Can the Centre hold?

 [Published by Centre for London, 9 July 2020]

Central London can seem curiously friendless in political debates – too metropolitan for national politicians but not resident-focused enough for local and regional authorities. But Central London’s economic recovery is essential to the capital and the UK as a whole, and it is currently exposed to a unique and highly toxic cocktail of risks.

London’s Central Activities Zone (the core commercial and office districts of the West End, the City and their fringes) makes an outsized contribution to the national economy: recent Centre for London research indicated that it generated 10 per cent of national economic output in an area covering just two per cent of London.

But the area’s importance extends beyond the dry data of economic output. Central London is the anchor of the UK’s tourist industry, and the epicentre of the mix of shops, restaurants, museums, clubs, bars, universities and theatres that sustains the UK’s soft power, drawing international students, businesses and workers year after year. Global London is the heartland of Global Britain.

In previous crises, central London has sometimes suffered, but bounced back. In the early 1990s recession, inner London lost manufacturing and manual jobs and saw sharp rises in unemployment, but by the middle of the decade, the service sectors were growing in compensation, with vacant commercial premises in areas like Shoreditch taken over by a new generation of start-ups. And after 2009 employment growth hardly faltered, as central London’s economy was buoyed by quantitative easing and international investment, and emerging sectors such as cultural industries and fintech began to grow as traditional financial services employment stalled. This resilience has bred resentment in other parts of the UK – some of it perhaps justified – but London’s success as the UK’s gateway to the world has been a force for good.

This time it could be different. London’s city centre emptied out faster and deeper than other UK urban centres when lockdown started at the end of March, partly reflecting the higher proportion of jobs – predominantly higher paid professional and office worker jobs – that could be undertaken from home. Lower paid workers in hospitality and retail also stayed home, but mainly on furlough in the short term – many will be wondering if they have jobs to return to. Anyone who has been into central London recently will have noticed how empty its streets remain, while life returns to more residential neighbourhoods.

The question of how many workers will come back to central London offices, and how quickly, is still an open one. For every elegy to the end of the office, there is an equally confident hymn to the social and productivity benefits of teams working in the same place, the spillover and innovation benefits nurtured by proximity. But it does seem that the lure of central locations may be diminished for some employers.

This storm might be weathered on its own, but combining a reduction in office workforce, with a sharp slowdown in domestic and international tourism, and a public transport system with heavily constrained capacity could be deeply damaging. Central London needs people, the throng of workers, shoppers, residents and tourists. Its retail, hospitality and cultural industries serve and entertain the world; they cannot survive on the area’s 330,000 residents alone. The tax breaks and discounts announced by the Chancellor yesterday may be a boost to neighbourhood pubs, cafés and restaurants across London, but they won’t bring crowds back to Zone 1 on their own.

Weakening central London’s visitor and commuter economy as a result of short-term shutdowns and slow resurgence over the coming months could store up deeper problems in the future, permanently undermining London’s soft power and global reach – the things that bring students, tourists and investors to the UK in the first place – as well as endangering the viability of the district that accommodates 40 per cent of London’s jobs.

So central London is particularly at risk, and damage to its economy could reverberate across the country. What can be done?

The first thing is to enable people to get back to central London as quickly as is compatible with managing the risks of coronavirus resurgence. At the height of the epidemic, Londoners were told to stay away from public transport, and that message has struck home. Now that face masks are mandatory, and infection rates much lower, a cautious return to public transport should be encouraged – not least as evidence from international studies and modelling of the spread of the virus in London in March indicate that public transport is not a major source of outbreaks. As Andrew Adonis has suggested, staggered working hours, clarity on cleaning standards and a change of messaging from the Mayor could all help bring people back into central London.

Getting people back on the tubes and buses will help, but will not be enough to make up for the loss of tourism and potential loss of workforce. It is likely that more targeted help will be needed, in particular for theatres, gig venues and other performance spaces. The West End accounts for 60 per cent of annual revenues for UK theatres, so allowing it to wither would be a body blow to the industry nationally.

The government’s new support package will help support cultural institutions while live performance is limited, but distributing cultural vouchers across the country could also play a part once theatres and other venues start to re-open (perhaps following the approach being tried out by Andrew Lloyd Webber). ‘Helicopter culture’ would be a gift in tough times to UK audiences, while drawing people back into city centres across the country, where attending a play or performance could be accompanied by food, drink and even shopping.

A return to public transport and support for entertainment might help sustain London’s centre as the virus recedes and tourism revives, but there will inevitably be shops, cafés and pubs that fail, and office space that is surrendered as firms reconsider their spatial needs and their employees’ appetite for remote working. There may be a case for allowing some growth in residential development: central London’s residential population has grown sharply in recent years but is still way below what it was in the 1930s. However, all the logic of business clustering, and the sunk costs of decades of infrastructure investment, argues that London should sustain a strong business core.

Rather than surrendering London’s business core, boroughs, the Mayor and government should work together on incentives to enable new enterprises to flourish, as they did in previous recessions. While rents are falling – and being linked to turnover in many cases – business rates are anchored to rental values from 2015 and so remain prohibitively high in many parts of central London. In the long term, business rates need reform, but in the short term, tax breaks for start-ups could include business rate discounts or holidays, and capital allowances for investment in office and shop fit-outs – an enterprise zone for the city centre.

Getting cross about central London – the crowds, the tourists, the prices, the pollution, the bustle – is a pastime that most Londoners can normally share with people across the country. But diluting its punchy and sometimes chaotic vitality would be a tragedy for the whole nation. London will bounce back in the long term, but may need some help over coming months as it faces a perfect storm of challenges.

London's unfinished devolution

 [Published by Centre for London, 3 July 2020]

Twenty years ago today, Ken Livingstone formally took on his powers as London’s first directly-elected mayor. His election had been a moment of high political drama rare in municipal government. Having legislated for a mayor and assembly in London, Tony Blair’s New Labour government had watched in horror as Livingstone – in their eyes a throwback to the 1980s ‘loony left’ – swerved all attempts to prevent his election, eventually running and winning as an independent against Labour’s Frank Dobson and the Conservatives’ Steven Norris.

The transfer of powers (unlike his successors, he had a two-month running-in period) was a much quieter event, despite the new Mayor declaring that it would be celebrated as “London’s independence day”, the occasion of the UK’s capital seizing back control of its affairs from the “most centralised state outside North Korea” (a favourite comparator).

Livingstone is no stranger to hyperbole, and his claim was probably not intended entirely seriously. The powers that he took on were limited and had been hard-fought by civil servants as the idea of a mayoralty took shape after the 1997 general election. Furthermore, London’s first mayor was denied control of London Underground while government struggled to finalise its disastrous ‘public private partnership’ scheme through 2000 and 2001.

But the powers were nonetheless significant: oversight of London’s police and fire services, a veto on major planning decisions, control of traffic lights, major roads, buses and (in due course) London Underground, and a new agency to manage European and domestic economic development projects. And all were drawn down from central government, rather than seized from London’s 33 local authorities who had repeatedly clashed with the Greater London Council, precursor to the mayor and assembly, in the 1980s.

Since 2000, London’s three mayors have shown themselves to be able advocates for the capital, leaders at times of crisis, and promoters of projects and policies that would have been impossible in the 1990s – from congestion charging, to London 2012, to cycle hire schemes. Their powers have been extended too, with affordable housing programmes, more extensive planning powers and stronger police oversight introduced through reforms in 2007 and 2011.

However, despite the extension of the mayoral model to other English cities in recent years and promises of a white paper, the advance of devolution appears to have stalled in the nation’s capital. The government’s recent interventions on transport and planning could even be seen as a rollback, as a former Mayor of London seeking to exert remote control over his successor.

But these interventions also highlight the flaws of the current system. Transport for London’s revenue base is so dependent on fares that government bailouts become inevitable during a shock like COVID-19, and a government that blocks mayoral plans to accommodate growth, without supporting any form of regional planning, is simply incoherent.

Recovering from the current crisis cannot be directed from Cabinet Office briefing rooms, or by despatching civil servants across the country to implement centrally determined policy. It will require agile and locally-appropriate measures across the country, from training programmes to targeted tax breaks. There are a thousand daily issues pressing on government right now, from infection monitoring to trade talks, so ministers do not have the time to micromanage planning policy and transport services, any more than they have the competence to do so.

Completing this unfinished devolution should begin with a discussion about money. The Mayor of London has extremely limited powers to vary council tax, and no powers over business rates or other property taxes. London’s shops and other commercial premises are taxed heavily while its richest householders pay some of the lowest property taxes in the world. This dysfunctional set up might be sustainable in boom times, but it could hobble the capital’s recovery in the tougher times that lie ahead. Responsibility for services without the power to set taxes makes for inefficient government and fudged accountability.

London’s mayoralty has proven itself to be a success over its first 20 years; it is time to take the next steps in loosening Whitehall’s grip on the capital and its finances.

Centre for London and LSE’s Professor Tony Travers are working on a book to mark the 20^th anniversary of London’s mayor and assembly, investigating the relative successes and challenges of the mayoralty to date, before asking what comes next for London. The book will be published in winter 2020.

Having doubts about density

 [Published by Centre for London, 29 June 2020]

I must admit, I have been having doubts about density in recent weeks. Such is the strength of belief in the high-density compact city model of urban living, that its denial feels like a crisis of faith. But coronavirus – and more importantly the changes to our lives that coronavirus has accelerated – are making me think again.

The argument for density is powerfully made, from a social, environmental and economic perspective. The sprawling suburbs that rising car use enabled in the mid 20^th century were hugely damaging in terms of air quality, carbon emissions and habitat destruction, their gridlocked freeways a reminder that the lure of the open road quickly evaporates when millions of people want to travel to the same destination at the same time, in the least efficient way possible.

Suburban sprawl also disrupted social bonds, as documented by scholars like Michael Young in East London. People retreated from a sense of community to lifestyles that prioritised the individual or the nuclear family, with ever weaker social ties (the ’bowling alone’ phenomenon). Sprawl became a self-fulfilling prophecy: without density of population, there was not the critical mass to sustain neighbourhood shops, cafes, public services and transport systems. These things all became the object of car journeys, and parking assumed priority over proximity in a thousand out-of-town retail and leisure centres.

These ruinous impacts of sprawl were well documented in the paradigm-shifting work of the Urban Task Force in the UK, and in the rise of New Urbanism across the world. Gradually residents started returning to city centres (big businesses had never really moved out, following their own logic of agglomeration), drawn by the lure of easier commutes, improving public services, and the resurgent hum of metropolitan life. In central London, the population grew by more than 25 per cent in the seven years to 2018. And across central and inner London, towering residential blocks have sprung up, often lumpily incongruous with their more modestly sized neighbours.

But you have to ask, who is going to want to live in these towers now? As London recovers, some of the benefits of centrality will be reinforced; the ability to walk or cycle to work, for example, will enable urbanites to bypass constrained public transport. But trading space for proximity will seem less of a good deal than it was. Restaurants and bars will struggle, and some may never reopen; online shopping could boom at the expense of already struggling city centre shops; and workplaces may become places that are used intermittently, rather than for the standard nine-to-five (or five-to-nine, depending on your business) daily grind.

At the same time, connectivity is being transformed. As the electricity supply becomes less and less dependent on carbon fuels, electric vehicles and more environmentally-friendly hybrids such as electric bikes will allow movement without wrecking the planet, and online technologies from Zoom to Spotify will shift the focus from moving people and products through physical space to moving bits of data through networks. We have not yet experienced the death of distance that was much vaunted at the dawn of the internet age, but we may now be seeing the decarbonisation of distance.

So coming out the crisis, citizens may see a weaker case for high-density urban living, and fewer downsides to the alternatives. This is not to advocate a return to sprawl, or even to argue that it is an inevitable outcome, but for more dispersed urban density. People value the buzz of urban life, but perhaps they would rather enjoy it from a house with a small garden, rather than from a meanly proportioned flat with a Lilliputian balcony. Perhaps suburbs could provide the “best of the city and the best of the countryside” once promised by the garden city movement.

And London looks well placed to prosper in this new age of sustainable suburban living, as a city in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ of urban density. The city is sometimes described as ‘low density’, and it is when compared to Barcelona or Manhattan. But London is actually just as dense as Paris, and significantly denser than New York (wider urban area), even though its peak density is lower than both (see Table 1). That is to say, it may not be as dense in the centre as those cities, but it doesn’t sprawl so much on the edge either.

Table 1: Density of major cities compared to London (Source: 2015 figures)

	New York	London	Paris	Barcelona
Overall density (000s pop/sq km)	3.4	5.2	5.2	6.4
Peak (000s pop/sq km)	56.3	25.5	45.2	26.8

London’s miles of terraced Victorian houses actually offer pretty high densities, as well as private outdoor space for residents and the potential to support schools and other services within a fifteen-minute walk (particularly if the daytime population grows with more home working).

So London and other big cities may face a choice, and sooner than they think. Some affluent residents may start to turn their back on hyper dense city centre locations (maybe enabling a wider variety of residents to move in, including more young people). The density doubters will then have a choice; whether to move right out of the city, or whether to put down their roots within a few miles.

Many of London’s suburbs have seen a gradual decline in recent years, as employment, services and richer residents have been drawn to the city centre, but this could be an opportunity for reinvention. With investment and the right planning policies, they could return to favour, offering enough density to thrive, but enough space to breathe.

Centralised localism won't control the virus

[Published by OnLondon, 16 May 2020]

Coronavirus is a global pandemic formed of myriad localised outbreaks. In the UK it hit London first and hardest, but is now spreading much faster in some other English regions.

The Prime Minister’s speech last Sunday acknowledged this in talking of “monitoring our progress locally, regionally, and nationally”. In a press conference the following day, he elaborated: “You’ve got to respect local issues, local flare-ups, local problems and part of the solution is responding in a particular part of the country, which we detect with our Covid Alert system, then we will be firefighting, doing whack-a-mole as that issue arises.” And by the end of the week, there seemed to be some consideration within government that different infection speeds in different places might mean relaxation of lockdown at different rates.

But all this mole-whacking and unlocking seems to be entirely centralised. References to local councils in the detailed recovery plan were to an auxiliary role – in supporting care homes, ensuring the distribution of supplies to vulnerable people, in widening pavements, and in playing a part in contact tracing.

In the first phase of the epidemic, when a blanket nationwide lockdown was introduced, it was natural for this to be led from Westminster. But as spats with the Welsh and Scottish government last weekend indicate, the UK government is happy with devolution as long as devolved administrations fall in behind Downing Street’s strictures. So even as a more localised approach is taken, there is no suggestion it will be led from anywhere beyond SW1.

Other European countries are already taking a more devolved approach. As France and Italy have emerged from lockdown, decision-making on local restrictions has been devolved, with boundaries set centrally. In France, the Mayors of individual départements have different rights to open and close schools, beaches and so on, depending on whether their region has been coded as “red” or “green” by the national government (and in consultation with the local “prefects” who represent central government). In the capital city region of Ile de France, for example, the regional administration has required mask-wearing on public transport, and has stipulated that those travelling at rush hour have an authorisation signed by their employer.

In Italy, a deal brokered between ministers and local politicians has allowed each of the country’s 20 regions to set their own course out of lockdown, leading to an accelerated re-opening of bars and restaurants in some regions.

Whether a more responsive localised approach is worth some erosion of national solidarity and clarity can be debated. I think it is, but there are plenty who would disagree – the differing approaches adopted in Scotland and Wales have already been controversial.

However, it does seem blinkered to have a localised system of monitoring, clamping down on outbreaks and easing restrictions without a role for local or regional government. England’s metro mayors have expressed concern about a lack of engagement from government, and have asked for representation, alongside the Mayor of London and Scottish and Welsh leaders, at Cobra meetings, but to date the planning of England’s more locally sensitised strategy to “control the virus” seems to be something done to rather than with local leaders.

Stand back, make room

 [Published by OnLondon and Centre for London, 12 May 2020]

London has been at the forefront of the UK’s Covid-19 epidemic. Cases and deaths rose fast and peaked early in the capital. But the city seems to have adapted quickly to lockdown and continuing recruitment activity shows some of the resilience the capital demonstrated after the financial crisis of 2008. And, after the wave of infections hit London first, it now seems to be retreating quickest, with new cases being identified at half the rate of some UK regions.

But what comes next could be a lot tougher. Having plunged much of day-to-day life into the deep freeze, the government is seeking a way to defrost it, of getting the country back to work. The much-debated change in government messaging gives an indication of the direction of change: from an unambiguous instruction to stay at home, to a cautious emergence.

As London’s economy tentatively tries to get back on its feet, some of its gaps and inequities will start to show through. During the crisis, working from home has been an inconvenience for workers like me, whose jobs involve talking, reading, writing and analysing. For other workers, such remote working is impossible. Some have been put at risk by continuing to work, while others have been furloughed. For those people to go back to work safely, they will have to travel.

And that’s where the problem is. From his experience as the Mayor of London, the Prime Minister will know that telling people to “avoid public transport if at all possible” is a really tall order in the capital. London’s commuters are heavily dependent on public transport: 46 per cent of London’s workers use trains, light rail or the Tube to get to work, and a further 12 per cent use buses, compared to around three per cent and six per cent respectively for the rest of Great Britain.

Avoiding public transport means that almost 60 per cent of London’s workers have to find an alternative way to work. Even if Tube, rail and buses are operating at around 15 per cent capacity, as some estimates suggest, 2.5 million London commuters will be displaced.

Some of the slack can be taken up by an increase in walking and cycling, which together account for around 14 per cent of London commutes. There is certainly a strong argument for this, for re-allocation of road space to encourage new cyclists (though it is not clear whether the funding support announced by Grant Shapps on Friday will be deployed in the capital), and for a more rapid roll-out of new rules for e-scooters.

But cycling would need to increase almost tenfold to replace the lost public transport capacity. Data from the 2011 census indicated the average London commuting distance was more than 11 miles (and is likely to be higher for many rail and Tube commuters), so there are a limited number of journeys where cycling will be a viable option – particularly for those new to the saddle and to London’s traffic.

There may be some increase in car-based commuting in the short-term, but this is not what any policy-makers want. It would not only unpick the progress made on air quality and carbon emissions in recent years, but also quite quickly result in gridlock – especially as roads are being remodelled to prioritise walking and cycling. In any case, there simply aren’t the workplace parking spaces in Central London for any mass switch.

So some form of “demand management” (a phrase heavily used when trying to limit travel during the London Olympics) will be needed, if London’s economy is to return to anything like normal. Changing work patterns will be part of this, and may need extensions of the night tube and some relaxation of current regulations on deliveries, as London shifts further towards becoming a 24-hour city.

But, as London rebuilds public transport capacity and public confidence, we may also need to prioritise some workers over others. The capital has been helped to date by the fact that many of us can work remotely. Given the risk of overwhelming the transport system, those who can do so should perhaps hold back from using public transport to get to work, however much we long for the social interactions that make the city what it is.

The Tube has been kept running for essential workers during the crisis. As the crisis eases, this priority should be extended to people who work in shops, factories, construction sites, and workshops – those who need to have access to their workplaces and to be able to travel to them safely.

You could even see permits to travel introduced, but such a system would be intrusive, complex and hard to enforce. However, the successful implementation of the government’s lockdown measures has shown that limiting use of the Tube can be self-policing. To enable essential workers to reach their destinations safely, perhaps those of us who trade in words, calculations and conversations should stand back and wait our turn.

Missing crowds still

[First used as a monologue script for OnLondon, broadcast in April 2020]

Early morning on Hove seafront, and the broad walkway is dotted with dog-walkers, joggers, and couples taking a stroll in the morning sun. Everybody is complying with the two metre rule, more or less, setting and adjusting their courses to minimise proximity. Occasionally someone stops dead, or abruptly switches direction, and ten others carefully re-order their routing to respond to the change.

 

It is a stately but slightly stuffy sight, and I suddenly know what it reminds me of – a slow-motion, spatially exploded version of Victoria Station at rush hour. Here on the coast people frown if they see someone within four feet of them; there workers, tourists and day-trippers would surge simultaneously in every direction, somehow managing to avoid each other by inches or even millimetres, marking near misses and glancing collisions with apologetic smiles.

 

And it’s then I realise how much I miss London’s crowds, the ebb and flow of the city’s life. Cities are at once alienating and intimate. When I visited London as a child, I found the relentless busy-ness and pace of the city distressing, even exhausting. When I moved to London, I made my peace with the throng, learning to find refuge from and even within the most crowded places. Now that I have all the calm that I could need, it is those crowds that I find myself missing.

 

Peter Ackroyd devotes a whole section of his London biography to the mob, treating it as an essential element of the city. “The crowd”, he writes, “is not a single entity manifesting itself on particular occasions, but the actual condition of London itself.” The courteous bustle of London’s concourses is in some ways far removed the unruly mobs that Ackroyd records surging through the capital’s streets, their polar opposite even. In other ways, however, the crowd is the mob’s politely evolved descendant, a hivemind bent on efficient movement and orderly function, not on chaos and destruction.

 

Cities are masterclasses in this type of subconscious collaboration. Every day, millions of people displace themselves, barely acknowledging each other’s presence, but choreographing their movements nonetheless, in the tango of a crowded station concourse, the waltz of a busy bar, the dos-a-dos of letting the passengers off the train first.

 

When this crisis passes, as it will, London will begin to buzz with life again. But there may be a lingering loss of ease with the intimacy of strangers. None of us quite enjoyed the experience of cramming cheek-to-cheek on the tube, but it was treated as a brief inconvenience, not as a health hazard or a micro-aggression.

 

London may take some time to get close again.

Could the pandemic revitalise devolution debates

 [Published by Centre for London, 27 April 2020]

Days during the pandemic have a certain rhythm, whether mid-week or during what we used to call ‘the weekend’. After the daily roll call of cases and fatalities, a government minister appears at a press conference to give the same virtual answers to the same virtual questions. Have we reached a peak? Is there enough personal protective equipment? How do we get out of this?

The charts and graphs tame the horror of deaths with a sense of rationality, and a wood panelled conference room can for a moment look like the command and control centre of a clearly-directed ‘war effort’ battle against an unseen enemy.

It is an illusion – a necessary and comforting illusion perhaps, but no more real for that, despite the wide range of powers granted to the government by the Coronavirus Act. And we should not be clinging to that illusion when we seek to learn lessons from the crisis.

While ministers pronounce targets and exhort compliance, hundreds of public sector workers across the country are making decisions and joining forces to respond to surges of infection as the spread across the country.

Again and again in recent weeks, I have heard similar stories – that measures that used to take months can now be achieved in days or hours, that proceduralism and protectiveness have gone out of the window, that public servants are taking action on the basis that “asking forgiveness is easier than asking permission.”

Officials talk of the value of a sense of shared endeavour and objectives, and health service managers distinguish centralised strategy and allocation of resources from localised decision-making and leadership.

This breathless rush of innovation and adaptation has lessons for how we think about public services coming out of the crisis. In particular, it should revitalise longer-term debates on devolution, and the new constitutional settlement that the country will need when both Brexit and COVID-19 are under control.

Creating tailored local services

Advocates of devolution sometimes make the case in the abstract, simply asserting but local is better. At one level this is surely true: power and decisions should be made as close to citizens and communities as is compatible with national fairness. This is what the European Union refers to the ‘principle of subsidiarity’ (though one that the European Commission is often accused of abusing).

But there’s more to it than that. A second argument for devolution is the argument for particularity – for enabling local services to be tailored to local circumstances. In London, local authorities have worked together to help hospitals clear space in critical care wards, to identify and find hotel rooms for homeless and other vulnerable people, to get food and PPE where they are most needed, and to coordinate volunteer services. All these tasks have depended on detailed local knowledge – of communities and resources, assets and risks – that could never be found in Whitehall.

Allied to this is an argument for integration – enabling local services to complement rather than conflict with each other. Citizens may need support from housing, social care, health services, education, probation, policing, and any number of other services. If these can be brought together, the results should not just be more efficient, but also more responsive to the needs of people and communities. This is never more true than at a time of crisis, when the commitment to deliver results can overcome organisational boundaries. But there is a risk of retreat when the crisis passes.

There is a flipside to all these arguments. Some point out that the centralised direction of the NHS has helped it cope better than Italy’s more fragmented health care system. Locally tailored services can easily look like a ‘postcode lottery’, and incompetently run localised services are no more accountable or efficient than their national counterparts. Even federalised countries like Germany have seen some controversy over regionally-varying lockdown regulations, though the country’s dispersed public health lab capacity has been seen as one of its success factors.

But the crisis has shown what can be done, and in its aftermath, we need a more rational debate about the balance between national standards and local innovation, between centralised strategy and operational autonomy, and between the myths of control and the reality of adaptation.