Loads of bull

In a tapas bar in Spain (well, ok, Marbella) last weekend, I saw this poster for Fundador, a Domecq brandy that was my mother's favourite tipple on family holidays in the seventies and eighties.

The poster shows an angry-looking bull rearing over a fence, on the other side of which a young man lies sprawled in the grass, his capote de brega (bullfighter's cape) half-covering his legs. He has been trying his luck with the bull, we infer, and has been chased over the fence by it. AL Kennedy writes, in her elegant study of bullfighting, that it was not unusual (though definitely discouraged) for aspirant toreros to steal onto rural granaderos (cattle ranches) by night to hone their skills.

Bulls are a popular motif for Spanish brandies. Domecq's previous advertising for Fundador had included a poster of a young picnicker chased up a tree. Don Alvaro Domecq y Diéz, who ran the family company from 1937, was a bull-fighter and -breeder. And Osborne's bull signs, seen on hilltops in silhouette against the harsh Spanish sun, have become one of the most instantly recognisable symbols of the country.

But I couldn't help thinking there was something else going on here, perhaps because I've been reading Giles Tremlett's excellent book on Spain and its carefully curated amnesia.

The poster dates from 1968, the tail end of the Francoist era, when its harsh Catholic Nationalist ideology was increasingly under siege, not least from the bikini-clad holiday makers who were starting to arrive in Benidorm and points south. Does the poster reflect the anxieties of the beleaguered?

The young man is not dressed in traditional Spanish peasant clothes, let alone in a bullfighter's traje de luces. Rather, he is wearing jeans and a leather jacket, and his hair may have seen some pomade. His boots even look like they might have a cuban heel. He looks more like a rocker than a bull-fighter, a symbol of the threat to Spanish values posed by teenage rebellion and delinquency. In which case, perhaps the bull represents his nemesis, Spain's eternal Francoist essence - virile, macho, tied to the land, 'natural'.

A Domecq poster representing the triumph of traditionalism and machismo over coiffed modernist degeneracy would, I suspect, have fitted with the boss's politics. Don Alvaro was not only a bull-fighter. but more significantly a keen Francoist, fighting for the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War and being appointed Mayor of Jerez by Franco, and also a member of the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei.

But I wonder whether there's something more. As the young man sprawls helplessly in the grass (his legs at very odd angles, but that's another story) and the bull eyes him, it all looks a bit 'Tom of Finland'. Is the bull after a bit more than just goring (as Zeus was when he appeared as a bull to rape Europa in Greek myth)? Is it a sly joke, or a subconscious reference? Or is it simply advertising? Sometimes, as Freud never said, a bull is just a bull.

Slow Train Coming - apocalyptic glee and abandoned adoration

It was forty years ago today (or last Tuesday anyhow) that Bob Dylan unleashed on the world the stream of invective, religious chauvinism, misogyny and racism that is Slow Train Coming, the first of his born-again albums.  All these years later, Slow Train is still shocking and enthralling in equal measure; much against my better judgement, it’s one of my favourite Dylan albums.

Mark Knopfler’s guitar has rarely sounded better than it does casting shimmering chords and arpeggios around the punchy backbone of the Muscle Shoals Horns and Pick Withers’ drumming. Helena Springs and Dylan’s future wife Carolyn Dennis provide backing ballast to Dylan’s voice, which sounds unusually clear, lively, committed.

Most of the good stuff is on the first side. The loping Gotta Serve Somebody sets up the album’s basic Manichean thesis – the world is divided into the godly and the wicked, and you gotta choose your side. Three tracks later, the belligerently swaggering title track pours scorn on everything from food surpluses, to OPEC, to Alabama road safety regulation.

But it is the tracks that these two sandwich which draw me back to the album time and again.  Dylan starts Precious Angel thankful for his damascene conversion, but swiftly moves on to excoriating those who remain unredeemed. Then he switches to a chorus – “Shine your light, shine your light on me” –  that is sparkling and joyous, a sincere riposte to the woozy gospel posturing of Shine a Light on the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St a few years earlier.

One of the song’s joys is the way that, over six minutes, the pace picks up and Bob Dylan’s voice audibly warms and becomes more enthusiastic. By verse two, he directs his attention to his immediate circle:

“My so-called friends have fallen under a spell;

They look me squarely in the eye and they say, ‘Well all is well’.

Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high

When men will beg God to kill them, and they won’t be able to die?”

The pay-off stings like a slap in the face – talk about throwing shade – and the lines are sung with almost indecent glee. Dylan has not found a friend in Jesus but rather a harsh avenger.

The next track, I Believe In You, is very different in tone. Rather than triumphantly overseeing the apocalypse, Dylan is himself cast out, persecuted for his beliefs, for his love. The song mixes divine and secular imagery, sometimes seeming to address itself to a one-night stand, sometimes to an absent lover, sometimes to a forsaking deity. “Don’t!” - twice Dylan pleads not to be abandoned, his voice contorting into the yelp of wounded animal. Few Dylan songs sound so raw and direct, so adoring, with some of the eroticised longing that early medieval hymns direct at the bloodied body of Christ.

It’s the sound of someone utterly convinced of his righteousness, in love with his own new-found passion. It is as captivating as it is horrifying.

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Could tighter border controls boost London's population (July 2019)

[Published on Centre for London blog, 26 July 2019]

After easing off in 2017, London’s population growth picked up pace last year to hit 83,000, with a resurgence in international immigration the principal cause of the recovery, as illustrated in Centre for London’s most recent edition of The London Intelligence.

The latest ONS population projections suggest that London will continue to grow at around this level in the coming years, adding 774,000 residents over the period 2016-26; growth of 8.8 per cent. The capital will still be the fastest growing English region, but will not be growing as fast as it did in the ten years to 2017, when growth was estimated at 1.1 million residents (15 per cent). Net international immigration outstripped net domestic out-migration by around 10 per cent last year, but the ONS forecast the net impact to be more balanced in future with natural change (births minus deaths) continuing to account for the expanding population.

Looming over these projections, however, is the spectre of Brexit. Leaving the European Union will definitely have an impact, but what will it be? It could be that the UK’s departure will lead to an even sharper slowdown in migration; certainly immigration tailed off during the two years of limbo since the referendum, and remains much lower than it was in 2015 or 2016. Given London’s high migrant population, this could hit the capital, and its economy, particularly hard.

But beyond the current hiatus, post-Brexit immigration rules could do precisely the opposite. Notwithstanding the change of government (and any deals done as part of future trade negotiations), the plan appears to be for EU and other migrants to be on an equal footing. Immigration from within the EU may fall back, while immigration from further afield may rise or at least stay steady. The London Intelligence already shows a rebalancing in the number of national insurance numbers issued to EU and non-EU nationals: the former were six per cent lower in the year to March 2019 than in the previous year; the latter were 21 per cent higher.

This matters because immigration from beyond Europe tends to have a different geographic distribution from European migration. Specifically, it is more concentrated in London and – to a lesser extent – other cities. While London has just over twice as many EU migrants in its working age population as non-urban areas of England and Wales do, it has four times the proportion of people born beyond the EU. Similarly, while the largest ‘core cities’ (Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield) have similar levels of EU-born working-age residents to the rest of the country, they have twice the proportion of people born further afield.

	% of 16-64 year old population born in other EU countries	% of 16-64 year old population born in non-EU countries
London	14	32
English and Welsh core cities	7	16
Rest of England and Wales	6	8

Source: Annual Population Survey, 2018

So more immigration from outside the EU, and particularly from emerging economies of the southern and eastern hemispheres, may mean more concentration in London and other big cities, where people from these countries will already find settled communities of their former compatriots.

And in London, this trend may be intensified by another element of the government’s proposals, a pay threshold for jobs held by foreign workers – designed to prevent the import of cheap unskilled labour. The government has not confirmed what this threshold should be but the Migration Advisory Committee recommended maintaining the current level of £30,000 (while abolishing other requirements such as the ‘resident labour market test’, which requires jobs to be advertised within the UK before recruiting overseas).

While many jobs in London, particularly in migration-dependent sectors such as restaurants, pay poorly, salaries are significantly higher overall. Government data on earnings show that 66 per cent of workers in London earn more than £30,000 pa, compared to 30 to 40 per cent of workers in other regions. So setting a minimum pay threshold – whether at £30,000 or at lower levels, as groups such as London First have argued – could further concentrate immigration in London, where more jobs would in theory be accessible for foreign workers.

Giving preference to immigrants with higher qualifications, through a more ‘points-based’ system as advocated by Boris Johnson during the Conservative leadership campaign, could further focus immigration in the capital, as immigrants who settle in London also tend to be more qualified.

These factors, together with perceptions of London as a city that is still open to immigrants, may serve to focus future international immigration on the capital, potentially turbo-charging population growth. This may look superficially serendipitous: London, the part of England most at ease with immigration and most opposed to Brexit, may see a resurgence in immigration, while changing demographics, and tougher salary and qualification requirements may curb immigration beyond the M25.

But it may also deepen economic as well as cultural differences between London, other cities and the rest of the UK. While London continues to make the case for infrastructure to support a growing population, other regions may start seeing population decline, as their economies struggle without the migrant workforce that farmers, restaurateurs and hoteliers rely on.

We may even, in time, see a shift in the tone of national debate, with politicians making the case for immigration rather than avoiding the subject – or even seeking to implement policies to encourage immigrants to look beyond the big cities as in Canada. As with so many aspects of Brexit, seemingly simple moves can have complex, surprising and far-reaching consequences.

My thanks to Professor Tony Travers of the LSE for his insights and help with this article.

Ceremony and memory (July 2019)

[Published OnLondon, 10 July 2019]

26 July, 2012 was a warm evening. I arrived to meet a friend at a pub in Brighton, which was hosting its annual visit from the Chanctonbury Ring Morris. As we sat outside, and the dancers whirled, jingled and clacked, I took a photo and tweeted – very drolly I thought – “Beat that, Danny Boyle.”

The next night, by common consent, he did. And how. After a slightly iffy handover in Beijing in 2008, featuring double-decker buses, bowler hats and a bemused-looking Boris Johnson, the London 2012 opening ceremony was a spectacular. It took in Brunel, Blake, Berners-Lee and Beckham; dancing nurses, lesbian kisses, and parachuting monarchs, Shakespeare and smokestacks. A nervous nation breathed a sigh of relief, and began to tell itself that maybe, just maybe, the London Olympic and Paralympic Games would go okay.

Seven years later, the lavish performance is still memorable, a very modern celebration of patriotism and pride, unity and diversity. But its meaning is now freighted with awareness of what followed, of the divisions that were triggered or laid bare by Brexit. We re-watch it through our fingers, like the opening scenes of a film where unsuspecting teens arrive for a party at a beautiful, isolated, cabin in the woods.

For many Remainers the ceremony stands for everything that Brexit threatens to destroy. Writing just after the EU referendum, Frank Cottrell-Boyce (who co-created the event with Boyle) made the contrast explicit: “The nation we saw in the opening ceremony and the nation we saw in the referendum are both real. They’re two parts of diptych. One holds out the possibility of inclusion and ease. The other might be seen as a kind of scream of pain and fury that tells us how it feels to be excluded from that ease.”

Similar sentiments are easily found on Twitter:

“The opening ceremony was the best of our gods, Brexit is the worst of our demons.”

“The optimism, pride and celebration of multiculturalism woven into that marvellous opening ceremony should have been a launchpad. Instead we made it a diving board.”

“On the night before Brexit I will be watching the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony and wondering what the fuck went wrong…”

For some Leavers, on the other hand, the opening ceremony’s celebratory optimism remains a reminder of Britain’s potential, of what Brexit can recapture if only the nation would re-unite. In the recent words of Liz Truss: “We need to revive the Olympic 2012 spirit – a modern, patriotic, enterprising vision of Britain and we need to use Brexit to achieve that.” In 2016 – a few days after the referendum – Johnson wrote pointedly of the “gloomy predictions that were banished” by London 2012.

But not everyone is convinced. Writing in the Guardian this week, Dawn Foster identified the “false premises” underpinning “centrist thinking”; one was “that the 2012 London Olympic ceremony represented an idyllic high-point of culture and unity in the UK, rather than occurring amid the brutal onslaught of austerity, with food bank use growing and the bedroom tax ruining lives”.

Others have argued that the ceremony’s reprise of a rosy national story fostered a sense of “Britain can make it” nostalgia that stoked anti-EU sentiment. Conversely – and as hinted by Cottrell-Boyce – its inclusive vision has been seen as deepening the resentment of those who felt alienated from the multicultural zeitgeist – a resentment which would later find expression in some Brexit votes.

Certainly the ceremony’s narrative – The internet! The NHS! Britpop! – can sound like a Tony Blair conference speech, but with better dancing and more verbs. And the golden glow of our memories can blind us to what else was happening in the early years of this decade: the first austerity budgets, recession, riots on the streets of London, divisions that were perhaps as deep as they are today but less visible.

But fact that the meaning and significance of a sport festival’s opening ceremony is still so keenly contested is a tribute to its persisting power – as a symbol of what we are losing, as a reminder of what we could be, or simply as a powerful piece of propaganda for a national unity that was always illusory.

In 2016, scheduled “four years on” reflections on the opening ceremony collided with the disruptive shock of the EU referendum result. I suspect we will still be debating both on 24 July next year, as Tokyo 2020 gets underway.

Belts, lumps and extensions (June 2019)

[Published OnLondon, 7 June 2019]

Nothing ignites a policy debate like the subject of London’s Green Belt. You might think Brexit had eclipsed it, but the discussion at a recent roundtable on the issue showed that the flame still burns bright.

On one side, the Green Belt was held up as an anachronism, restricting land supply, thereby pushing up house prices in the capital, pulling the lower rungs of the property ladder further and further out of reach and deepening London’s affordability crisis. The Green Belt isn’t even that green, the argument went, accommodating as it does golf courses, haulage yards, and other economically or aesthetically dubious uses.

On the other side, the Green Belt’s defenders argue that all of this is premature, or even beside the point. London still has plentiful and oft-replenished stocks of “brownfield’’ (previously developed) land. Allowing London to spread into the Green Belt rather than making the most of these inner city sites would be socially and environmentally disastrous; it would hollow out the capital and lead to the pattern of urban dereliction and car-dependent sprawl that has blighted many US cities. We should focus – first and last and always – on building out the brownfield sites within the M25.

These positions are entrenched and passionately defended, though it is worth noting that some of the arguments seem to be at cross-purposes. Defenders of the Green Belt do not actually hold it to be an arcadian idyll. For them, its primary purpose is containment, not beauty. Neither do (most) advocates for change argue for wholesale abandonment of any constraints on development, and for the frenzy of speculation and sprawl that would likely ensue.

But the real problem with both strongly-held position is that they do not allow for nuance, or the complexity inherent in a system where planning, consumer choice, housing finance, urban design, international investment and local politics intertwine. So here are six see-saw statements – each balanced on a “but” – exploring whether London really has a land shortage and whether the Green Belt might help address this.

The Green Belt is not all green, but that’s not really the point

When a “green belt” was first proposed by the Greater London Regional Planning Committee in 1935, it was described both as a recreational amenity and as a constraint on growth, and was envisaged as being a few miles wide. When the first green belts were introduced in the mid-1950s, the focus shifted to the latter function – to checking metropolitan growth, stopping towns merging with each other and preserving their character. Leisure and nature conservation were secondary. And as the population of south east England has grown, London’s Green Belt has been defensively extended in stages to cover more than 500,000 hectares, three times the area of Greater London. The “belt” is at least as important as the “green”.

London has accommodated huge population growth, but at a price

In the post-war period, as Inner London lost population, the Green Belt prevented the city from sprawling out as many US cities did, although many Londoners settled – by choice or dispersal – in the new and old towns that surrounded the capital. Since the tide turned in the late 1980s, London has housed a population that has grown by a third, from 6.7 to 8.8 million, within its boundaries. And it has done this while persistently failing to build the number of new homes that planners say are needed.

How so? Overcrowding has increased and the number of vacant homes has fallen but, most dramatically, house prices have shot up – accelerated by speculative frenzy and in recent years cheap credit – both in London itself and in the surrounding towns and cities that have seen commuting increase. If London is to continue to grow, this approach is not sustainable: building more homes, and in particular more low-priced homes, has to be part of the solution to what is becoming a crisis for young Londoners and a threat to London’s economy.

There are ‘sites’ for London’s population growth, but their deliverability is debatable.

The draft London Plan, published in late 2017, maintains that London can accommodate the vast majority of the 66,000 homes per year that it needs to built. The Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment that underpins the Plan estimates that sites for 65,000 of these can be found on a mixture of identified and “windfall” sites, many of them in Outer London.

The Plan has just completed its “examination in public” (a form of public enquiry) and the planning inspectors will report on their findings in September. It is fair to say that the examination saw debate about the realism of housing targets. How could London double the rate of building, given the current track record, the controversial nature of building more in Outer London, and the Plan’s clampdown on release of industrial land (which has supplied 100 hectares a year for development in recent years, three times the level anticipated)?

Getting planning permission for small sites around Outer London town centres is likely to be tough, but planning permission is only the start. London already has a backlog of permissions, with 300,000 homes – ten years’ supply at current build rates – in the pipeline. Some of these permissions may be scuppered by planning obligations, or by the need for investment in infrastructure or remediation. Others may be being held back by developers nervous about London’s shaky-looking market. And some may have been secured solely to establish value for a site, by landowners who have no intention of building.

Finally, high land prices mean that even when new housing is built, the viability of affordable housing becomes a matter for intense negotiation, often stalling schemes. Capital programmes for affordable housing have been cut to the bone, so without more funding in the system, it is hard for affordable housing to be built at scale without market housing to cross-subsidise it.

Density is good for cities, but maximising density isn’t always best

But if London’s remaining sites are scarce and/or difficult, the city can surely build at higher densities. Within its boundaries, London is much less densely built than New York, Paris or Barcelona, and the importance of urban density – to create vitality, make efficient use of land, and support public transport and other services – has come to the fore recently. Density is good for cities and citizens.

Yet density cannot be increased across the city simply by turning a dial. Barcelona has incredibly high density because of its characteristic block formation. Creating this type of density in London would require wholesale demolition and reconstruction of a city that remains dominated by two to three storey terraces and semi-detached houses. New developments are being built much more densely than in the past, surging past planning guidelines and taking advantage of lower levels of car ownership. But this uneven pattern of “lumpy” development is not only creating community controversy, it is not even making much difference to the speed of housebuilding. Developers are simply releasing land more slowly.

Unbuckling the Green Belt would likely be a disaster, but that’s not the only way

Watching the glacial pace of development within London, you can’t help but wonder whether to be radically disruptive. Ditching the Green Belt designation would likely lead to a frenzy of activity but maybe not to so much building.

Many local authorities would still seek to protect former Green Belt land from development, while the planning system would see a flurry of applications and appeals, agricultural land prices would spiral upwards and urban land prices would fall. Some landowners – maybe those with the deepest pockets and the sharpest lawyers – would secure planning permission for new development, and some of that development might even be built, pockmarking the hills and plains around the M25 with new settlements. So how many new houses would actually be built is pretty moot, and whether they would be decently designed or planned even more so.

But there are other ways to open up more housing land. One, which has been promoted by the Centre for Cities and Barney Stringer from planning consultancy Quod, looks to areas around railways stations to provide capacity. Taking a two kilometre catchment area around stations, they estimate that such sites could provide room for 1.4 million homes within Greater London’s boundary, or 3.4 million if the whole Green Belt was included. This would be a more rational form of development, with public transport access reducing car dependency and enabling “compact city” development. But there’s still no guarantee that any of these homes would be built, particularly around Outer London centres where the Green Belt has been enthusiastically embraced as a brake on new build.

An alternative approach would be that advocated by David Rudlin, Nicholas Falk and colleagues from urban designers Urbed, in their winning submission to the 2014 Wolfson Prize. Looking at an imaginary city (loosely modelled on Oxford), they proposed that “rather than nibbling into the fields that surround the city and all its satellite villages, we should take a good confident bite out of the green belt to create sustainable urban extensions”. National government and the Mayor of London could agree to identify and designate a location for an urban extension, take control of the land, develop a master plan, and use value capture to invest in roads, rails and social infrastructure. They could also drive the pace of development, sharing risks and proceeds with developers willing to commit to the quality, mix and speed of development required.

Urban extensions might look like a soft option, but they could boost the inner city too

But would an urban extension also drive dereliction, diverting investment and resources from urban sites? This argument is powerful, uniting green belt defenders and urban renaissance advocates, but it is not the inevitable outcome. Firstly, construction and investment capacity is not fixed; London continues to be a favoured destination for investment, and workforce capacity can be addressed over time. Secondly, city centre and urban extension could be made to work together – some of the value generated within the extension could be earmarked for reinvestment in city centre sites where infrastructure needs and market conditions undermine viability. And while an urban extension was being planned, developers would have every incentive to complete their work within the city.

Timing is critical, given the years that debating, planning and building a new piece of city would require. Our first priority should still be delivering the major planning applications that are within London’s pipeline. Together with the new sites identified in the London Plan, these may meet London’s needs for ten years or more, depending on whether and when “windfall” sites, such as car parks, become available. But we should be starting work on a Green Belt review now if we are to have any chance of seeing new homes built by 2030.

This approach may look heavy-handed and statist – and it is – but the government has assumed powers to build new towns in the past when it has taken the need for new homes seriously. Legislation to set up new town development corporations and urban and mayoral development corporations remains in place. These public bodies can buy up land (including through compulsory purchase), grant planning permission, and build homes and infrastructure. Land would need to be bought at existing (mainly agricultural) prices – rather than “hope values” based on its end use – in order for value uplifts to fund infrastructure, but this is a policy change that is already being advocated by Civitas among others. The main losers would be players in the shadowy land options market, for whom few tears would be shed.

An abrupt switch in policy on the Green Belt would probably be as disastrous as it is unlikely, but that shouldn’t rule out a sensible, long-term review or at least a more nuanced debate. The housing crisis in London and the wider south east is too deeply entrenched and complex for a single magical solution. A Green Belt review, backed by a clear commitment to take powers over planning and land ownership, should form a part of the toolkit for building more homes for the next million Londoners.

Better rent (May 2019)

[Published on Centre for London blog, 23 May 2019]

In our world of clone towns, megabrands and oligopolies, we understandably venerate the small business, the sole trader or micro chain. Renting somewhere to live may be an exception. If smaller doesn’t mean better, could larger landlords help pacify London’s wild west rental market?

Private renting is heavily dominated by smaller operators: a 2016 UK-wide survey found that more than 50 per cent of rented homes were owned by landlords with three properties or fewer. Most small landlords are not professionals: they may have put spare cash into rental property to generate retirement income, or have retained homes as they have moved up ‘the housing ladder’, or in some cases may be owning and letting out property in one place, while themselves being renters in another.

Not all small landlords are rogues, but many have a bad reputation for good reason. Landlords and letting agents are blamed for shoddy conditions and delayed repairs, for inflated charges and deposits withheld without good reason, for taking advantage of ‘no fault’ evictions to change tenants and boost rents every year. In a landlord’s market, many of these practices are consequence-free – there’s no corporate reputation to defend, and unhappy tenants have limited recourse apart from moving on; there’s always someone ready to take their place.

Against this backdrop, the arrival in London of professional ‘Build to Rent’ landlords, who build flats, and let them directly to private renters, should be good news. Build to Rent landlords are professionals. They have corporate reputations to consider, and actively market their properties on the basis of the quality of accommodation and of the service that they can provide (albeit at a price).
Recent estimates suggested that around 50,000 Build to Rent apartments have been built or given planning permission since 2009. Their developers are an interesting mix: they include joint ventures, housing associations, traditional commercial developers, and institutional investors looking for long-term financial returns.

The Build to Rent sector only accounts for around five per cent of the one million private sector rentals in London, but the numbers are steadily growing. (Calculated from Housing in London 2018 tables.)

The sector may even be starting to have an impact on rental levels. Rental growth has slowed in recent years. Government data cited in the most recent edition of Centre for London’s quarterly The London Intelligence showed that rents are now static, having shot up from the end of 2010 to early 2017. Figures compiled from a Dataloft survey of new lettings tell a subtly different story. These figures show rents continuing to grow, with larger properties showing the fastest growth and one-bed flats showing the slowest.

Rival explanations for the deceleration of rent increases include suggestions that lower international migration levels are having an impact on demand, as well as arguments that recent completions are leading to a moment of over-supply – particularly of flats – before the market slowdown puts the dampers on new development.

But could the growth in Build to Rent have helped too? Many Build to Rent landlords offer three-year tenancies, with index-linked rent increases, as standard. Even if rents catch up with the market as a whole at the end of three years, these new tenancies could be helping to damp down growth right now. They may also explain the difference between continuing growth in rents for new lettings, and a more subdued picture overall.

This market moderation comes – whether by coincidence or not – just as the issue of rent control is rising back up the agenda. While government backed off proposals for minimum three year tenancies last year, it has proposed abolishing ‘no fault’ evictions. This may partly be in response to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan suggesting that rent control could be a key plank of his re-election campaign – though this would still require government support through legislation.

Build to Rent landlords say that heavy handed rent control will simply kill off their business model. They already struggle to make schemes stack up, they say, competing for land against developers building for sale, who can afford to pay 30 per cent more for land.  Removing their ability to charge what the market can afford in rent will push scheme viability even deeper underwater.

But ‘rent control’ can take a number of forms, from formal setting of private rents, to simply index-linking rises during the course of longer tenancies. If more and more Build to Rent property is offered on the basis of three-year tenancies with index-linked rent rises, the sector may be able to offer a self-regulation solution. This may not tackle all the issues of affordability in London’s rental market, but could forestall the need for legislation, sidestep parliamentary battles, and sustain sense in London’s rental market without stifling a sector that is just finding its feet.

Big Bang and Grande Bouffe - the eateries that boosted London (March 2019)

 [Originally in OnLondon, 8 March 2019]


‘There’s a Big Bang in the City, We’re all on the make.” (Shopping, Pet Shop Boys, 1987).

The news this week that the Kensington Place restaurant is to shut its doors is more than just another restaurant closure. It completes a chapter in the incredible story of London’s 30 year resurgence.

The years 1986 and 1987 were pivotal for the capital and the high water mark for Thatcherism. In April 1986, amidst a blaze of fireworks and protests, the Greater London Council was abolished alongside other metropolitan councils, banishing the spectre of “socialism on the rates”. And in October – after years of wrangling – the “Big Bang” transformed financial services.

The details of the Big Bang are complex. Essentially it was a package of reforms that deregulated stockbroking, opened up London’s Stock Exchange to foreign-owned firms and enabled computerised trading to replace the frantic scrum of “open outcry” trading on its floor. But the Big Bang represented something more – the apotheosis of confident capitalism, personified by the mobile phone-toting Yuppie, in TV dramas such as Capital City, and by Harry Enfield’s Loadsamoney – conceived as satire, but sometimes treated as a role model.

The Big Bang was also cited as a factor in the revival in net international migration, which meant London’s population started to grow again – albeit just by a few thousand a year – after decades of decline. At the time, London’s return to growth was seen as an anomaly, or even a blip. Writing in early 1987, Tony Champion and Peter Congdon suggested that the “surge in net international migration for City jobs will settle down after Big Bang”.

In 1987, as the Conservatives celebrated their third consecutive election victory, and the City of London was rocked by the twin shocks of the “Black Monday” crash and the emergence of Canary Wharf to the east, the Big Bang was also having an impact to the west. Three restaurants opened to cater to London’s growing gang of globally mobile professionals with sophisticated palates. In doing so, they put London’s food scene on the road to transformation from international punchline to global draw.

In Hammersmith, Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray took over a disused warehouse building next door to Ruth’s husband’s firm, Richard Rogers Partnership. The River Café started by serving lunches to local workers, before gradually opening for longer hours and a wider clientele. But from the outset Ruth and Rose focused on fresh flavours and carefully chosen ingredients, an Italian cuisine that was a world away from the mounds of pasta, check table cloths and straw-covered chianti bottles of traditional trattorias.

In South Kensington, Terence Conran opened Bibendum in the opulent Michelin Tyre Company building on Fulham Road. Chef Simon Hopkinson’s cuisine was as deeply rooted in the rich sauces and offals of French country cooking as the River Café’s was in in the bright and earthy flavours of Tuscany. But, also like the River Café, Bibendum matched this respect for the classics with a stripped-back modernist ethos. Both restaurants were a world away from the tweezered pretension of 1980s nouvelle cuisine.

A little further west, Rowley Leigh opened Kensington Place, serving modern British food (almost a contradiction in terms at the time) in deliberately informal surroundings, dispensing with table cloths to create a London version of the neighbourhood brasseries that dotted Paris, and pioneering dishes such as scallops with pea puree that have now become gastropub standards.

By 1989, the “Lawson Boom” that had driven the ebullience of yuppie culture had run out of steam and the UK began to dip into a recession that hit London particularly hard, with soaring interest rates, a property market crash and thousands of homeowners facing negative equity. But the three restaurants that reinvented London’s food scene survived, and London’s population growth picked up pace. As Kensington Place closes, to be redeveloped for housing, it is caught in the undertow of the wave of change that it surfed.

5 ways mayors have changed London (Nov 2018)

[Originally published on Centre for London blog, 7 November 2018]

This year, the London Mayoralty turns 18 years old and ‘comes of age’. During this time, London’s three Mayors – Ken, Boris, Sadiq – have used the limited levers that they had – sometimes to breaking point –  to improve the city.

But what impact have they actually had? Here’s five ways that the Mayors have transformed our city since the Mayoralty was established.

1. Leading London’s urban renaissance

The London Plan, as adapted and evolved by the three Mayors, set a world standard in promoting smart growth, sustainable development, urban renaissance.  The plans committed to accommodating growth within the city, focusing on public transport walking and cycling, developing ever more ambitious housing targets, renewing the public realm, and harnessing the dynamics of development to create a fairer and greener city.

2. Driving transport innovation

The Mayor’s ability to integrate transport and development – the envy of other cities like New York – has been central to the London Plan.  But Transport for London – chaired by all three Mayors in a signal of its significance – has also led policy innovation in transport – from the original congestion charging zone, to bike rentals, to the Oyster card and contactless payment, to the ultra-low emissions zone.

3. Providing civic leadership

The Mayors have also provided a focal point for civic leadership. This has not just been a matter of fronting bids for major events, and representing the city in trade fairs and Whitehall spending rounds. It has also sadly meant leading the city at times of tragedy – after the London bombings in 2005, and the terrorist attacks and Grenfell Tower fire that the city faced last summer. The Mayors have, with differing emphases and tone, presented London and the world with an image of capital that is inclusive, tolerant, diverse, open, united.  It’s an aspect of the Mayor’s role that is not mentioned in any statute, but eighteen years on you wonder how we lived without it.

4. Doing deals with central Government

Having a Mayor has enabled London to do deals with central Government on how to finance and deliver major infrastructure projects.  These deals – on the London 2012 Olympics and legacy, on Crossrail and on the Northern Line Extension – have helped London to accommodate its growth, to weather the storms of the financial crisis, and to transform areas benighted by decades of underinvestment – while also building world-leading capacity in major projects.

5. Making the case for more power

And the Mayors have secured new powers through statute.

• In 2006, the Mayor was given powers to stage the London 2012 Olympics – which was fortunate given that he and the government had committed to do so the previous year.
• In 2007, planning powers and housing powers were strengthened, as was the London Assembly’s role in approving mayoral appointments.
• In 2011, policing oversight – always a bone of contention between the Mayor and Home Secretary was reformed, as the Metropolitan Police Authority was replaced by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime
• Also in 2011 the Localism Act empowered the London Assembly to reject mayoral strategies, and passed control of HCA and LDA land to the Mayor, delegated the affordable housing budget, enabled the Mayor to establish Mayor Development Corporations – shifting the focus of the GLA from strategy to delivery.But progress since 2011 has been faltering.  There have been devolution deals on the Adult Education Budget, agreements on health and social care, and discussions on justice devolution.  But despite two London finance commissions, and strong representations from the Mayor and London Councils, further devolution feels like unfinished business.

And at no time since the Mayoralty was set up 18 years ago have the challenges facing the capital looked more daunting. Local government services are under increasing pressure. A cooling housing market is leading to a slowdown in the construction and availability of affordable homes. Migration from the EU and across the country is falling. And all of this before Brexit.

Against that background, we need to rethink the way London operates for new times. We need to continue to make the case for new powers for the Mayor – across housing, taxes, and skills, to help London meet the challenges ahead.

S H O P P I N G (Sept 2018)

[Originally published OnLondon, 30 Sept 2018]

What are Londoners like? Judging by recently released experimental Office for National Statistics data on spending patterns, we are a surprisingly healthy, even ascetic bunch. We each spend around £25,000 each year, 30 per cent more than people across the UK as a whole. But we spend much more on fish and fruit and less on cigarettes and alcohol; more on gym memberships, less on consumer goods. What do these figures really tell us about life in London?

The data suggest some patterns that will be familiar to every Londoner.  We spend an outrageous amount on housing, which accounts for more than £10,000 of the average Londoner’s expenditure every year – twice as much as the UK average. Transport spending is around £2,500 per year across London and the UK alike, but Londoners spend 60 per cent of that sum on transport services such as tubes, buses and taxis, while 70 per cent of average UK transport spending goes on buying and maintaining private vehicles.

The focus on services as opposed to goods is a common thread, and probably arises from a mixture of lifestyle choice and necessity. Modern consumption, we are often told, focuses on experiences rather than on accumulating “stuff”, which is lucky for Londoners, given the insecure tenure and Lilliputian accommodation that many have to put up with.

Londoners spend nearly 30 per cent less than others in the UK on recreational durables – cameras, hi-fis, TVs etc – but more on recreational and sporting services (gym memberships and tickets), and on hotels and restaurants. We don’t have the space for giant TVs or time to watch them, but we do have the almost limitless possibilities of London on our doorstep. The one item of home furnishings that Londoners do spend significantly more on is cutlery and glasses – even the most bijou flat can accommodate a David Mellor teaspoon.

But other aspects of the figures prompt questions. Why do Londoners spend so little per head on vices such as drinking, smoking and gambling (while level-pegging with the rest of the UK on drugs and prostitution)? Wouldn’t you expect a young city with packed bars and pavements to be spending more? Is it simply that Londoners are too hard-up?

That may be part of the answer. But London is not one thing, and there is no such person as an average Londoner. The city that celebrates hedonism and liberation is also the UK’s most religious place. The city with the biggest lesbian, gay and bisexual population is also the city with the lowest proportion of births outside marriage. The millennials who foreswear alcohol or meat for reasons of health or expense live alongside those who do so for religious or cultural reasons.

London mixes conservatism and liberalism in its society as much as in its politics. Diversity and openness to the world make London a city where anyone can live the life they choose. The spending patterns of Londoners illustrate how these myriad lifestyles can contrast but also overlap with each other. Full data below.

From adhocracy to algorithm - notes on mayoral style (July 2018)

 [Originally published in OnLondon, 7 July 2018]

Halfway through his first term, there are some curious paradoxes about Sadiq Khan’s tenure as Mayor of London. He has a solid record of announcements under his belt, from a remixed London Plan to cash for affordable housing and eye-catching initiatives such as the borough of culture or ballots on estate regeneration.

While there’s a mounting funding crisis in Transport for London, initiatives such as the Hopper fare for buses have been successful, even if pedestrianising Oxford Street has fallen foul of Westminster Council politics. And Sadiq has campaigned for a capital-friendly Brexit, been vigorous in promoting London’s openness, and appointed well-respected and diverse deputy mayors and committees of advisors.

And yet. And yet. Despite assiduous media management, there are some voices – from Greater London Authority officers to housebuilders to senior borough executives – who talk of the Mayor as remote, inaccessible, disengaged. You can’t meet with him or speak with him, they say. You think you’ve agreed something with a deputy mayor, they complain, but then Sadiq does his own thing. It’s all smoke and mirrors, run by a tight gang around the Mayor who already have their eye on his next big job.

It’s worth pausing to ask whether these murmurs of discontent are simply the protests of the former in-crowd feeling the chill of a change in administration and a significant change in political direction. There’s certainly some of this, and you could argue that previous mayors were perhaps too eager to court housebuilders to little effect in terms of housing delivery.

But I think there’s something more – a change in style, or even mode of governance. Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone both governed in a highly personal manner; they wielded their authority in a way that the sociologist Max Weber might have described as “charismatic”. For Ken, leadership was a matter of drawing together the factions and alliances that had enabled him to rise to the top of the Greater London Council, doing deals with developers even when he felt like bringing a long spoon, schmoozing the blazered sportsocrats of the International Olympic Committee, and alternately raging at government and wheedling powers and resources from it.

Boris’s regime was even more personalised. From successes such as the promotion of the “Olympicopolis” legacy plan for the Olympic Park – now renamed Eastbank – to more questionable follies such as the ArcelorMittal Orbit, the Garden Bridge and Emirates cable car, his most prominent initiatives were high risk, opportunistic deals, bearing only a glancing relationship to mayoral powers or remit, but using sheer force of personality to lever resources from high net worth individuals and corporations.

All of which seems very far away from Sadiq’s approach. He’s not interested in doing deals, you sense, but in tightening and adjusting the policy levers at his disposal to secure the results he wants. His governance rests on the “legal-rational” (Weber’s term again) basis of the mayoral powers and remit, with decisions taken calmly and rationally – albeit with a keen eye for politics – rather than on the basis of deals done personally or with subordinates.

It’s a fundamentally different model, and one that other people in City Hall (perhaps lower down the pecking order and therefore less likely to miss direct access to the Mayor) relish. One said to me, “With Boris, you got the feeling that he had a highly-tuned machine that he couldn’t be bothered to steer. With this lot, you get clear direction, and authority to go out and do things.” It is also probably more like the technocratic mayoralty that I and fellow members of the transition team expected before the first mayoral election in 2000, when we played “war games” about how the newly established Mayor and London Assembly would operate in practice.

Whether Sadiq’s approach will be more or less successful than his predecessors’ remains to be seen. A city cannot just be governed by deals with developers and ad hoc initiatives devised in Davos cloakrooms, but it probably can’t run like an algorithm either. The Mayor’s resources are limited, so he needs to work with investors and developers to build the city he wants. With a few exceptions, I applaud Sadiq’s policies. But I wonder how some of them will be implemented.

To diversify housing, let boroughs build (June 2018)

[Originally published on Centre for London blog, 25 June 2018]

Build out rates – the speed with which building takes place after planning permission has been granted ­­– are one of the great mysteries of housing policy.

We talk of how many houses different boroughs can deliver, and compare it to London Plan targets, but once a borough has granted planning permission, its power is actually very limited. Planners can plan, but it’s hard to make builders build.

Under successive mayors (and in spite of falling budgets) London planners have pushed more and more permissions through the system, making it hard to lay blame at their door, but delivery has remained stubbornly slow.

Is this the result of developers sitting on sites as their values rise, of unimplementable permissions, of infrastructure or contamination problems, or of shortages of capital, bricks or bricklayers?

The Letwin Review into build out rates, commissioned by the government last autumn, has been seeking to answer some of these questions. Its analysis, published today, looked at sites with permission for more than 1,000 homes, finding that the median rate of build out is 6.5 per cent per year, with a median completion period of 15 years. Worryingly, the Review’s existing analysis for London suggests an even slower rate of 3.2 per cent per year (though this may partly result from London sites simply being larger).

As in his interim report, Sir Oliver Letwin argues that developers do not simply sit on land, hoping for values to rise before they sell it on, but they limit the rate at which they build to avoid ‘flooding the market’ and pushing prices downwards. Shortages of skills, materials and finance all play a part too, but it is this ‘absorption rate’ issue that is at the heart of slow housebuilding.

The Review will publish its policy recommendations around the time of the Budget, but Sir Oliver writes that diversifying tenure, housing type and architectural style will be central to these; build-to-rent does not compete with housing for sale, and apartments do not compete with townhouses, so these housing types can be delivered alongside each other without pushing prices down.

One big outstanding question is whether this can be achieved through the large housebuilders alone.
Diversifying the types of housing delivered should go hand in hand with diversifying the development industry: commercial developers, housing associations and community organisations all play a part, but London’s boroughs are also getting back in the game.

Local authorities could make a real difference, stepping up delivery of social and affordable housing, mixed with market housing. The schemes built to date, and many more in the pipeline, focus on sites that the market has passed over – often smaller sites owned by local authorities. Most local authorities in London either have a delivery programme in place, or are planning one, but government restrictions on borrowing continue to tie their hands.

Direct delivery by councils and council-owned companies is not a magic bullet solution to London’s complex and persistent housing and affordability challenges, but it should form part of the arsenal. If we are going to accelerate delivery, we need to let boroughs build.

Cool markets and hot debates - Housing in London (Feb 2018)

[Originally publiched in OnLondon, 23 Feb 2018]

The number of houses and flats in London grew by nearly 40,000 in the year ending March 2017 – faster than it has since the mayoralty was established in 2000 and only just short of the former Mayor’s annual housing target. Some of the growth was down to controversial conversions of offices to homes (“permitted development”), but 30,000 new homes were built too, which is an achievement to be celebrated.  

But what if this is as good as it gets? It seems almost churlish to make the point, but there is a pile up of indicators suggesting that new home building in London is about to slow down sharply. The first alarm bell is rung by falling house prices and transaction levels, as highlighted in Centre for London’s The London Intelligence bulletin at the end of January. 

House prices across London have fallen at their fastest rate since 2009, and the fall in prices and transaction levels has been particularly sharp in relation to flats in the centre of the city. A recent survey by Molior Consulting confirms this top-of-the-market slow down: less than half of the luxury flats that were started last year were sold (off-plan or on completion). 

Molior’s figures refer to flats selling at around £3 million and these may seem pretty remote from the concerns of most Londoners – luxury flat developers are pretty low on the league table of much-loved London professions. But all the moving parts are connected. As housing grant has reduced, more and more affordable housing in London is delivered through developer obligations. While the number of affordable housing starts supported by mayoral funding has been rising, as the £3.15 billion funding package agreed with the government in 2016 feeds into the system, developer contributions still account for 50 per cent or more of the total. If the flow of luxury flats slows, so will the flow of affordable housing.

And there are other factors suggesting that supply is slowing. NHBC – the National Housing Building Council – issues warranties for around 80 per cent of new build homes in the UK. These tend to be issued just before construction work starts and therefore give a good indication of future supply. The number of warranties issued in London fell from 26,000 in 2015, most of which will have been built in the bumper 2016/17 year, to 17,500 in 2016, and stayed at that level in 2017.  

While the market cools, the politics of housebuilding in London are heating up. Haringey’s proposed joint venture with Lendlease is only the most prominent of a number of controversial partnerships for housing estate redevelopment. Campaigning in Haringey has unseated council leader Claire Kober and probably sealed the fate of the Haringey Development Vehicle itself. Other councils and developers will at the very least be more cautious about joint ventures – which typically take years to plan and even longer to implement – and nothing will happen before local elections in May.

Finally, Sadiq Khan’s draft new London Plan presents a tough policy environment. The Mayor has tightened affordable housing targets, proposed residents’ ballots for estate redevelopment schemes, restricted use of industrial land and shifted the burden of development on to the Outer London boroughs, where new development is most controversial politically. Many Londoners would support most if not all of these policy positions, but the assumption that developers will live with them in return for a stake in London’s super soaraway property market may be outdated. There is already talk of some of London’s biggest housebuilders shifting their focus to Birmingham, Manchester and other places where the market seems more buoyant.

In short, the prospects of accelerating housing delivery to meet the new London Plan target of 66,000 homes a year are looking slimmer by the day. But perhaps a sharp slowdown of housebuilding would not be such bad news after all. “Never let a crisis go to waste,” in words variously attributed to Winston Churchill and Rahm Emanuel. For some years now, London’s housing market has hobbled along like a Heath Robinson contraption, with housing shortages driving land price inflation, social housing becoming an exercise in gamesmanship rather than provision of public goods, and housing targets always soaring ahead of supply like the stakhanovite fantasias of soviet planning.

Perhaps, if this model starts to look broken, we can look for alternatives. All sorts of magic bullets – housing estate redevelopment, Green Belt liberalisation, public sector land – have been aimed at and missed London’s housing targets to date, so we should be wary of singular solutions of blinding simplicity. But we could start to think about possibilities – about packages of measures that could fix London’s dysfunctional housing market.

This may indeed mean thinking about the Green Belt and estate redevelopment – ways of finding the land needed for new homes – but we also need fresh approaches to how homes are built and paid for. If slow sales are deterring traditional housebuilders, how can we rethink the institutional framework, funding structures and building methods?

Could housing benefit payments support borrowing to build, rather than being funnelled to private landlords? Could local authorities borrow more, directly or through central government bond issues, or work with pension funds and other long-term investors to find sites and build homes for rent, providing a stable income stream for both parties? Could off site construction be used at scale to supply local authorities and developers across the capital with low cost homes for vacant sites?
Tackling London’s housing crisis may mean going after some sacred cows: more focus on rent rather than sale; a positive approach to public investment and less worrying about how borrowing is treated in public accounts; more aggressive approaches to land hoarding; more direct public sector involvement; perhaps even a development corporation that can push through planning and construction across the capital.

Some of these options may be controversial – though a consensus for a radical package of reforms is growing among London’s politicians and housing experts – but watching as the market sputters to a halt seems even less attractive. To adapt Sherlock Holmes, “When we have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how unpalatable, must be the housing delivery plan.”

But is there the political appetite and will to match the urgency of the challenge and the scale of the opportunity? Mayor Khan has already announced that he needs a five-fold increase in government funding for affordable housing, and roundly condemned the autumn 2017 budget for its failure to commit investment at this level. For its part, the government is cash-strapped, Brexit-blinkered, and unlikely to see much political capital in helping out a Labour mayor or London itself. The challenge – to Whitehall and City Hall – is to rise above the politics of the housing crisis, to take shared responsibility and shared credit for the bold steps needed to fix London’s broken housing market.