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.

Man out of time for our time

Rory Stewart can seem like a man out of time, his exotic CV inviting comparisons to mid 20th Century men of letters and action such as Patrick Leigh-Fermor, who wore their learning as lightly as their derring-do.

But, while he remains an outsider, his candidacy for leadership of the Conservative Party is intriguing.  All weekend, I have been reading analyses of the EU election results that talk in terms of an irreconcilable culture war, between young, educated, cosmopolitan urbanites, and older, more traditional, patriotic town- and country-dwellers. It's a thesis that's been pitched in various forms by people like David Goodhart, Paul Collier and Matthew Goodwin, and while sceptical, I have started taking it more seriously over recent weeks, as I have read reports and watched footage of the fury of Farage supporters at his rallies round the country.

Stewart seems to cut through some of these glib anitheses. He professes almost mystical old-Tory affection for the English landscape, its military and its institutions, and has even had (limited) military service himself. But his patriotism seems very far removed from the performative blood-and-soil rhetoric adopted by some of his fellow Conservatives. And he is also clearly a modern metropolitan, extensively travelled, highly-educated, excited by new ideas such as citizens' assemblies. He seems to combine, in a slightly eccentric upper-middle class manner, both facets of our allegedly riven national character.

Indeed, unity is one of his big themes, as he travels round the country listening to people:

This whole day - whether in “remain” areas or “leave” areas is just a reminder that we have far more in common than divides us. #letscometogether pic.twitter.com/JJs3Xtze6S

— Rory Stewart (@RoryStewartUK) May 27, 2019

It's not a radical message, but it seems to come from somewhere that is heartfelt, and is accompanied by a reluctance to adopt the melodramatic poses of modern political discourse. One example: a journalist this morning quoted a description of Stewart as a 'suicide bomber' clearing the way for a Michael Gove candidacy. Stewart replied that the metaphor sat "a bit awkwardly for someone who was in Iraq and Afghanistan", but left it at that, without the pearl-clutching synthetic outrage that has become customary.

It seems highly unlikely that the Conservatives will pick a relatively untried Old Etonian as their leader (the last one was hardly a success), and the things that make Stewart appealing to me may be the very things that will rule him out. But politics at the moment seems capable of supplying, to paraphrase the Red Queen, at least six highly unlikely things before breakfast.

Eat yourself fitter?

The health stories came on like a rash last week. Kitchen sprays cause COPD, yoghurt stops heart attacks, processed food gives you cancer.

The outbreak was partly the result of the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, always fertile hunting grounds for ‘things that will kill or cure you’ stories. But the fascination of these stories for the media never seems to fade, even though they miss two big issues.

The first is, without getting too Lenten about it, we are all going to die. Every person saved from a heart attack – where rates have dropped dramatically in recent years –  is one more waiting in line for cancer or Alzheimers.  While dying before your time is a tragedy, the slow drawn-out processes of decline that accompany diseases of ageing are miserable too.

But perhaps more seriously these stories peddle a myth of control, suggesting that we can cheat death through our behaviour.  We do, of course, know much more than we used to about the damage done to health by our own behaviour – smoking, drinking, poor diet and inactivity – as well as by environmental factors like air pollution.

But these behaviours only load the dice; they don’t determine the outcome.  Bad diet, for example, is associated with about 15 per cent of deaths from cardiovascular disease, smoking and inactivity with another 10 per cent. So three out of four deaths from heart attack and stroke have nothing to do with any of these. Of course, we shouldn’t neglect health, or downplay its impact on the quality of our lives as well as the manner of their ending, but most people dying from ‘diseases of lifestyle’ are just unlucky.

There seems to be a certain ironic obtuseness in the amount of effort we put into trying to influence the one thing that is beyond our control – our mortality and its means – while neglecting the huge threats posed by climate change, or any number of social evils, which are firmly within our grasp collectively if not individually.