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MPs approve report criticising London Tories over Boris Johnson ‘partygate’ probe

Three Conservative Lords with London political backgrounds were named, as was a prominent backer of a would-be London Mayor
Dave Hill

Members of Parliament have backed a House of Commons privileges committee report which named three Conservative peers with prominent London political histories as being involved in a campaign to “lobby or intimidate” members of the committee during its inquiry into whether Boris Johnson misled Parliament over the “partygate” affair when he was Prime Minister.

In the report, published late last month, Johnson allies Lord Stephen Greenhalgh, Lord Zac Goldsmith and Lord Peter Cruddas were all accused of engaging in activities amounting to a “co-ordinated campaign of interference” during the committee’s investigation of Johnson. The draft findings of the report prompted Johnson to resign as an MP, bringing about the forthcoming Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election.

Also criticised in the report is former Home Secretary Priti Patel, the MP for Witham, who is a high profile backer of Moz Hossain, the barrister currently seeking selection as the Conservatives’ next candidate for Mayor of London.

The privileges committee report gives as an example of what it calls “selective pressure brought to bear on Conservative members of the committee” an article published on the Conservative Post website in mid-March, just over a week before Johnson’s 22 March appearance before the seven-strong committee, which has four Tory members and is chaired by London Labour MP Harriet Harman.

The article appealed to party members to “HELP Boris and protect the integrity of our political system”, called the investigation “deeply flawed, biased and unfair” and provided a template email which readers could use to contact the four Tory MPs. The template email described the investigation as “nothing but a politically motivated attack against our former Prime Minister” and characterised the process as “reminiscent of a banana republic”.

The committee report says that “Two Members of the House of Lords, whose peerages were conferred on the recommendation of Mr Johnson, were among over 600 people who emailed Committee members using the template email devised by Conservative Post,” and describes the website as “the online magazine of the Conservative Democratic Organisation” (CDO), a group set up in December 2022 to, in its words, “strengthen party democracy”.

The report then notes that Cruddas and Greenhalgh are, respectively, president and vice-president of the CDO. However, Conservative Post founder and editor Claire Bullivant has since written that Conservative Post is not the online magazine of the CDO, and was set up in September 2020, over two years before she, Cruddas and others launched the CDO “as a completely different entity”. Bullivant has made a formal complaint about the matter.

Greenhalgh (pictured) led Hammersmith & Fulham Council from 2006 until 2012, when Johnson, then Mayor of London, appointed him as his deputy mayor for policing and crime. Cruddas, whose title is Baron Cruddas of Shoreditch, is a self-made Hackney-born banker and businessman and a major financial donor to the Tories.

Goldsmith, who also owes his peerage to Johnson having been recommended for one by him in 2019 after Goldsmith lost his Commons seat in the general election of that year, was named in the report for, on 9 June, re-tweeting a Twitter comment calling the inquiry a witch hunt and a kangaroo court, and for commenting: “Exactly this. There was only ever going to be one outcome and the evidence was totally irrelevant to it.”

Goldsmith resigned as an environment minister when the committee’s report was published, but insisted he had chosen to leave because he considered the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, “uninterested” in environmental issues, though he accepted that he should not have commented on the committee’s work.

The report also named Johnson-supporting MPs Nadine Dorries, Brendan Clarke-Smith, Michael Fabricant, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others as having interfered in the committee’s deliberations. Although they backed its report, MPs did not get an opportunity to decided if the committee should be empowered to decide if the parliamentarians’ behaviour amounted to contempt of Parliament.

Twitter: Dave Hill and On London. If you value On London’s output, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to Dave’s Substack. Photograph from Stephen Greenhalgh Twitter profile. This article was updated shortly after publication to include the Conservative Post’s reaction to the mention of it in the committee’s report. 

Categories: News
Tags: Boris Johnson, Conservatives, Mozammel Hossain, Stephen Greenhalgh, Zac Goldsmith

Charles Wright: DLR train deal is reminder of when government saw value of investing in London

Research by a think tank and even a key government department has found that it pays off, yet the current administration prefers not to
Charles Wright

Hot on the heels of Transport for London’s unveiling of ambitious plans to extend the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) to Thamesmead, supporting up to 30,000 much-needed new homes and 10,000 jobs, comes another exciting DLR announcement – a deal for 11 new DLR trains, which will help to boost the network’s capacity by more than 60 per cent and unlock 10,000 new homes.

There’s a big difference between the two things, though – unlike the “currently unfunded” DLR extension – in simple terms, it won’t be happening any time soon –  the new train deal comes with some £280 million of government funding.

A sudden change of heart by an administration more inclined to slam the brakes on public investment, particularly when it’s the capital doing the asking? Not quite. The cash for the new trains, to be provided from Whitehall’s Housing Infrastructure Fund for “strategic and high-impact” projects, was allocated in 2018 by then Chancellor Philip Hammond.

Different times, perhaps, but also a clear recognition of the importance of publicly-funded infrastructure to get building going across the city’s brownfield “opportunity areas”.

Coincidentally, the new train deal was announced as the Department for Transport (DfT) released research precisely looking at whether transport improvements can bring about positive economic and social “transformative” change beyond what is commonly captured in “traditional” cost-benefit appraisals.

There wasn’t much doubt about one of its case studies, the £3.5 billion Jubilee Line extension (JLE) to Stratford. This has generally been seen, along with the original DLR, as vital to the regeneration of Canary Wharf and the wider docklands area. The new research found that view to be correct: “By enabling Canary Wharf to be developed, the JLE has made a major contribution to the whole London and national economy.”

What makes a project “transformative?” The research gives some clues. A “coordinated programme” of public and private investment is necessary, integrated with existing public transport, it says. Support must be targeted and potentially large, in order to “build new infrastructure…assemble land, encourage development and facilitate change”, the finds, citing the King’s Cross development as well as the JLE as a particular success story.

With the government itself, in its Levelling Up white paper, pledging support for “King’s Cross style” regeneration projects around the country, think tank Centre for Cities took a close look at that scheme last year. Its findings chime with the new ones.

The number of firms on the site roughly doubled between 2010 and 2021, including flagship occupiers Facebook and Google. The number of jobs increased threefold, and thousands of new residents moved in on what had been low demand, underused and dilapidated railway land. Substantial public funding had been the key to unlocking large-scale private investment, the centre found.

Increasing evidence, then, for informing current schemes such as the DfT’s Euston project – not just the HS2 terminus but improvements to the existing station and “over-site” development which, according to Camden Council, could deliver up to 20,000 jobs and 2,000 homes?

Apparently not, according to last week’s hard-hitting report on the scheme from the Commons Public Accounts Committee, whose chair, London MP Meg Hillier, describe the over budget and now “paused” project as “floundering”.

Eight years in, the DfT “still does not know what it is trying to achieve with the station and what sort of regeneration it will support”, the committee’s verdict says. “HS2 Euston station is yet another example of the Department…failing to learn lessons from its management of other major rail programmes.”

The hand of HM Treasury was in evidence too. Its instruction to the DfT to absorb inflationary costs within existing budgets, even on major multi-year schemes, immediately saw capital projects, including Euston, put on hold.

With the scheme now back on the drawing board, with one option being to dump its wider regeneration elements entirely, officials did at least acknowledge that there were lessons they could learn from King’s Cross. A glimmer of light. But is it too late to secure the benefits that were once forecast?

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

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Docklands Light Railway, HS2, Meg Hillier, Transport for London

Actually, Tory Susan Hall would not ‘remove TfL managed LTNs’ as London Mayor

Why not? Because there aren't any
Dave Hill

As votes continue to be cast in the Conservative London Mayor candidate election, the favourite, Susan Hall, has vowed she “would remove TfL managed LTNs” should she find herself in charge at City Hall next May. It is a pledge she would not be able to keep.

Hall has been invited by, among others, former Enfield councillor Ian Barnes to provide a list of LTNs – Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – that are managed by Transport for London. She won’t be able to because there aren’t any.

LTNs filter traffic through residential streets. They are installed, removed and “managed” in all respects by London’s 33 local authorities – its 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation – not by the Mayor of London, whoever that Mayor may be.

The Mayor’s influence over LTNs and all other road transport initiatives run at local authority level begins and ends with the allocation of money for some of them through TfL’s local implementation plan programme, known as LIP funding. After that, such schemes are none of the Mayor’s business. Does Hall, who claims to know City Hall inside out, really not know that?

A characteristic of the pandemic-period string of TfL-national government funding “settlements” as those stop-go exercises in centralised micro-management of the capital’s theoretically devolved transport authority have been termed, was the requirement to make money available to boroughs to bring in new LTNs.

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During that period, the Prime Minister was Boris Johnson, to whom Hall demonstrated conspicuous loyalty throughout the “partygate” scandal and even after Tory MPs removed him from Number 10 because of it.

The Johnson government’s enthusiasm for LTNs reflected that of Johnson himself and of his transport adviser and former media supporter Andrew Gilligan for riding bicycles, a lifestyle preference they – and, as it happens, TfL – believed LTNs would nurture in others.

In opposing LTNs, Hall is consistent in opposing road space-management programmes “Boris” backed just as much as TfL and Sadiq Khan did (it was about the only thing those political antagonists were able to agree about). She is also consistent with the Tories’ previous mayoral candidate, Shaun Bailey, in claiming she would be able to get rid of them when she wouldn’t.

The power it looks as if she might really have as Mayor would be to curtail any further TfL LIP funding for LTNs. Hall made her un-honourable pledge to “remove TfL managed LTNs” on Twitter yesterday in response to transport secretary Mark Harper announcing that he has “stopped funding for any new LTNs” in the name of “choice”.

The current TfL “settlement” with national government will expire on 31 March 2024, five weeks before the mayoral election. Past form suggests we shouldn’t bank on a new deal being negotiated before the present one runs out. But even if it isn’t done until after 2 May – mayoral election day – it seems as if a would-be Mayor Hall would be spared even the trouble of having to say no more LTNs on my watch. And those already in place will stay there for as long as boroughs want them to, whether Hall likes it or not.

Given the latest bout of London Tory disinformation about this issue, it’s worth pointing out again that LTNs have existed in London for a very long time, going back decades before a bunch of new ones were brought in without prior consultation during Covid. They are and always have been planned, built and “managed” by local authorities, not TfL. No honest mayoral candidate should go round saying otherwise.

Update, 12 July 2023, 13:48. Friends are suggesting that the nearest thing there is to a “TfL managed LTN” is the TfL Streetspace scheme introduced to Bishopsgate in August 2020 under pandemic conditions. This restricted motor vehicle access to the street and installed wider pavements and bicycle lanes. TfL has announced that these initially temporary arrangements will now be made permanent. Susan Hall’s campaign has been contacted by On London to find out of she would reverse those change should she become Mayor.

Twitter: Dave Hill and On London. If you value On London’s output, become a supporter or a paid subscriber to Dave’s Substack. Photograph from Susan Hall’s campaign website.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Conservatives, Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, Mark Harper, Shaun Bailey, Susan Hall, transport, Transport for London

John Vane’s London Stories: Lorraine Linton’s big Vauxhall bus station indecision

A fictional Mayor of London faces a very real dilemma about what to do with a revered south London landmark
John Vane

Before sending Frightgeist to be printed I walked all the way from Brixton to Westminster Bridge, just as Lorraine Linton, my fictional Mayor of London, does in the novel. I wanted to make sure my mental pictures of the route, albeit many of them were quite recent, were accurate – my story is a “tall tale”, but the various parts of London it describes needed to be reasonably real. Here’s part of the passage in question from the novel, in which Lorraine arrives at Vauxhall Cross:

“Emerging from beneath the railway bridge at Vauxhall, Lorraine paused to contemplate the bus station with its cantilevered solar arms. Some loved it as a local landmark, others thought it ugly and in the way. Lorraine was troubled by the issue, torn between her own attachment to the building and the logic of removing it. She disliked her indecision being final.”

Vauxhall Cross is where six roads converge on an architectural dog’s dinner served up on the south side of Vauxhall Bridge. In one of his famous guides, architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described it as it was in the mid-20th Century as “one of the most unpleasant road junctions in South London”.

It’s still hard to feel fond of. Despite being served by an Underground and a railway station, the area is dominated by motor vehicles. Its long-standing hostility to pedestrians has been intensified by its baffling Boris Johnson-era bicycle infrastructure. The Secret Intelligence Services (or MI6) building, Sir Terry Farrell’s 1990s attempted modernist homage, was not damaged enough for some tastes by a rocket fired at it in September 2000, probably by Irish Republicans. For such critics, its imagined demolition in the 2015 James Bond film Spectre was a recommendation for life imitating art.

Amid all this kitsch, din and muddle, the bus station has the air of a sanctuary of good order, noble sentiments and relative tranquility. Completed in 2005, it was built at a cost of £4.5 million to consolidate the public transport interchange having been commissioned after a more ambitious project called the Pod, a two-storey oval building designed by Rolfe Judd, became too expensive and was dumped.

The structure, designed by Arup, is exotic in a way few stations are, primarily because of its 200-metre long stainless steel canopy with its twin cantilevered ski-slope prongs at one end, containing 167 solar panels. Between them, these supply a third of the bus station’s electricity requirement.

Ten years have passed since Lambeth Council and Transport for London announced plans to knock it down, just eight years after it opened, as part of a large future regeneration scheme. The 2oth Century Society is among its admirers, but an attempt by the Vauxhall Society to get it listed failed. And in April 2020, following a public inquiry, the government gave the go-ahead for two mixed-use tower blocks of 53 and 42 floors respectively to be put up in its place. A duller bus stop is to be re-provided.

Frightgeist is set in an unspecified “London, lately”. Lorraine Linton is an honest politician who wrestles with difficult dilemmas, such as how to reconcile her affection for the bus station with the arguments for making a different and arguably more rational use of the land it stands on. The Vauxhall bus station, therefore, enabled me to provide readers of my novel with an in-transit insight into Lorraine’s character. And visiting it gave me an excuse to, well, hang around it for a while.

John Vane is a pen name used by On London publisher and editor Dave Hill. Follow John on Twitter and buy Frightgeist either HERE or from bookshop Pages of Hackney. Thanks.

Categories: John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Frightgeist, Vauxhall, Vauxhall Bridge, Vauxhall bus station

London businesses weathering economic storms, survey finds

The latest survey for London Chamber finds progress in the capital, despite adverse circumstances and pessimism about the UK as a whole
Dave Hill

An increasing number of London businesses saw sales pick up during the second quarter of 2023 compared to the first, with domestic orders rising for the first time in five quarters, according to the latest Capital 500 survey for the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The survey, conducted by Savanta before the Bank of England raised interest rates last month, found that 22 per cent on London firms had seen their orders increase compared with the previous there months, up from 15 per cent and 13 per cent had enjoyed increased sales.

Nearly 40 per cent said they expect their profitability and turnover to go up over the next 12 months, although 44 per cent anticipated the economic growth across the UK as a whole to worsen.

The relatively upbeat findings have come despite 69 per cent of firms saying their energy costs rose during the second quarter compared with the first. This was down from 74 per cent in the previous survey, covering the first quarter of this year, though only four per cent of businesses said their energy costs had fallen.

Inflation continues to be cited as the biggest worry for firms, with 66 per cent putting it at the top of their list although this is down from 73 per cent.

Just over one in five (22 per cent) of firms expect their workforce to grow during the coming three months, while only five per cent think it will reduce.

The chamber’s chief executive Richard Burge said: “LCCI’s quarterly economic survey shows yet again the resilience and entrepreneurial drive of the London business community despite the economic headwinds. There has been an uptick in business confidence with 24% of London businesses expecting London’s economy to improve in the next 12 months. With stronger government support, London could lead the national economic recovery. Stubborn inflation figures require supply side measures to keep up the recovery momentum.”

Read the survey results in full, with expert commentary, HERE. Photo from LCCI.

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

Categories: News
Tags: economy, London Chamber of Commerce & Industry, Richard Burge

Tory mayoral hopeful Susan Hall pledges to scrap 20 mph speed limits

The frontrunner to become the main challenger to Sadiq Khan has said she would allow greater speeds on TfL red routes
Noah Vickers, Local Democracy Reporter

The frontrunner to become the Conservatives’ candidate for London Mayor has sparked a row over road safety after pledging to lift speed limits on main roads in central London.

Susan Hall vowed to axe traffic measures introduced by Sadiq Khan, such as the 20 mph limit on main “red route” thoroughfares such as Finchley Road, which she believes have unfairly penalised Londoners who need to use a car.

But Seb Dance, Khan’s deputy mayor for transport, warned that such a move would not speed up journey times and could be dangerous.

“City streets are not motorways, they are shared spaces,” he said. “They are shared with other road users such as cyclists [and] pedestrians. All of the research shows that the average speed in cities is well below 20 mph, so you’re not going to get to your destination any [faster]. But the chances of being killed if you are struck by a vehicle at 20 mph is significantly less than if you’re struck at 30 mph.”

London Assembly member Hall is competing against criminal barrister Moz Hossain for the Tory nomination following the withdrawal of Daniel Korski. Transport for London aims to convert almost 90 miles of main roads to 20 mph by next May to improve road safety.
Ms Hall said she would retain 20mph limits in residential areas and added: “Around schools, I applaud them.”

In May it was revealed that Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby had been caught speeding on the Albert Embankment as he headed towards Lambeth Palace last October. He had been travelling at 25 mph in a 20 mph area.

The number of people being killed or seriously injured on London roads last year increased by 11 per cent, from 3,580 to 3,974. TfL says that speed “remains the biggest risk to road users”, with about half of the fatal collisions last year (48 out of 99) reporting speed as a contributory factor.

It said cutting the speed limit to 20 mph inside the central London congestion charge zone had helped reduce road collisions by a quarter.

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

Categories: News
Tags: Conservatives, road safety, Sadiq Khan, Susan Hall, transport

Uxbridge by-election hustings: Much emitting, signifying little

The contest is being reduced to a quarrel between two men about which of them is the more appalled by a red herring
Dave Hill

In Uxbridge town centre, a few minutes’ walk from its famous, Charles Holden-designed London Underground station, stands a Grade II listed building from the same interwar era. It has the word “Randalls” spelled out in red neon on the front, a reference to it’s having been, until 2015, the home of Randalls of Uxbridge department store, a five-generations family business whose final owner, John Randall, now Lord Randall, was also the MP for the area until he stepped down before the general election held the same year.

In May 2015, Boris Johnson, while still Mayor of London, succeeded Randall as Uxbridge & South Ruislip’s parliamentary representative. In his victory speech, Johnson thanked his then wife Marina Wheeler for her support for his campaign and revealed that it was their wedding anniversary. The world had yet to learn that he was having his cake and eating it with Jennifer Arcuri on the side at the time. And few of his admirers had yet detected the gift for double standards, duplicity and disrespect for rules he would later display as Prime Minister – characteristics that would ultimately prompt him to resign from his seat rather than risk a humbling by-election beating.

Johnson has long been adept at leaving others to clear up his mess. That is the task he has dumped on Hillingdon councillor Steve Tuckwell, the Tory candidate in a contest he is not favourite to win. Given this, it was painful to behold Tuckwell at a hustings last night unable to answer “no” when asked by the chair of the event, Rob Powell of Sky News, if Johnson is an honest man. The ex-MP and ex-PM has done more than anyone, with the possible exception of Liz Truss, to plunge Tuckwell’s party into an electoral death spiral. Yet still Tuckwell can’t admit to voters that “Boris” was a wrong ‘un.

Perhaps he’s decided that any credit he might gain from repudiating Johnson would be outweighed by jeers of “you took your time”. And in fairness to Tuckwell he wasn’t the only candidate at the hustings, organised by the Hillingdon Chamber of Commerce and held at Brunel University, who had been making electoral calculations.

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Headlines have screamed about Labour’s Danny Beales announcing loud and clear that this is “not the right time” for Sadiq Khan to be extending the Ultra-Low Emission Zone to outer London, what with the cost of living crisis still raging. Only three weeks ago he struck a far more neutral tone, stopping short of backing the Labour Mayor’s plan, but giving equal weight to the views of local voters “frustrated with the policy” and others “who are very concerned about air quality”.

Someone or something has put the wind up him. Either he’s playing at ultra-low risk positioning or Tuckwell’s party line about the by-election being “a referendum” about the ULEZ is ringing true – which would be a bit weird, given that already around 85 per cent of cars registered in the borough of Hillingdon, if not more, are ULEZ-compliant.

Yes, some who feel they’ve had to upgrade because of Khan might hold it against Labour. Yes, some who won’t be directly affected might nonetheless feel that it is wrong. But some of those displeased would be voting Tory anyway. Twenty per cent of Hillingdon households don’t have a car at all. And neither Tuckwell nor Beales would have the slightest power to affect a City Hall policy from the back benches of the House of Commons. Aided by the media, this democratic exercise is being reduced to a quarrel over who is the more appalled by a red herring.

Still, naturally enough, given the miserable condition of his party, Tuckwell doesn’t want the by-election to be about anything else. Labour has other ideas and has been pouring stars and activists into the constituency, with Wes Streeting highlighting the sorry state of Hillingdon hospital through a very big megaphone.

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At the hustings, attended by 50-odd people, Tuckwell accused Mayor Khan of cynical opportunism for announcing that he’s told the Met that Uxbridge police station must not be sold off. The cop shop has already been closed to the public for several years, and what difference Khan’s intervention will make to crime levels in the town may prove hard to quantify.

But, cynically or not, that fox is shot. It was “Boris”, of course, who began the process of selling off Met property in order to compensate for Tory government cuts. As Powell reminded Tuckwell, the then Mayor’s mantra at that time was “bobbies, not buildings“. More discomfort for BoJo’s mop-up man.

Tuckwell and Beales were joined for the occasion by Sarah Green for the Greens and Blaise Baquiche for the Liberal Democrats. All said they are opposed to the expansion of Heathrow, a long-running local issue. Tuckwell and Beales disagreed about the state of Uxbridge High Street, with Tuckwell talking it up and Beales saying it is struggling and needs more help.

A comic feature of the evening was Beales and Tuckwell vying to out-local each other, both having been born and raised in the area, although Beales is now a councillor in Camden. On the way home, I reflected on the contrasting legacies of John Randall, remembered as a diligent MP and solid local businessman, and Boris Johnson, whose reputation is rather different.

A win for Tuckwell, a former postman, might represent something of a restoration of Conservative decency in Uxbridge & South Ruislip. It’s never been the case that Labour would walk it. But will pointing at a red herring be enough?

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

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Boris Johnson, Danny Beales, Hillingdon Council, Hillingdon Hospital, Steve Tuckwell, ultra low emission zone, Uxbridge & South Ruislip

London housing crisis becoming ‘an emergency’ as supply falls and rents soar

A new report identifies a chronic shortage of homes for social rent and a continuing squeeze on benefit support driving more and more Londoners into homelessness
Charles Wright

“We are moving from a crisis to an emergency”. That was the verdict of Kensington & Chelsea Council’s housing needs director Kojo Sarpong, as a new London boroughs’ report highlighted the worsening impact of shrinking housing supply and escalating rents on Londoners looking for an affordable home.

Speaking at a Trust for London event marking today’s publication of the analysis, conducted by the London School of Economics and property consultants Savills for London Councils, the trust, the pan-London Capital Letters agency and the London Housing Directors’ Group, Sarpong underlined the grim impact of the crisis in his own borough last year – fewer private sector lets, a three per cent reduction in social housing lettings, and a 14 per cent increase in families presenting as homeless.

Overall, the research shows the number of London properties available for private rent down by a startling 41 per cent since the Covid-19 pandemic, with rents now 20 per cent above their March 2020 level and fewer than three per cent of rental listings affordable to those relying on the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) benefit to cover their housing costs.

There is a particular shortage of larger properties to rent, the report finds, with the overall “downward trajectory of availability” hitting the lower end of the market hardest – meaning fewer options for low-income households and local councils seeking temporary accommodation for residents accepted as statutorily homeless (TA).

Lower turnover of existing tenancies and a continuing shortfall in the supply of affordable housing as well as the shrinking private rented sector are creating  an increasingly “unmanageable” situation, according to London Councils, with 166,000 Londoners living in temporary accommodation, including commercial hotel rooms. The cost to the boroughs is more than £52 million a month, and the TA total is heading towards reaching its highest ever number by the end of this summer.

“This research is the latest evidence of how the capital’s broken housing market is worsening the unsustainable and increasingly unmanageable pressures we face in London,” said Darren Rodwell, London Councils Executive Member for Regeneration, Housing and Planning. “A bad situation is now becoming disastrous. Urgent action is needed from the government to help households avoid homelessness and to reduce the number in temporary accommodation.”

The report also highlighted financial and regulatory pressures on smaller landlords in particular, with those most likely to be working with councils to provide lower-cost temporary accommodation also those most likely to be pulling out of those arrangements or exiting the rental sector altogether. Council procurement of new private rented homes has fallen down 26 per cent in the last year and placement into usually last resort bed and breakfast accommodation had risen by 167 per cent in February, year on year.

The report’s key recommendation is an immediate boost to LHA, which is currently relied on by 300,000 London households to meet their housing costs, raising its level to the 30th percentile of current market rents.

The report finds that the government’s decision to freeze LHA rates since April 2020 contributed to a significant reduction in the number of private rental homes affordable for low-income Londoners. Only 2.3 per cent of London listings on Rightmove in 2022-23 were within reach of those using LHA to pay their rent, compared to 8.9 per cent in 2020-21.

Other recommendations include new arrangements between London’s councils and other public sector bodies, particularly the Home Office, to limit competition for scarce rental properties, which is currently skewing the market and driving up prices.

And as well as an overall increase in funding for new social housing, the government should be helping councils with grants or other capital support to  enable them to buy up properties where landlords were pulling out of the rental market, the report says.

Responding to the report, the Centre for London think tank, whose own analysis of the capital’s temporary accommodation crisis came out last September, said the analysis showed “London is experiencing the sharpest reduction in the supply of privately rented properties of anywhere in the UK”.

Piecemeal solutions ware “not enough”, they added. “The government must work with local authorities and housing providers to get to grips with this crisis before more people are pushed into homelessness or out of the capital entirely.”

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

Categories: News
Tags: Centre For London, Darren Rodwell, homelessness, housing, local housing allowance, London Councils, private rented housing, Trust For London