London's left-behind places

[First published by onlondon, 5 March 2020]

London is an economic powerhouse, accounting for 23 per cent of the UK economy with only 13 per cent of the UK population. Productivity figures released last week show that four of the ten most productive UK districts (in terms of economic output per hour worked) are in the capital: Hounslow, Tower Hamlets, City of London and Westminster.

But this is not the whole story. Other London boroughs, such as Haringey and Lewisham, appear much further down the list, among “left behind” places such as Blackburn, Stafford and Rhondda Cynon Taf. And while UK productivity grew by about 21 per cent between 2008 and 2018 (not accounting for inflation), it fell in Newham, Barking & Dagenham and Merton, and barely moved in Lewisham.

A slowdown in productivity growth in high performing places would not be a huge surprise: growth is harder to achieve when you are already operating at high productivity; the gains you can squeeze from marginal increases in efficiency are much less impressive than those that can come from new enterprises in regenerating areas.

This – alongside the bigger issues of the financial crisis – probably explains why the City of London’s productivity shrunk more than any other UK local authority’s over the decade. But it doesn’t explain some of the other changes. Productivity surged by more than average in some Inner London boroughs that were already doing well: Camden, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham. The boroughs where productivity fell, on the other hand – Newham, Barking & Dagenham, and Merton – were struggling to start with. London’s economy is becoming more and more concentrated in the city centre.

Struggling Outer London boroughs are not uniformly poor any more than northern towns are, but these productivity figures reflect the very different economic lives lived by rich and poor Londoners. Each borough will have wealthy residents, whose economic activity shows up where they work, not where they live. Their economic fortunes are in sharp contrast to people working in precarious and low-paid employment locally, whose labour is reflected in these local figures. These may not be “left behind places”, but some of the people living in them have every right to feel marginalised.

This dichotomy – between a globally competitive city centre and a struggling periphery –raises questions for local, regional and national policymakers. London’s suburban centres and high streets are being hollowed out by the same forces of retail restructuring as town centres across the country.

But the light of London’s central business district can leave its hinterland in shadow when it comes to government policy. Nowhere in London was among the 100 places invited to bid for £3.6 billion ‘Towns Fund’ last year. How can Outer London’s centres adapt and revive, supporting enterprises and services that will bring commercial and community life – and better productivity and wages – back to London’s suburbs and London’s suburban communities? Centre for London’s forthcoming project on Outer London centres will be focusing on this issue.

There is a broader point too. London is a rich city with a lot of poor people in it, having higher poverty rates than any other UK nation or region after housing costs. Being poor in a rich area does perhaps offer opportunity (though this is debated), but it can also add to stress when local services don’t meet your needs, as explored in a recent report by the Southern Policy Centre.

So the government should be cautious about rushing to refocus spending on “left-behind places” at the expense of thinking about the people and communities who are struggling – even if they are doing so within eyesight of central London’s temples of global trade.

Housing in a time of coronavirus

[First published by Centre for London, 6 April 2020]

In 2006, the City of Sao Paulo adopted the Cidade Limpia (“clean city”) statute, banning the billboard advertising that lined the city’s highways. Citizens and visitors alike saw a new city, a city of stark concrete structures and even starker social divisions. The favelas, slums and squatted buildings that had been shrouded by advertising were made unavoidably visible.

Coronavirus may be having a similar impact for London. The city has been in the front line of infection. On 20 March, the capital had just under half of all reported cases in England, though that proportion had fallen to around a third two weeks later. Even to enthusiastic advocates of dense urban living, what once looked like creative proximity and intermingling now looks risky verging on toxic.

But density has different aspects and different impacts. If the density of connections, and of social and economic life – in crowded offices, pubs and tube trains – helped the virus to race round London in the middle of March, it is the density of living space that has made the government’s lockdown rules tough for many Londoners since then. The disease has shone a spotlight on the increasingly unequal distribution of space in the city.

One way to look at this is the ratio of people to homes.  According to the Greater London Authority’s Housing in London 2019 data compendium, this has been falling for the last 30 years across England, reflecting later marriage and more people living alone at the end of their lives. London bucks the trend: the number of people per dwelling has increased from around 2.3 to 2.5 since the early 1990s. London does have some larger families, but a larger element of this growth can be seen as ‘supressed household formation’ – people continuing to live with their parents, or in shared houses and flats, when they would rather be on their own or with a partner.

Measures of overcrowding using the ‘bedroom standard’ (essentially a room for each couple or adult, with some sharing for children) tell a similar story: overcrowding has increased over the past twenty years, but this increase has been most concentrated in private rented accommodation (where 12 per cent of households were overcrowded in 2017/18 against five per cent in 1995/96), and in social rented housing where levels rose from 11 to 15 per cent. The opposite trend is visible for home-owners: over the same period, the proportion of owner-occupied households with two or more spare bedrooms has risen from 33 to 42 per cent.

Many commentators – including me, I suspect – have talked of how younger Londoners are happy to trade space for proximity to the city centre, of how pubs and parks, cafes and restaurants are the living rooms for a new generation. Why yearn for a private garden, when you have Hampstead Heath or London Fields on your doorstep? This ‘trade-off’ theory of urban living is probably true, or it probably was until self-isolation locked young Londoners in homes where every possible nook is being used as a bedroom – let alone the 58,000 households (two thirds of the English total) in cramped temporary accommodation.

London has great public spaces, the convivial tableaux of park, pub and street food market, but if the crisis has shone a light on London’s crowding problems, it may also make people rethink their trade-offs, and perhaps value private space more. The legacy growth in home working may fuel demand for homes with more spare rooms. Building taller and denser around outer London town centres may look like a more civilised way to accommodate growth than squeezing more and more renters into terraced houses designed for families. We should maybe start to worry less about the air space that buildings occupy, and more about the internal spaces they offer.

Coming out of the pandemic, the once triumphant paradigm of dense city living may find itself on the back foot. We may even see a drift from the city to smaller towns and villages. City living will have to remind the world of its benefits – as powerful now as ever – of the cultural and social life it can foster, of the environmental advantages and economic opportunities that it offers. But it will also need to show that it can be resilient to the next shock, that it can offer decent accommodation with space for seclusion as well as sociability to all its citizens.

City sickness, urban recovery

[First published by onlondon, 6 April 2020]

Coronavirus has not been good news for fans of cities. How ever important urban centres will be to the recovery, the rapid spread of the pandemic from Wuhan to Milan and from London to New York revives deep-rooted suspicions of them as close-packed seedbeds for disease (“pestilential human rookeries” in the words of one Victorian pamphleteer) and as the stomping grounds of rootless cosmopolitan types, with lifestyles and habits remote from the more “authentic” concerns of their provincial countrymen.

The early spread of coronavirus in London probably played up to both stereotypes, reflecting both density and connectivity. Reported cases of infection first soared in Kensington & Chelsea. By 10 March, 14 per cent of London’s known cases were among residents of the borough, who account for just 1.8 per cent of London’s population. Kensington & Chelsea is one of London’s most densely populated boroughs, but also one of the most cosmopolitan: nearly half of its residents were born outside the UK, and research by transport campaigners suggests they are the country’s most frequent flyers. For good and ill, London is the UK’s gateway to the world.

In the following days, cases surged in Camden, Westminster, Lambeth and Southwark (as well as Barnet). Central London’s intensity of movements and interactions probably played a role here. With a day time population that grows by 80 per cent every day and intensive mixing on public transport, in offices and in pubs, the conditions for rapid spread were in place in the city centre.

By mid-March, the epidemic was spreading fast across almost every London borough, with reported cases growing by a third every day in the week of 16 March, while they grew by a fifth to a quarter across the rest of England. The newspapers were full of talk of a lockdown being imposed on the capital.

The restrictions imposed by the government at the end of that week were nationwide rather than restricted to London, but their effect appears to have been strongest here. The rate of increase in cases dropped sharply and has remained lower than in the rest of England’s since then, as the graph below shows. Over the past week, the growth in new cases appears to have slowed nationwide, but remains lower in London: in the capital it grew by an average of nine per cent over the three days to 4 April, compared to an average of 14 per cent in the rest of the country.

 

 Source: PHE website, updated to 8 April

There are all sorts of reasons not to get over-excited about these numbers. At best, they show that the disease is spreading more slowly. There are still hundreds more cases every day even in London, and that will translate to more deaths in the days and weeks to come. And it is quite possible that the slowdown has only been temporary, with a resurgent outbreak waiting in the wings.

But it is still worth considering why London has fallen back from the forefront of the epidemic’s spread. Are fewer tests being done in London? This is possible, but since mid-March testing has been undertaken for all patients requiring hospital admission, so the slow down in cases presumably reflects a slowdown in hospitalisations.

Maybe this is a result of London’s age profile. Londoners’ median age is 35 years, compared to 40 across the UK. Perhaps, after the initial surge, this relatively youthful population is being reflected in correspondingly slower growth in the number of serious cases. Or maybe Londoners, despite crowded housing conditions and continuing denunciations from the media, are actually sticking to the government restrictions and starting to suppress the spread of coronavirus: figures on transport use at the end of last month showed the steepest falls were for use of the Tube, compared to road travel and national rail.

Despite the tough weeks ahead, apparent slow-downs in infection rates in London and across England are good news. And if London can further stifle the spread of the disease, it may yet show how cities can be at the forefront of recovery as well as of infection.