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Losing my religion - or how I learned to start worrying and distrust the news...

 As the waves of Covid19 have ebbed and flowed over the past 10 months, I have become more and more fixated on the data that chart their course. Every afternoon, I check if the daily case, hospitalisation, death, and now vaccination numbers have been updated. I look at the curves, at regional patterns, at the maps that enable me to zoom in to my neighbourhood, and those where family and friends live. Every week I look out for the ONS infection survey, and for other surveys like the Imperial REACT study and the Kings College London’s ZOE symptom tracker.

 

Why am I doing this? I’m not sure it’s healthy behaviour. I am not an expert in interpreting epidemiological data; and much of the time I learn very little. The problem is that I find myself believing less and less what the government or most media outlets are telling me. I see a headline proclaiming that the lockdown is having no impact, even as cases are falling across the country, then another telling me the opposite 48 hours later. The next day a paper tells me that a new strain of coronavirus is more deadly (albeit with sly quote marks), while another news outlet tells me the question is still open.  The government cautiously suggests there is some evidence that lockdown is having an impact, when their own data show that case numbers have fallen by a third since the beginning of January.

 

At one level, this is not really surprising. The pandemic is a complex phenomenon, and its progress is the product of imperfectly understood pathology and the unpredictable behaviour of wearied humans, which is further complicated by delays of weeks between actions and effects. Different data may point in different directions, and reasonable people may disagree on interpretation.

 

But I worry that a lot of disagreement is not reasonable, but partisan. Online, the debate is polarised between presumed ‘covid deniers’ and alleged ‘lockdown lovers’. Passionate intensity reigns, and good faith arguments seem thin on the ground. When in early January I pointed to some limited evidence that case numbers seemed to be falling in the parts of the south east England that had been locked down since mid-December, I was corrected (rightly) for looking at case numbers rather than positivity rates (though the trend was sustained, so I was right even if accidentally), but I got the feeling that my real error was being on the wrong side of the argument, that I was suspected of trivialising the illness, or making a point for or against lockdowns.

 

So far, so Twitter. But the mass media are not much better. Rather than trying to offer level-headed analysis, some papers seem wilfully optimistic, others determined to find the clouds behind every silver lining. And Government, along with a BBC that has increasingly operated as state broadcaster during the crisis, seems to issue statements and information based primarily on their likely effect on behaviours, rather than on their accuracy.

 

I have mixed feelings about all this. I can actually understand and to some extent support the ‘behavioural’ approach taken by the government and the BBC. The last thing we need now is irrational optimism leading to reduced compliance with government restrictions. Even George Orwell saw the value of propaganda in war time; and if the enemy today is complacency and lockdown fatigue, then we cannot be surprised if the government uses every means to keep it at bay. 

 

But this approach has shaken or even corroded my faith in institutions (a faith that may have been too blindly given in the first place). I have always listened to politicians through a sceptical filter, but that filter is now applied to scientific advisors, academics and BBC journalists. Hearing them, I no longer simply expect to become better informed, but at some level suspect that I am being played, that the aim of the communication is behaviour modification (“a call to action” – or more likely inaction, these days) not enlightenment. 

 

Scepticism may be healthy, but when faith in institutions is eroded, all sorts of wild flights of fantasy can take its place. To paraphrase a quote attributed to GK Chesterton, when people stop believing in institutions, they don’t believe in nothing, but can believe in anything. Behaviour change communication may be entirely benign in intention, but it also risks fuelling conspiracy theories and sweeping distrust of experts.

 

Meanwhile, I go back to the data, clicking on the charts every afternoon, trying to keep both optimism and pessimism in check as the pandemic rolls grimly on.

Against declinism

Jointly with Mark Kleinman

[First published on Kings College London blog (also at Centre for London blog and OnLondon, w/e 24 January 2021]

London enters 2021 in a very different mood, not just to last year, but to much of the zeitgeist of the last 30. There were fireworks on the Thames on new year’s eve, but no crowds were watching in the streets and parks. The mood of the impressive light and sound show was one of resilience and solidarity, rather than unbridled confidence. As with the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games, praise for the National Health Service took a central role, but the tone was less celebratory than seriously grateful.

London has suffered badly, both from the health and the economic impacts of the pandemic, as can be seen in The London Intelligence Economic Tracker. As we write, the NHS in London and throughout the UK is again straining under pressure. The emerging labour market evidence shows a particularly severe downturn in London. The Greater London Authority (GLA) Economics team report that the number of workforce jobs fell 3.8% (229,000) in the capital between March and September – a far greater fall than for the UK as a whole, at 1.8%. They go on to say that while in the earlier stages of the pandemic, there were only modest changes in headline labour market statistics relative to the large falls in activity, this has changed more recently, with large movements in London’s unemployment rate. In the three months to October, the unemployment rate rose a record 1.2 percentage points to 6.3% in London – the largest quarterly rise since the series began in 1992. Only the North East region has a higher current unemployment rate than London, at 6.6%.

As we hobble through the next few months, bigger questions are being asked about the future of cities and of London in particular. Will the “urban age” of big cities leading global trade and growth return? Or does the future lie in more dispersed and fractured economic activity, as globalisation falters, global travel slows and/or the benefits of agglomeration are outweighed by the convenience and safety of working from home?

The debate has been growing in recent years about whether we have reached “peak London”, whether the city’s phoenix-like recovery from post-war deconcentration and urban flight has run out of steam. Like waves of pandemic infections, the turning point of cities’ fortunes are more easily visible after the event: nobody really expected London to start growing again in the mid-1980s.

Population growth has been slowing in London over the past three years. Moreover, recent analysis of Labour Force Survey data by Michael O’Connor and Jonathan Portes suggests that London’s population could have fallen during the pandemic by as much as 700,000 – a huge turnround. And consultants PwC recently forecast a 300,000 person decline by the end of 2021. These are only estimates and projections, and of course much of this change might be temporary. Will 2020 prove to be a blip, reflecting the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, or will it be another inflection point like 1987?

The latest demographic projections issued by the GLA in November 2020 forecast a return to growth – though at a slower rate than the past decade, when London’s population grew by almost 90,000 every year. Their “central projections” anticipate growth of around 50-70,000 people per year instead, with the next two years at the lower end of this scale. This would lead to a potential population of around 11 million by 2050 (compared to just under 9 million in 2019).

Population growth is driven by two factors: migration and natural increase. In the year to mid-2019, London’s population was estimated to have increased by 54,000. This consisted of net of 77,000 people to London from overseas, net movement of 94,000 people from London to the rest of the UK, and a net increase of 71,000 people from the balance of births and deaths.

The GLA’s central projection assumes that international migration will be suppressed for the period to 2022, but will then bounce back to average 95,000 (net) every year. The GLA’s expert panel felt that on balance, future reductions in migration are more likely than increases. However, they advised against discounting the possibility of higher levels of international migration, pointing to the resilience of international migration; the possibility that new immigration rules may result in foreign nationals settling in London for longer, and potential reductions in emigration rates of UK nationals in post-Brexit Europe.. The projections also suggest that net domestic migration to the rest of the UK will return to around 100,000 per year by 2030. So most of the projected growth will be fuelled by resurgent natural change (births minus deaths), which has fallen since 2010 but is forecast to stabilise at around 60,000 per year. London will continue to see a rapid churn in population, but its growth will be fuelled from within.

Similarly, the GLA project continued economic growth over the longer term. Their economic projections anticipate contraction and jobs losses in 2021, followed by recovery in 2022, with economic output (GVA) exceeding the 2019 peak by 2022, and the number of jobs in 2022 just reaching the peak of three years earlier. Beyond that, the implication of GLA and other forecasters’ cyclical and trend analyses is for the London economy to resume previous levels of growth, both in output, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, employment.

How credible is this? London’s position as a leading global city has taken a hit from Brexit and the UK’s management of coronavirus, but the city is still in a potentially strong position, with strengths in tech, green innovation, financial and business services, education, arts and culture. London needs to remain open and inviting, through immigration policy but also through nurturing and restoring its wounded cultural and hospitality sectors – the “soft power” foundations of its global appeal. The UK as a whole will continue to need London, as a driver of economic growth, for its fiscal contribution and as its gateway to the world. Brexit, and the UK’s potential isolation outside the major trading and economic blocs, makes London’s role more rather than less important.

How much does the government understand this, and will it commit to the infrastructure and other support needed for London to continue to grow? The signals are mixed: national planning policy is now focused on concentrating growth in cities, and the government’s latest algorithm envisages London building more than 90,000 homes every year – many more than the Mayor’s London Plan proposes, the GLA’s projections would imply, or that London is actually building at the moment.

Given this expectation, and the economic importance of London and South East, you would expect the government to want to invest in the capital’s infrastructure. But worryingly, in the National Infrastructure Review last November, the government suspended support for Crossrail 2, the next phase of major transport infrastructure investment in London, beyond safeguarding work. As Alex Jan has commented, Crossrail 2 is “pretty integral” to the London Plan, though all major infrastructure projects have their ups and downs – Crossrail 1 was first mooted in the 1970s, with roots in the Abercrombie Plan of 1944. Government commitment to “levelling up” regional imbalances in the UK is welcome, but this should not happen by starving the capital of much-needed public investment.

We will not know for some time whether short-term population and economic decline are temporary diversions or longer-term redirections of London’s future. We do not know whether 700,000 people really have left London over the last year, or whether and how quickly they may come back. And we do not known how far recovery from the crisis could see some rebalancing of activity within London and the wider South East. We know, in short, that there are still a lot of unknowns.

But public policy should shape the future rather than just responding to it (a core proposition of Centre for London’s London Futures programme), and governments should be wary of drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term disruptions. London’s potential for growth should be nurtured so that the city can work better for all its current citizens, as well as the two million more who could arrive in the next 30 years, and so that the capital can support recovery across the UK.

Reheating London's hospitality industry

 [First published in OnLondon, 29 December 2020]

After Boris Johnson’s election victory in December 2019, some of his supporters heralded the approach of another “Roaring Twenties”. 

With hindsight, it was an unfortunate analogy, for the 1920s boom followed the devastation of World War I and an influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people worldwide. But the comparison has stuck, and as we look nervously but hopefully into 2021, even sober-minded think tanks such as the Resolution Foundation are deploying it, predicting a boom in deferred expenditure, particularly in the hospitality sector, once vaccines have enabled social mixing to return to something like normal.

Anecdote bears this out, as those friends who are still in work discuss which restaurants and bars they will visit – we are all planning to get “lit up in London”. But the capital’s hospitality sector is a lot more than the subject of lockdown fantasies. Over the last ten years, employment in the sector has grown by 40%, which is faster than any other apart from professional services, IT and communications. 

This growth is driven by and supports London’s global role. Spending by overseas visitors forms a major chunk of London’s exports, and it is London’s cultural offer – from nightlife to galleries to restaurants – that helps the city to retain its position at the top of global surveys, such as this year’s Global Power City Index, published by Tokyo’s Mori Memorial Foundation. Hospitality isn’t the froth on the top of “serious” sectors, such as financial and business services. It is foundational to them.

And as we lose the advantages of access to the European Single Market, these “soft power” assets will assume ever more importance in bringing the world to London, enabling us to play our part in “Global Britain” – another phrase that has taken a battering in this year of mutating viruses, lockdowns and travel bans.

But hospitality has been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. The sector accounts for around 25% of current furloughs (compared to less than 8% of jobs), and has seen the most substantial job losses of any industry. And the outlook is grim: recent national surveys suggest that almost 30% of pubs and bars are pessimistic about surviving into the spring. London’s pubs and restaurants had a particularly tough year, with visits to the city centre dramatically reduced even during the summer period of relaxed restrictions.

As ever, the situation is complicated by Brexit. London’s hospitality sector is particularly reliant on foreign workers, with overseas nationals comprising around 50 per cent of the workforce. New immigration rules will make it far harder to employ foreign nationals in hospitality. Managers and a few specialist roles such as chefs are classified as “skilled” and therefore eligible for work visas but, bar staff, waiters, baristas and other hotel and kitchen staff are not.

Furthermore, the coronavirus crisis appears to have triggered the type of exodus that many were predicting (but failed to materialise) after the EU referendum in 2016. More than 700,000 people born outside the UK (around 500,000 from the EU) left employment between the first and third quarters of this year, according government surveys. Most appear to have left the country (or at least the survey sample) entirely. They may be biding their time until London re-opens, or they may stay away.

So, come the great unlocking, London’s hospitality sector may be in the unhappy situation of experiencing business closures and labour shortages at the same time – just as the city is trying to renew its global appeal. There may be an opportunity here for unemployed young Londoners to pick up the slack. But that is likely to put – long overdue – upwards pressure on wages and working conditions, which may in turn threaten the viability of pubs and restaurants facing higher food costs and already financially scarred by the coronavirus winter.

London will re-open, and its restaurants and bars will once again buzz with life, as they fill with people from across the city, the nation and the world, underpinning London’s status as a global meeting place. But recovery will be tough for the hospitality sector, and it could need almost as much support as during the long winter of coronavirus closures.

Good advices?

 [First published in Local Government Chronicle, 24 November 2020]

Choosing the right advisors is one of the most important decisions that political leaders make, as recent Downing Street dramas have illustrated. This is perhaps particularly true for the mayor of London, who unlike the prime minister or a council leader does not have the support of a party group, but only the watchful eye of a scrutinising London Assembly.

So, alongside City Hall’s expert staff, mayors need mates; their own people who can advise and represent them in such a huge city. The mayor of London can bring in 12 appointees, and the ways in which the three mayors to date have appointed and worked with their teams have been indicative both of their strengths and their weaknesses – as detailed in London’s Mayor at 20, a collection of essays, analyses and interviews looking back over the past two decades of the capital’s mayoralty.

When Ken Livingstone was elected in 2000, he came with a gang of advisors who had worked with him for many years – from the Greater London Council, from activism since then, from his parliamentary office. Most had worked with him when he had decided to run as an independent following Labour’s bungled attempt to fix candidate selection. Within weeks of his election, Ken had advertised posts as ‘policy advisors’, and many of these were filled by familiar faces.

The team were all broadly from the political left, albeit from different denominations; Simon Fletcher, Ken’s chief of staff and former parliamentary researcher, brokered agreement on priorities and positioning. The mayor used to describe advisors such as Neale Coleman, John Ross, Jude Woodward and Lee Jasper as being like ministers – with full authority to represent his views. The team was consistent through Ken’s two terms, with the mayor showing loyalty (and damaging his 2008 re-election campaign) when advisors became embroiled in newspaper allegations of cronyism.

Unlike his predecessor, Boris Johnson had no deep roots in London politics, and had only been an MP since 2001. There was no gang waiting in the wings when the ebullient loner was elected in 2008. Nick Boles, then Conservative MP for Grantham and founder of the Policy Exchange thinktank, worked with the new mayor to appoint deputy mayors.

The initial tranche proved shaky: one was prosecuted for fiddling expenses, another was found to have fabricated his CV, and a third senior advisor made comments on race issues that led to swift resignation. Tim Parker – a corporate restructuring guru appointed as chief of staff and first deputy mayor – left when it became clear that there wasn’t the scope or appetite for the application of his specialised skill set, and that Boris wanted to take decisions as mayor rather than acting as a media-friendly figurehead.

Other appointments were more stable, some becoming long-term Johnson allies. Munira Mirza, deputy mayor for culture and education, followed Johnson to Downing Street, as did chief of staff Eddie Lister, who is now temporarily filling the same role at 10 Downing Street. Lister, and Simon Milton the former Westminster City Council leader who preceded him at City Hall, took a relatively light-touch approach to policy co-ordination, leaving other deputy mayors, such as Stephen Greenhalgh, Kit Malthouse and Isabel Dedring, with space to develop policy positions, but also giving a looser sense of direction than under Livingstone.

If Sadiq Khan drew one lesson from Boris’s wobbly transition, it was not to make appointments too quickly. His deputy mayors were appointed painstakingly over his first six months in office. Senior local government figures such as James Murray and Jules Pipe, former mayor of Hackney, were appointed alongside former GLA officials Justine Simons and Shirley Rodrigues, and external figures such as human rights barrister Matthew Ryder, shadow transport minister Heidi Alexander and former Home Office special advisor Sophie Linden.

These appointments have been carefully judged, but the deputies are not close to Sadiq and his decision-making in the way that Ken’s were, or eventually Boris’s became. Less prominent are the inner circle of advisors who agree policy positioning: chief of staff David Bellamy, director of policy Nick Bowes, and communications and external affairs directors Leah Kreitzman, Paddy Hennessy and Jack Stenner.

The London mayoralty is an unusual role: it can be a springboard or a dead-end; it suits loners and mavericks, but requires constant coalition-building; it gives extensive powers of patronage and appointment, alongside singular accountability. It is a job to which the incumbent is elected alone, but not one which any mayor could hope to carry out alone. Appointing advisors and deputies is an early but critical decision, requiring trust and judgement. For a political loner like Boris Johnson it is a fraught business, and one that has given him a rocky start both as mayor of London and as prime minister.

City Hall - from glass testicle to white elephant

 [First published by OnLondon, 3 November 2020]

 So farewell then, City Hall.

I remember a conversation in early 2000, soon after I started working in the “transition team” that set up the Greater London Authority (GLA). We didn’t have a Mayor of London yet, but – as I explained loudly to someone in a noisy nightclub – I just really, really wanted to work in City Hall, the sloping glass blob by Tower Bridge that has housed the GLA for the past 18 years. On the site of Pickle Herring Street’s warehouses and wharves, looking north to London’s commercial heartland and east to the capital’s future, City Hall would be a very modern HQ for a very modern strategic authority.

While these shiny new headquarters were being built, London’s new Mayor and Assembly spent their first two years in Westminster’s Romney House, a former hotel that had been requisitioned by the government during World War II, and had served as a dumping ground for departmental detritus since then (and has now been converted into flats). Then, after a formal opening on 23 July 2002 by the Queen (“Your new building, which is so clearly based on ideas of openness and accessibility, will provide an exciting forum for Londoners as your debates ebb and flow”), we moved in.

Openness and accessibility may have been part of Foster and Partners’ design (alongside the government’s instruction to keep a cap on the new Authority’s staff numbers), but these features fell from favour in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Risk assessments were quickly undertaken and an awkward metal detector arch installed by the reception desk. The need to pass through this quickly killed off the idea of citizens being able to drift in from the sunken Scoop outside (which looked like it was purpose build for the skateboarders who security guards so assiduously chased away) into the lower ground floor café.

Security also killed off the rather romantic notion of the ramp above the Assembly Chamber, a slighter echo of Berlin’s Reichstag dome (designed by the same architects and completed in 1999), as a vantage point for citizens to watch new civic democracy in action. Not only was this quickly written off as dangerous (on account of angry firefighters, taxi-drivers and pigeon-feed sellers as much as terrorists), but walking on the ramp was so clattery that even GLA officers were banned from it during meetings.

The Chamber itself is a fine lofty room, which has been used in The Apprentice, for politics programmes and in James Bond films. But with the dead air of the ramp above it, the space it occupies is out of all proportion to its use. Monthly questions to the Mayor attract a smattering of journalists and school children, but other committee meetings are rarely that well attended.

And the real debates and decisions do not take place in the Assembly, but in the Mayor of London’s office (and the offices of his advisors) under the sloping glass eaves of the eighth floor. Ken Livingstone, who had derided the designs as a “glass testicle”, insisted on individual offices for his advisors “for all the plotting they need to do”.

Assembly members had individual offices too, but all staff – from the chief executive down – were in open plan desks arranged around the edge of the building, all uniformly grey to avoid any contrast with the bright yellow walls that the architects had chosen for the building’s core, to enhance the night-time profile it projected over the Thames. Meeting rooms with minimal natural light were clustered around the other side of the core, or buried in the even gloomier basement.

But for all its flaws – from leaking panes of glass and draughty entrance lobby, to the hassle of never knowing whether you would be waiting 15 minutes at security – City Hall had a public face: the lower ground floor café offered the opportunity to bump into the Mayor, Assembly members, GLA staffers, borough leaders and anyone else involved in policy in London. London’s Living Room, on the top floor, is a panoramic party venue – surrounded by a balcony with views over Tower Bridge, the City of London, and the sweeping railways and estates of Southwark. And though the building was clunky and cheaply-finished, it did feel like a place of power.

It is hard to argue with the £60m savings that will be realised by moving the GLA to The Crystal, an equally idiosyncratic building in the Royal Docks, or with the potential to accelerate redevelopment of one of East London’s most complex but isolated locations. But it is also hard not to worry that the move will diminish the GLA, making it just a little more marginal to the lives of Londoners.

Zones of interest - the Planning White Paper and London

[Published by Centre for London, 29 October 2020]

The government’s ‘Planning for the future’ White Paper, on which public consultation closes this week, is a bold statement of intent at a time when many of us are confused about planning for the Christmas holidays. It sets out a radical agenda for reforming town planning — to speed the process up, to get more and better homes built, to make community involvement more meaningful. But how will it work in London?

Read our response to the consultation

The proposals amount to a rather British hybrid (aka ‘fudge’) between zoning-based systems where rules are set up front for what can be built where, and the more discretionary system we have now, where decisions are taken on a case-by case basis, albeit in the light of local and national policy. It proposes that the whole country will be divided into areas for growth, areas for renewal and areas for protection, with automatic planning permission for new developments that fall within the rules for growth areas, and a greater role for discretion in the other categories.

The government will set housing targets for each council, will issue a national ‘design code’ allowing for local variation, and will introduce a standardised levy on the value of new development, to pay for affordable housing and other local infrastructure. Councils will allocate land to the different categories, develop local design codes and zoning rules (eg, on mix of uses), consult local people on these, collect and spend the new infrastructure levy, and take any decisions still required.

There’s a lot of potential in these proposals. They won’t solve London’s housing problem on their own, but they could help. Greater planning certainty could diversify the market and speed up building, and there’s a huge problem of public trust that earlier engagement could help with.

But the White Paper is deafeningly silent on how all this applies to London, and implies too many powers being drawn into the centre and not enough being left to local democracy. Given the government’s challenge to the Mayor’s draft London Plan, and the strings attached to bailouts of Transport for London, you could be forgiven for seeing this as another area where devolution is being rolled back by ministers that see city mayors as an irritant at best. Government officials insist this is not the case. In fact, they say, London’s two tier planning system, housing targets and network of opportunity areas are the type of approach being pushed more widely.

But the detail does need fleshing out, as Centre for London’s response to the consultation argues. If London is really to accommodate the number of new homes that the government’s new calculations suggest (more than 90,000 each year), this will need more radical approaches to working across South-East England and/or a long-overdue review of the green belt.

And the roles of the London Plan, borough plans and associated design codes will need to be very clear if ‘upstream’ community engagement is to have strong enough teeth for local people to feel that they can shape growth and urban change where they live, without debating every building. This will also have to mean strengthening controls on ‘permitted development’ conversions of commercial buildings, which are creating some horrid and pokey flats around the capital (though the government has made the positive commitment that national space standards will now be applied to such developments).

The new proposed ‘infrastructure levy’ for affordable housing and other costs will not generate enough funding on its own to build all the affordable homes London needs. But, along with zoning, it should help to bring more builders into the market by creating more clarity up front, and reducing the haggling and costs involved in securing permission.

If the changes are implemented, it will redefine the role of borough planning officers. More zoning-based systems will require more up-front work on masterplans and public consultations and maybe less management of individual planning applications. Given the cuts that planning departments have seen in recent years and the shortage of skills in these areas they are already facing, this will have to mean more money, at least for a transitional period.

But the big question is whether the reforms will be followed through. The proposed centralised approach to setting housing targets and the higher targets that this would generate for the South East has scandalised many home counties MPs (though many seem to miss the fact that the numbers generated by the ‘mutant algorithm’ will be modified to reflect constraints on capacity). And picking apart and restitching the complexities of planning, without generating uncertainty for developers and councils as the UK enters recession, will be a big challenge. But 1947, when the Town and Country Planning Act became law and put in place the planning system we have today, was a testing time too.