twitter: Charles Wright and On London. Image from Slough House book cover. If you value On London, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack. Thanks.

Categories: Culture
Tags: Aldersgate Street, London Fiction, Marylebone High Street, Mick Herron, Old Street

Kinley King: Alternative Pride

The London Trans+ Pride march has emerged as the inheritor of the Stonewall uprising's legacy of continuous community revolt
Kinley King

As inevitably seems to be the case for anyone who dares record the thoughts they have as a teenager, my childhood bedroom is home to an overwhelming amount of pretentious drivel scribbled on just about every surface imaginable. Among these archives of a closeted, creative introvert who ping-ponged between crippling insecurity and insufferable arrogance, tucked away in the pages of my teenage journals is a slogan that reads:

The depths of the Avant-Garde

too deeply shallowed

by the normality

of complacent conformity.

This needlessly elaborate shunning of those who complain about the world but do not do enough to fix it – a population of which I most definitely was and am still an active member – reads now, true to its origins, more like the scribblings of a 15- year-old studying GCSE Economics for the first time than it does the mark of an undiscovered lyrical genius (which I was sure that it was at the time).

But last Saturday, marching among 35,000 fellow rain-soaked queers and a handful of disgruntled police pretending to ignore the smell of weed emanating from the crowd, it came back to me – initially with a sense of irony, and then with an admittedly tequila-induced profundity and a growing sense that the crowd I stood in, a field of latex-clad women with stubble and men with scarred chests, was perhaps the last true example of what can be called autonomous democracy.

The match that first started the fire of Pride was lit in the early hours of the 28 June 1969, when police officers descended on the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village in a raid that quickly became violent and would lead to the Stonewall riots. A year later, in June 1970, marches took place across the United States – in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago – in defiant remembrance of the riots and with an impossible-to-ignore voice crying that the cause was still in need of fighting for.

These marches were the first Prides. And, in an unprecedented phenomenon, the same ones re-formed year after year, growing in size in proportion to the level of progress that had been achieved for all but two of the 53 since the original (the exceptions were 2020 and 2021, when marches were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic).

The Conservative government’s recent, shockingly blatant, moves against the free speech of British citizens mean it goes without saying that the right to protest is one that must not only be steadfastly preserved, but also used in active response to attacks on it. With corruption and incompetence running rampant through our democracy, you would be hard-pressed to pick a day of the year when there wasn’t some government manoeuvre worth marching against.

But perhaps as an unintended side effect of the constant aggravation from the powers that be, marching has come to be seen by both politicians and activists alike as purely reactive: as protests that happen only in response to shock and scandal.

For a long time, Pride stood out as the opposite of this. Year after year, more and more people amassed on the streets, not in outraged response to some new law or a political or police outrage, but because it was their right. Its origins are a reminder that the role of the people in a democracy goes beyond the responsibilities of voting day. The annual protests remind us that specific catalysts of some horrific or inhumane nature are not and should not be prerequisites for an individual or a community to make their voices heard.

Yet Pride in 2023 looks very different from the flagship marches of 1970. Throughout June and into July, marches and parades now take place across the globe. In London, home to one of the largest parades outside of the USA, over 30,000 people took part in the parade and marching this year, with thousands more in attendance. It was a colourful reminder of all that has been accomplished since the first protests.

But despite my own queerness, I cannot march for free. The cost of my Pride is the purchase price of a wristband – a wristband branded with the logos of the world’s largest corporations, many of which openly fund the political campaigns of anti-LGBTQ+ politicians in the USA, to say nothing of involvement with fossil fuel production in the open air of our economy. Safe from the past atrocities of marriage illegality and AIDs inaction, it seems that the contemporary cost of my Pride, lowered from the price of my life, is now the comparatively affordable sum of my moral conscience…as well as my money.

It seems, then, that Pride has long since given up being a protest at all. And in 2023, the legend of the recurring protest lives on not in Pride but in Trans+ Pride. Operating as an entirely separate entity to commercial Pride, it is a march that takes place a week after it.

It was there that my boozy epiphany took me back to the slogan of my teenage journal. Those who participate in Trans+ Pride do so for free, and in the wholehearted belief in the organisers’ tag line – Pride is a protest. We march as an expression of “Love, Rage and Power”. We march, to echo the words of my closeted, 15-year-old self, against the normality of complacent conformity.

Marching past The Ritz, its arches filled with police sheltering from the rain, my friend, prone to emotional outbursts, raised their voice and shouted to the crowd, “This is what community looks like!”

Kinley King is a London student. Photograph: LondonTransPride. If you value On London’s output, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack.  

Categories: Culture
Tags: Piccadilly, Pride, The Ritz

Newham: Two by-elections, one dent in Labour’s dominance

By-elections can produce surprises even in parts of London where one party is overwhelmingly strong
Lewis Baston

Newham has never been synonymous with electoral excitement. Labour has won 90 per cent of seats or more in every local election since 1978, and the appearance of two Greens on the council in 2022 was more competition than usual. On Thursday, the party had to defend two seats in by-elections – always a riskier environment for a dominant party than full borough elections.

They were caused by the resignations of Labour councillors Cecilia Welsh (Boleyn ward) and Luke Charters (Wall End ward). Welsh cited family reasons, while Charters has been selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for York Outer, a seat adjacent to Selby & Ainsty the party should win if it is to form a government after the next general election.

Wall End is East Ham East. Its name is little-used except for the ward, but it has a reputable and logical history. It is at the end of East Ham nearest to the River Roding, and therefore a defensive wall to protect this flat area. The ward consists mostly of late Victorian and Edwardian terraced housing arranged in overlapping grids.

It is a predominantly Asian-British area, with all South Asian heritages well-represented, including Sri Lankans. By religion, the largest single community is Muslim, but Hindus and Christians are also well represented in what is one of the least non-religious wards in London. Most of the population are young, hard-working and living in private rented housing. These demographics, even outside the Newham context, point to a safe Labour seat.

Wall End was the less hard-fought of the two by-elections, and its default Labour status was reaffirmed. The turnout of 25.1 per cent could have been worse. Labour’s candidate Stephanie Garfield was runaway winner with 1,659 votes (61.1 per cent, up 12.4 points since the borough elections in May 2022).

The Conservatives came second, with their standard-bearer Durai Kannan polling 724 votes (27.2 per cent, up 12.3 points). Liberal Democrat Claire Pattie was third (138 votes) and the Greens’ Tassaduq Cheema fourth (124 votes). Reform UK’s David Sandground brought up the rear with 58 votes.

Independent and Christian People’s Alliance candidates stood last year, but not this time. Labour introduced Garfield as a woman who “works for the NHS, runs a small independent arts business and has been a British Sign Language interpreter. She is a dedicated public servant, local activist and entrepreneur, with a strong commitment to inclusive and compassionate local services”. Others note that her partner, Josh Garfield, already serves in the Newham Cabinet.

The net swing since May 2022 was a tiny one in Labour’s favour, although the Conservatives can also take satisfaction from a substantial increase in their vote in an unpromising area. A good Tory candidate and campaign is clearly capable of making progress among at least some South Asian heritage London communities. In better national circumstances for the party and with a less hard-core young private renting electorate, that might pay dividends in due course.

The other ward contested, Boleyn, is effectively East Ham West. It starts at Green Street and Boundary Road, which used to separate the pre-1965 county boroughs of East Ham and West Ham. They merged to form Newham – New plus Ham.

Boleyn covers another chunk of Newham’s terraced landscape. This one is a little different, in that it formerly contained West Ham football club’s Boleyn Ground, and the name is a nod in that direction. The area has been redeveloped since the club moved to the London Stadium on the Olympic Park. Boleyn has more new housing and more social housing than Wall End, and also older terraced housing. Like Wall End, it is majority South Asian, but here the predominant population is Muslim.

Boleyn was seen as the more winnable ward for Newham’s Green Party, which forms the opposition group on the council. But they managed only a small increase in their vote share, their candidate Joe Hudson-Small polling 572 votes (21.3 per cent), well behind Labour’s Sofia Patel with had 871 votes (32.1 per cent). But the winner was Independent candidate Mehmood Mirza (pictured), who came out on top with 1,153 votes (42.5 per cent). The other candidates – Conservative, Lib Dem and Reform – polled 69, 22 and 23 votes respectively. Turnout was 27.7 per cent.

Mirza’s win came as a surprise to most observers, although he had obviously run an effective campaign on the quiet. While Labour dominates in Newham, other candidates poll a third of the votes cast even at a peak Labour elections such as 2018. There – particularly with the focus of a local by-election – there is still the critical mass required for a challenge in the right ward at the right moment.

Boleyn was one of the three best Newham wards for Respect in 2006, when it mounted the most successful recent challenge to Labour’s ascendancy. Mirza’s vote in 2023 mobilised some of this left of Labour and independent strand of opinion, and he was assisted by left wing campaigners. Some of Mirza’s policies were not particularly socialist – he said he was in favour of free car parking and a lower council tax, so he might have attracted some Conservative-inclined voters too.

Neither by-election was great news for Labour. The Mirza gain will have been a particular blow. It is, though, too early to say whether it will reverberate or whether it is a flash in the pan. I wouldn’t lose my head over Boleyn just yet.

Twitter: Lewis Baston and On London. If you value On London’s output, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to publisher and editor Dave Hill’s Substack. Photo from Mehmood Mirza’s Twitter feed.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Conservatives, Council Tax, Green Party, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Newham Council

Darren Rodwell: It’s never been more vital to champion London to the world

As Opportunity London, the capital's government and its public and private sectors have come together to attract investment
Darren Rodwell

London is the most incredible city in the world. Most people do not realise that we make more films than Hollywood and are second only to Silicon Valley for tech and innovation. We have achieved global recognition in literature from William Shakespeare to Stephen Fry, and an international banking system going back to the time of Sir Francis Drake. Our universities are world class, thanks to people like the LSE’s Professor Tony Travers. And, for me most important of all, today, our culture and diversity are second to none.

But, boy, we also need to champion our city. There’s never been a more important time to attract investment, jobs and new opportunities for the Londoners of today as well as those of the future.

We know we can do it. In recent years, we’ve brought in more than £100 billion of investment — from the Elizabeth Line to the Olympic Park; from King’s Cross and the City Cluster to Canary Wharf; from Barking Riverside to Battersea; and from White City to Wembley. But we need to do more. That’s where Opportunity London comes in.

Opportunity London is a cross-party initiative under the auspices of London Councils, our local authorities’ umbrella group, the Greater London Authority and the City of London Corporation. It brings together around 80 leading organisations from the public and private sectors, as well as from across the political spectrum. Individuals involved include Nick McKeogh from New London Architecture, Laura Citron from London and Partners, and Kate Willard OBE, our envoy for the Thames Estuary – and, of course the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.

We have “done” MIPIM, joined colleagues from Manchester at the UK’s Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum, and have plans for unveiling opportunities at future investment conferences.

Thanks to work by Metro Dynamics, we are planning to bring forward 100 investment opportunities under one framework by the Spring of 2024, backed by individual London boroughs providing certainty.

I have recently returned from a jam-packed week in New York after joining the Opportunity London delegation. The US is one of the most significant foreign investors in UK plc, responsible for injecting a huge amount of capital that supports our built infrastructure and energy supply.

During the week, I met leading investors, developers and civic leaders to better understand how New York manages being a cutting-edge global city. One of the most interesting aspects of the visit was seeing how they are grappling with inflation and rising unemployment at the same time as getting ahead of the curve by creating the jobs of tomorrow, such as those in the life sciences, manufacturing and new technologies like Artificial Intelligence.

I met with leading investors to discuss how we can broaden and promote London’s investment opportunities in a way that would grab the attention of the international development community. And, naturally, with Dagenham in my London borough being home to two of the capital’s newest film studios, I headed for the set of Sesame Street in Queens. There, I met Big Bird and ticked off one from my Bucket List.

Our colleagues in America were so impressed they are planning to cross the pond and visit us later this year. In preparation, I’ve started practising saying “The Fall“.

London needs to maintain the inbound traffic of investors and opportunities, particularly from a vital market like New York, to make sure we have the best chance of responding to the economic challenges we face. I am confident that we have a compelling story to tell, but – as the Chinese proverb goes – we live in interesting times, and we cannot take our foot off the pedal. We do not have all the answers. We need to learn from what others are doing around the world to make sure London remains the best city in the world.

Councillor Darren Rodwell is Leader of the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham and London Councils Executive Member for Regeneration, Housing and Planning. Learn more about Opportunity London here. Twitter: Darren Rodwell, London Councils, Opportunity London. Image from Opportunity London.

If you value On London’s output, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to the Substack of the website’s publisher and editor, Dave Hill. Thanks.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Barking & Dagenham, Darren Rodwell, London Councils, New London Architecture, Opportunity London

London ULEZ: Let’s go through those compliance numbers again

The proportion of vehicles registered in the capital that falls short of compliance requirements has been shrinking, including in Uxbridge
Dave Hill

I’ve been toying with renaming the ULEZ the ULEZzzzzz, so tired have I become of the frenzy and fury about it. But to do so would be childish, and we don’t want that sort of thing round here. Instead, I will offer some calming facts and some bits of news.

Let’s focus on the borough of Hillingdon, where the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election will take place on 20 July – next Thursday. Conservative candidate Steve Tuckwell has declared it a “Referendum on ULEZ”, and why wouldn’t he? After all, the last thing he’d want it to be about is his party’s record in national government.

Isabel Hardman has reported for the Spectator (paywall alert) that “most people who open their doors” to him agree with Tuckwell that the ULEZ expansion is “going to cost them a great deal of money”. But unless the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) and Transport for London (TfL) have wildly misunderstood official figures for vehicle ownership in the area – and even likely Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall has given them her stamp of approval – the great majority won’t be directly affected at all, except, perhaps, by a small reduction in congestion.

TfL analysis of the SMMT figures, which are largely drawn from the DVLA’s, found that in 2022, 83 per cent of cars registered in Hillingdon were ULEZ compliant – almost exactly the same as the overall outer London figure of 84 per cent. The outer London figure for the previous year, 2021, had shown 75 per cent compliance. The compliance rate had therefore gone up by nine per cent in the space of a year.

If we suppose that rate of increase has continued, it could mean that now, more than halfway through 2023, 87 or 88 per cent of cars registered in Hillingdon are ULEZ-compliant. Maybe more. So how can it be – if indeed it is so – that the issue is as huge on the doorstep as it appears or is claimed to be?

  • Could it be because, as previously discussed, significant numbers of people think the expansion is wrong, even if their own cars (or vans) pass the ULEZ test?
  • Could it be that some who’ve upgraded their vehicles in anticipation of the expansion are still fed up about it?
  • Could it be that significant numbers fear that their cars will fall short of ULEZ standards but have yet to use the TfL “check your vehicle” facility to find out.

On that last point, given the Conservative party’s, shall we say, exceptional recent record of campaigning on road-user charging issues, no doubt Tuckwell is advising worried voters to find out for sure whether or not their vehicle is ULEZ compliant every bit as eagerly as Labour’s Danny Beales is…

Whatever the true scale or strength of anti-ULEZ expansion sentiment in the seat, and notwithstanding its stubborn resistance to changing political colour, most evidence suggests the Tories have the most to worry about.

Neither a local opinion poll nor bookmakers’ odds are fireproof guides to by-elections anywhere, but in this case both are pointing to a Labour victory. I have drafted a headline which reads: “Uxbridge: ‘ULEZ referendum’ produces ‘yes’ for Labour”. Let’s see if it survives contact with reality this time next week.

I promised ULEZ news. The biggest bit is a London Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) poll of 510 businesses in the capital, conducted between 26 April and 30 May, and therefore completed shortly before Sadiq Khan announced a widening of eligibility for his £110 million scrappage scheme, making help with upgrading vehicles available to more small businesses and others.

The poll found that nearly half – 47 per cent – of businesses of various sizes thought the expansion would have no impact on their employees, though a large minority of 33 per cent were worried that it would. There was a bit of an inner-outer split, with 39 per cent of outer London firms saying they were worried compared with 29 per cent of those in inner London.

When it came to negative effects on their costs, 46 per cent of outer London businesses thought it would have no impact, 13 per cent said it would have a positive one and 40 per cent, a negative one.

The LCCI has welcomed the Mayor’s adjustments to the scrappage scheme, along with a six-month “grace period” post-launch for sole traders and small and micro businesses that order compliant vehicles before the expansion but won’t take delivery of them until afterwards.

And finally, Brent Tory councillors staged a walkout during a full council meeting after the Labour leadership amended their motion for discussing the ULEZ expansion in a manner not to their liking. Such theatre. Anyone would think there’s a mayoral election coming.

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

Categories: Analysis
Tags: London Chamber of Commerce & Industry, ultra low emission zone, Uxbridge & South Ruislip

Adam Langleben: Whoever fights Islington North for Labour must have no illusions about the dangers they will face

Cranks and extremists of every kind will flock to the constituency to support Jeremy Corbyn running as an independent
Adam Langleben

When Patrick Maguire of The Times wrote that journalist Paul Mason’s reported bid to be Labour’s candidate for Islington North “tees up a battle for a notionally safe Labour seat [Islington North] that is likely to be among the most gruelling and bitter of the next election campaign,” I fear he was downplaying it.

Gruelling and bitter yes. But also fraught with danger. There is a very good reason why few names have been publicly linked with fighting the seat for Labour, which looks a good bet for any candidate, with or without Jeremy Corbyn in the contest as an independent. And it is not because of feelings of great loyalty to the former party leader.

Out of a sense of well meaning irony, I guess, some have suggested that a prominent Jewish Labour member should stand. Such people have not thought this through. Whoever is brave enough to put themselves forward needs to be open eyed about what they will face.

Every variety of crank, fruitcake, conspiracist, Trot, Tankie, antisemite and nutter from all over the country, as well as every organised and disorganised revolutionary cult, is going to descend on the good people of Islington North for that general election campaign when it comes. It will be a joint convention of the Marxism Festival, the Flat Earth Society and the Holocaust-denying Keep Talking group. Those of us who do not live there should thank the Lord, and pity those residents who will be faced with this barrage.

The Labour candidate will face abuse, harassment and almost certainly threats against them and their family – not from Jeremy Corbyn himself, but from followers he has never shown any real willingness to confront and probably never will. Corbyn will claim to be above it all. He might even denounce some of it and get very angry when asked about it.

But his denouncements will be made in such a way that this eclectic group will believe he doesn’t really mean it. Because without total, clear and direct public condemnation, they interpret anything short of it as a nod, a wink and a sign of approval. Much like Trump supporters. Both are cults.

Despite his hopes to the contrary, most local members will not resign from Labour to join Corbyn’s Finsbury Park revolution. He is going to be forsaking a fairly well-disciplined and experienced local Labour activist base for an army of people whose only experience of political persuasion is shouting into the abyss at the electorate or unsuccessfully trying to flog them revolutionary newspapers.

If Labour are successful in replacing the independent member for Islington North, as Jeremy Corbyn now is – and, unsurprisingly, I hope that they are – that same gang of malcontents will forever target the victor. He or she will be called a stooge of the Zionists and no doubt find themselves placed front and centre of another antisemitic film, possibly titled The Big Lie – the Sequel.

So good luck to any Labour candidate willing to do it. I’ll come and lend a hand, and so will many others. But having lived through some of the personal consequences of challenging Corbyn and his followers – and they were very limited compared with those in stories I’ve heard from MPs – whoever does it will need to be very clear about what’s coming their way.

Update: Paul Mason has responded to reports that he hopes to run for Labour in Islington North by saying he has “no plans” to.

Adam Langleben is National Secretary of the Jewish Labour Movement and a former Barnet councillor. 

Twitter: On London. If you value On London’s output, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to the Substack of its publisher and editor, Dave Hill.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour

London buses are slowing down, slowing down, slowing down

The latest Transport for London figures point to continuing problems for a critical public transport mode
Dave Hill

It might not seem like very much, but it matters and the direction of travel is not good. The latest Transport for London data about the speed and reliability of the capital’s bus services confirms that they are going backwards at a time when the city badly needs the opposite to be true.

Let’s look at the TfL figures for the average speeds our buses have been going at (they can be found under buses performance data, bus speed reports, network – all day types & all hours – to P03 2023-24).

These show that for the first three monitoring periods of the current financial year, encompassing 1 April until 27 May 2023, the mean (average) speed at which buses travelled within the Greater London Authority boundary throughout a 24-hour day was, respectively, 9.5 miles per hour, 9.3 miles per hour and 9.2 miles per hour.

Screenshot 2023 07 11 at 10.16.51

In all three cases, these were slower than for the equivalent three periods of the last financial year, 2022/23, when the average speeds were 9.7 mph, 9.4 mph and 9.5 mph. And the year before that, 2021/22, they were 9.8 mph, 9.6 mph and 9.5 mph.

The equivalent three years’ worth of figures for just the morning travel peak period – defined as 7am until 10am – aren’t much better, with average speeds between 0.1 and 0.3 mph slower in 2023/24 so far than they were in 2021/22. The highest figure was 9.0 mph for the first monitoring period of 2022/23 and the slowest was 8.3 mph for late April to late May this year.

To this continuing slippage in average speeds since London began emerging from the pandemic – at the peak of which they were often above 10 mph, presumably due to there being less traffic on the roads in general – we can add TfL’s measurement of the average amount of time passengers spend on London buses.

Doing this, in TfL’s words, “enables us to monitor the performance of our bus service from the perspective of our customers”. The shorter the amount of time passengers spend on board, the happier they are likely to be, because it means they’ve completed their journey faster. “Quicker journeys are more likely to encourage people back onto our network as we recover from the pandemic,” is how TfL puts it.

This explanation is included alongside bus journey time figures considered today by TfL’s customer service and operational performance panel. The figures show that the average journey time for the fourth quarter of 2022/23 was 34.5 minutes, missing a target of 33.4 minutes, and that the journey time for 2022/23 as a whole was 34 minutes, missing the annual target of 33.5. That is also the longest average journey time since at least 2018/19, as shown by a TfL chart.

Screenshot 2023 07 12 at 16.32.38

TfL attributes these missed targets to, in the first case, mainly “longer waiting times and lower reliability levels as a result of reduced staff availability at bus operators, mechanical issues and traffic congestion” and, in the second, to “higher lost bus mileage due to staff and mechanical issues” and to “the longer average journey length made by bus customers since the pandemic”.

City Hall published a bus action plan in March 2022, which aspired to providing “fast and reliable journey times” and recognised the bus as “the most commonly used form of public transport in the capital” and “often the unsung hero of London’s transport system”.

Arguments rage about exactly why average bus speeds are falling and journey times are getting longer. On London has asked TfL if it can elaborate further, and this article will be updated when a response is received.

UPDATE, 17 July 2023: In a statement, TfL’s head of bus performance, Philip Gerhardt, acknowledged a “slight decease in average bus speeds compared to 2020/21 and 2012/22” and attributed this to “traffic conditions and the impact of roadworks” returning to pre-pandemic levels. He added:

“The average speed across the network does not reflect the interventions made in specific locations to improve journeys for customers – such as introducing bus lanes and signal re-timings. We remain focused on delivering our Bus Action Plan which commits us to a 10 per cent improvement on speeds recorded in 2015. The introduction of 25km of new bus lanes by 2025 will be central to achieving this target.” 

TfL also pointed out that the bus speeds for period three of 2023/24, 9.3 mph, was the same as for the equivalent periods in the pre-pandemic years of 2019/20, 2018/19 and 2017/18.

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

Categories: Analysis
Tags: buses, public transport, transport, Transport for London