richardfjbrown

Mansions on the bill?

As regular readers know, On London is always on guard against attempts to divert more funding from London, already a major net contributor to UK taxes, to the rest of the country. Other regions need investment for sure, but London’s golden eggs are in limited supply. The capital’s problems, which include the highest regional poverty rates after housing costs, cannot be ignored.

But it’s hard to deny that Rachel Reeves had a point when she observed in her budget speech that a “Band D home in Darlington or Blackpool pays just under £2,400 in Council Tax…nearly £300 more than a £10 million mansion in Mayfair”.

You can decry the pointing at Mayfair when several London boroughs charge more in Counci Tax than Darlington or Blackpool. You can point out the historic reasons for the imbalance, from the tax’s origins as a post-Poll Tax hybrid of service charge and tax, to outdated valuations and variable price changes since 1991, to the relative performances of councils in different parts of the country. You can highlight the way that other local taxes, such as Business Rates, are raised in London and distributed across the country. But even so, the disparity doesn’t look fair.

The Chancellor’s solution is a new “mansion tax” – or “high value council tax surcharge” to use its full and slightly misleading title – which will be imposed on properties valued at over £2 million. It will be introduced from April 2028 – like other tax rises, kicked towards what Reeves must hope will be sunnier uplands two years hence. Treasury calculations estimate the tax will raise £400 million by 2029/30.

The “mansion tax” will clearly hit London (and the South East) harder than other English regions, but it is hard to work out precisely how much harder. The most recent comprehensive valuation of properties, which forms the basis of Council Tax bands today, was made 35 years ago. Property price changes have diverged wildly since then, so it doesn’t tell us much about current values.

One possible proxy would be looking at prices actually paid for properties. Such data is collected and published by the Land Registry. This is probably as good as anything else in the public domain, but still pretty flawed. For one thing, we cannot assume that the values of properties sold in any given year reflect the values of those that are not. There may be more high value properties than show up in the sales figures, as these have proved toughest to sell in recent years. Or, there may be fewer, as prices have dropped for this very reason (particularly in “prime” London).

Still…In 2024, around 2,600 properties in London were registered as sold for over £2 million, representing around two thirds of all sold at that level in England. Almost half of these sales were in Kensington & Chelsea, Camden, Westminster and the City of London. Properties in London were also far more likely to be sold for the highest prices: 0.5 per cent of all sales in London were for more than £5 million compared to 0.01 per cent of all such sales in the rest of England.

Extrapolating those ratios to estimate (very roughly) the impact of the measures, it looks like around 100,000 of London’s three million non-socially rented dwellings (3.3 per cent) might be liable to the tax, compared to around 40,000 of the 19 million in the rest of England (0.2 per cent). In total, Londoners could pay just over 75 per cent of an indicative mansion tax yield of £525 million.

This is a higher total figure than that estimated by the Treasury, which has no doubt modelled non-payment, price changes and various valuation finagles, but it is not that far off. My workings can be seen below.

So, Londoners will be paying the bulk of this new tax, and that will include many who feel very far from “wealthy”. But it won’t go to London. Though it is called a “council tax surcharge”, the tax has nothing to do with Council Tax: funds raised will go straight into national coffers, bypassing even a nominal allocation to local authorities (who would likely lose any gain in adjusted government grant allocations). In the words of the LSE’s Professor Tony Travers, “It’s a central government tax. Pure and simple”.

London’s net fiscal transfer will creep up from the £43 billion that went from the capital to other parts of the UK in 2022/23, and accountability will become ever more confused. The Local Government Association has already highlighted the risk that councils are regarded as accountable for a charge that they do not control or spend, and have asked that the funding raised is allocated to local authority services.

There may be significant practical difficulties in implementation too. There have been revaluations since 1991: the Valuation Office undertook one of Wales’ 1.5 million homes in 2003, and is planning another by 2028, using sales data and automated valuation to develop a more sophisticated approach to determining values.

But it’s not going to be easy. As a signal of complexity, it is worth noting that the Welsh revaluation has been postponed from this year. Furthermore, people living in houses valued at over £2 million include many who have tax advisors, chartered surveyors and lawyers on speed dial.

Experts such as Paul Johnson, Dan Neidle and Neal Hudson have also observed that the system is a throwback to the “slab” system of Stamp Duty Land Tax that was phased out in 2016, and led to sale values clustering just below the points where higher rates would kick in. April 2028 suddenly seems a lot closer.

More fundamentally, this is a clunky half measure. There is a strong case for a comprehensive reform, to fully revalue and re-band properties for Council Tax, or to go further and replace Council Tax and Stamp Duty with new property or land value taxes, using innovative valuation techniques to create a more transparent, responsive and proportionate system.

The mansion tax is not that comprehensive reform. Instead, the risk is that this measure, like Inheritance Tax hikes on owners of farmland and family businesses, annoys an influential and vocal minority, without raising huge sums.

And it will leave the core machinery of Council Tax, with its 20th Century valuations, its restrictive banding model, and its proliferating surcharges and discounts, looking increasingly dusty and dilapidated – like an unloved and barely functional household appliance that everybody hates but nobody can quite bring themselves to replace.

First published by On London

Glad it’s all over

A recent piece by the FT’s Gideon Rachman, on the re-awakening of the nuclear ams race, sent me back to the early 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war stalked the pop charts, even as unseen crises such as Able Archer 83 secretly brought the world to the brink.

Because I am a cheery soul, I already have a playlist on Spotify called ‘Nuclear‘, which draws together some of the irradiated pop dystopias that sold in such numbers 40 years ago. There are some absences (such as Sting’s ‘Russians’) largely on the grounds of my tastes, but the list does give a sense of how pervasive the nuclear threat was in popular culture – at a time when the charts were much more of a communal experience than they are today. I don’t detect the same looming anxiety about, say, climate change in today’s pop music. But I don’t listen to much modern pop music so what do I know?

And it wasn’t just music. In the UK alone, TV dramas such as Edge of Darkness (1985), A Very British Coup (1988) and, unforgettably, Threads (1984) all touched or centred on the politics and potential consequences of nuclear defence, nuclear diplomacy and nuclear war. There are, of course, US films such as War Games (1983) too, but there’s a blend of ghoulishness, glee, melancholy and cynical fatalism that seems peculiar to the UK dramas and pop songs.

I was a teenager in the early 1980s, so was perhaps particularly sensitive to this sense of dread that seemed draped over the world, just as I started taking an interest in it. Looking back, I suspect that spending long afternoons in darkened rooms listening to how different mixes of ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood incorporated civil defence warnings was not the most psychologically healthy of hobbies. (And I wonder whether the political apathy often attributed to ‘Generation X’ relates to us not confidently expecting to reach voting age, let alone maturity.)

But it wasn’t just morbid protogoths. The likelihood of nuclear war, “within the next year or two”, was a commonplace of discussion between my parents and their friends, sometimes overheard from upstairs as the dinner party drinking continued.

All that seems curiously distant now, only half-glimpsed through pop culture reflections, crowded out by more tangible 1980s markers such as Concorde and Sony walkmen. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides commented that distant observers would judge Athens to have been far more powerful than it was owing to its wealth of monunmental buildings, but would not understand the power of Sparta, a great power that had a minimal (and mainly wooden) physical footprint.

In a similar way, the physical traces of this part of the Cold War are hard to find: missile and civil defence sites were buried or locked away, and most still are. You saw the women camped out at Greenham Common, but you never saw what they were protesting against. For most of us, the standoff was a strangely immaterial event, even a psychological one. But the songs and dramas of the 1980s can still give a sense of its power and how it was imprinted on our consciousness, like the ghostly shadows left by the nuclear blast at Hiroshima.

Hard Times in London Town

The new English indices of deprivation, published last week, provide an important snapshot of the complexities of poverty and other forms of deprivation faced by communities across the country. They are also unavoidably political, as they feed into local government funding formulas. This lends a strange tone to the debate about them: nobody wants to be called the most deprived place in England, but nobody wants to lose out on the funding that comes with it.

So, when the composite Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) placed seven London boroughs among the 20 per cent (60 out of 297) most deprived districts in the country, some anti-London moithering was inevitable. Quoted in the Financial Times, North Durham MP (and former Hackney councillor) Luke Akehurst complained that the indices could result in “leafy southern suburbs and the most exclusive parts” of central London receiving more government funding: “That can’t be right,” he said. Clearly, the poverty faced by more than two million Londoners isn’t real poverty.

The IMD combines seven different indices which are themselves drawn from more than 50 indicators, mostly measured at the level of lower super output areas (LSOAs) – small geographic units with populations of 1,000-3,000 people. These are then aggregated and weighted to show results by local authority. London’s most deprived boroughs are in the arc from Enfield to Barking & Dagenham in north east London, plus Brent in the north west. This is a similar position to 2019, when the indices were last published, though greatly improved from 2004, when London boroughs made up 14 of the most deprived 20 per cent.

The index measures relative deprivation, so London’s improving position over time may reflect deterioration outside the M25 as well as improvements in the capital. But a closer look at the six sub-indices gives a more rounded picture of where Londoners face the biggest challenges.

The two most heavily-weighted scores are for income and employment deprivation, which together make up 45 per cent of the IMD. Five of the six worst-scoring local authorities for income are in north-east London, though there are pockets of income deprivation across the inner city – from north Kensington to West Wandsworth. By contrast, only one London borough features in the 20 districts scoring worst for employment.

The difference is, as so often in London, about housing. The income index includes a count of people living in households receiving benefits (including in-work benefits) with an income below 70 per cent of the national average after housing costs; in 2019 it counted people living on less than 60 per cent average incomes before housing costs. As a result of these changes, which better reflect the reality of living in London, the number of people counted as facing income deprivation in the capital has almost doubled, from 1.1 million in 2019 to 2.2 million in 2025.

This change illustrates how London’s housing costs impoverish many working people. They also have an acute impact on children and older people. Three London boroughs – Tower Hamlets, Newham and Hackney – have the highest levels of children and older people living with income deprivation. Many people who can afford to are choosing to leave London to start families, which means the population staying in the city is disproportionately made up of those affluent enough to afford its family housing, and those who don’t have the luxury of choice.

In other areas, London scores relatively well. Its impressive record on school attainment and university progression is reflected in low scores for education and skills deprivation, albeit with some “not spots” of relatively poor performance in parts of outer London (for example, Enfield, Brent and Ealing). Londoners are also relatively healthy, with no boroughs in the ten per cent of worst performing, but some pockets of ill health concentrated in an inner-city arc from Camden to Newham.

Crime is much less concentrated in London than right-wing demagogues might suggest. Only one borough – Hackney – features in the ten per cent worst districts (compared to seven in 2019). However, the two English LSOAs with the highest rate of theft (one of the constituent indicators) are in the area of Westminster stretching from Fitzrovia down to Embankment, probably reflecting the epidemic of phone snatching that plagues parts of central London.

Two final indices mix indicators that give an ambiguous picture of London and its challenges. A “Barriers to Housing and Services Index” seeks to balance indicators of how easy it is to access housing and other services. London boroughs score well on “connectivity”, but much less so on access to housing, homelessness and overcrowding. As a result of these latter indicators, London boroughs account for seven of the ten worst performers on this index.

The final “Living Environment Index” is a bit of a wild card. London boroughs make up eight of the ten worst performers, but the indicators include whether houses are deprived of private outdoor spaces, their energy performance, levels of noise pollution, and traffic casualties among pedestrians and cyclists.

These all seem to penalise dense places with busy roads, places with lots of older buildings and places near airports. By this measure, Mayfair, Primrose Hill and Knightsbridge are among England’s 10 per cent most deprived LSOAs. Here, you can see Luke Akehurst’s point, though this Index makes up less than ten per cent of the composite IMD.

Even if the Living Environment Index doesn’t seem quite right, the bigger message of the new indices is that deprivation and disadvantage are genuinely multi-faceted, and can’t be simply be summarised as “pampered south, neglected north”. London is not a bad place to live, and does a lot better on measures such as crime than many of the populist right on both sides of the Atlantic would argue. However, as so often, housing costs are a pervasive drag on liveability, pushing people into poverty, hobbling aspiration and jeopardising the UK’s prosperity.

Originally published by On London.

Gimme shelter

At the time of writing, no London borough has formally announced plans to challenge asylum seekers being housed in hotels. And while there have been recent protests at hotels in Canary Wharf and Islington, protestors objecting to “asylum hotels” in the capital have often been outnumbered by counter-protestors.

This might seem typical of a city characterised by diversity, one which has welcomed people fleeing persecution through the ages – from Huguenots, to Jews, to Ugandan Asians, to Vietnamese “boat people”. London is already doing its bit, and more besides, in accommodating asylum seekers. But any shift in national policy in response to this week’s Epping court ruling could have big impacts.

According to a Migration Observatory briefing issued last week, the number of asylum seekers in London grew more than fourfold between 2018 and 2024. Its share of the UK total rose from nine to 19 per cent, part of a broader shift to southern England from the rest of the UK. Any connection to the distribution of marginal seats may be coincidental.

Use of hotels and other short-term “contingency accommodation” (rather than “dispersal accommodation”, including rented houses and flats) increased from five per cent to 45 per cent of asylum seekers from 2019 to 2023, but has fallen back since then, to 30 per cent at the end of last year. The big exception is London, where hotels still housed approximately 12,000 asylum seekers, 60 per cent of the city’s total, in early 2025.

Both the total number of asylum seekers and the proportion housed in hotels are highest in Hillingdon and Hounslow. They are the London boroughs closest to Heathrow Airport, one of the UK’s most important ports of entry (though less popular than the Kentish coastline as a location for performative blimpism by the likes of Robert Jenrick, Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe). These boroughs are two of the six in the UK where the number of asylum seekers housed locally is higher than the maximum specified in national agreements.

So London, as ever, is something of an outlier. Meanwhile the government is clearly in a fix. It has pledged to phase out the use of hotels to house asylum seekers and may be forced to speed up the process in response to court cases and protests. What part is London likely to play in their thinking?

The government could decide that “London can take it”, and load more asylum seekers into the city. This would encourage those who want trouble to stir it up, not helped by the fact that the Epping court judgement took (cautious) account of local protests. On the other hand, the move away from hotels could be accelerated, raising questions of where 12,000 temporary Londoners are to live.

The problem is that until claims are processed housing asylum seekers really is a zero-sum exercise. If they are not accommodated in hotels, where do they go? Military camps have been tried but proved controversial, as did the now-abandoned Bibby Stockholm barge. Aside from raising questions about their humanity or lack of it, such proposals are complex to put into effect – camps need to be fitted out and barges need to be procured. There are few obvious quick fixes.

Outside London and the wider south, the last two years have seen a shift away from hotels towards longer-term “dispersal accommodation”, often private rented sectors homes in multiple occupation (HMOs). But these are in short supply in London. Asylum seekers would be lining up alongside homeless families, who number 70,000 (half of the English total) in the capital. It is also notable that some local authorities (outside the south east) are already reported to be tightening controls on using HMOs in this way.

So the risk is that local authorities, already struggling with the costs of homelessness, would be left to support any asylum seekers evicted from hotel accommodation. Hillingdon Council has already written to MPs to protest about the Home Office planning to “evict 2,300 asylum seekers into the borough without secured accommodation or support” and has claimed that supporting asylum seekers is adding £5 million a year to already-stretched budgets. The BBC has reported a rise in rough sleeping and a spread of tented encampments in the borough, and Hillingdon is now reported to be reviewing the Epping decision.

London has the capacity to welcome and absorb thousands of people, and it does so, year after year. I do not think the capital is about to erupt in protest. But there is a question of how much the nation asks of it. London is the economic engine and the fiscal float for the UK. Should its boroughs also be expected to support an ever-growing share of people in urgent housing need, while funding is diverted to other parts of the country?

First published by OnLondon.

Remote control

“Confusion in her eyes that says it all.
She’s lost control.”

Joy Division, Control, 1979

On the radio a couple of days ago Amol Rajan mentioned a blog by James Kanagasooriam, suggesting that ‘agency’ could be the Next Big Idea in political discourse. It reminded me, infuriatingly, of something that I have been mulling over trying to think about maybe planning to write for ages. How could he? I have now read James’ excellent piece (and recommend you do too), and am relieved. He takes a different perspective from the one I have been mulling, so I thought it was worth articulating a few fuzzy thoughts in response.

James identifies a growing proportion of people, particularly in the UK, who see themselves as lacking agency. They feel left behind, and nurse grievances and a sense that they are being discriminated against. They vote for the Greens, Reform and (slightly surprisingly) the Lib Dems. James sees this trend as largely the result of “agency-suppressing beliefs”, including intersectionality and the sense that everybody can find some measure according to which they are under-privileged (what he calls the ‘Nietzschean Trap’ in another post). He also alludes, intriguingly, to modern forms of media consumption, including the quick-hit ‘dopamine culture’ of clickbait, dating apps and tiktoks, adding to this sense of disempowerment.

I like this analysis, which I think does a great job in explaining why the past five years or so have seen a particularly sharp drop in the number of people feeling that they are masters of their fate. But I think there are longer term trends and explanations too.

I started thinking about agency and control in the aftermath of the EU Referendum, when ‘Take Back Control’ had been such a potent and persistent slogan, taking in border security and national sovereignty, but also reflecting a deeper sense of disquiet about something lost in the previous decades. I think this disquiet is real, though it has been gingered up, stoked and even weaponised by politicians and other political players since 2016.

I think this simmering disquiet is about a perceived loss of control over our own lives and over an ever more visible world. And I think that the roots of the disquiet are entwined with technological progress and its impacts, with individualism and the decline of certain types of identity politics, and with a broader sense of political and civic impotence.

“We were brought up on the space race,
now they expect you to clean toilets.
When you’ve seen how big the world is,
how can you make do with this?”

Pulp, Glory Days, 1998

Technology has dramatically increased visibility and connectivity since the 1990s: we can now see the lives of people across the world, often people who present themselves as ‘living the dream’ – fulfilled, happy, in control. We can compare ourselves and our lives with theirs in a much more granular and immediate way than we could when watching ‘stars’ on television or reading about them in papers. We may come up wanting, and wondering why we cannot acquire those lives, that seemingly effortless poise. At one level this is simple resentment – as evidenced by poisonous postings on celebrity social media accounts – but there is also a sense of disempowerment. If anyone can make it, why haven’t I?

At the same time technology has made our own lives more visible. The early 20^th Century saw the disciplines of ‘scientific management’ imposed on factory workers, but technology has sharply extended the scope of soft surveillance and control – to warehouse workers, coders, consultants and lawyers. This is not just a matter of spyware and barcode scanners, but also productivity norms, compliance checks, performance reporting, real-time analytics and timesheets. In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, technology enables us to see the world, but also to be seen.

In overcoming spatial distance, technology has fostered social distance and alienation. We are all familiar with the magical ease of ordering goods and services online, the low-friction transactions that have transformed our day-to-day lives and lightened the burden of ‘life admin’. But we are also familiar with the struggle through defensive thickets of chatbots, FAQs, online forms and ‘noreply’ email addresses that make it almost impossible to resolve queries or seek support outside of a very narrow defined set of algorithms.

This may be trivial if tooth-grindingly frustrating for consumers, but this mode of tech-enabled disengagement also affects public services, as anyone who has tried to seek support from HMRC, to book parking permits or to request repairs from a social landlord recently will testify. (As a side note, it was incredibly pleasing, when dealing with the Irish state recently, to receive letters from named individuals, with email addresses and phone numbers to follow up if needed).

Technological advances have also amplified the emptier promises of individualism. As workers, more and more of us are autonomous agents, freed from the norms (and security) of jobs for life. We can work freelance, in the gig economy, on short-term contracts. But while such arrangements may feel empowering for comfortable middle-class people (yes, people like me), it doesn’t look like that for everyone.

It is true that an industrial worker in the mid-20^th Century had limited personal autonomy, but the structures of union, party and class solidarity offered other ways to exert control over working and living conditions, at least in theory. There may not have been that much power in a union, but there was arguably more than an individual gig economy worker can deploy today.

“What happens to the rat that finally stops running the maze?
The doctors think he’s dumb, when he’s just disappointed.”

American Music Club, Hollywood 4-5-92, 1993

The collapse of traditional class and party identities has sharpened and been sharpened by a sense of the impotence of mainstream politics (as indicated by very low voting turnout by some groups). Some problems – climate change, ageing populations, health and care spending running ahead of tax revenues – seem simply intractable, at least by single states. Others – sovereign industrial capacity, control over borders, building homes and infrastructure – seem to get stuck in the messy undergrowth of the ‘rules-based international order’, and the plethora of (self-imposed) constraints, protections and prohibitions it contains. When Leviathan has lost it, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Writing the paragraphs above, I am conscious that this may read as nostalgia for a more corporatist or communitarian past, or even as Reform- or MAGA-coded. That’s not my intention; I’m seeking to articulate not to advocate. Personally, in the terms used by James Kanagasooriam, I am broadly OAT (“optimistic, agentic and trusting”); on balance this world works OK for me.

But I can understand that it does not seem like that for everyone, and can see why this can make simple atavistic solutions appealing. So I think we do need to acknowledge that people feel disempowered and to talk about why that is, and what can be done to restore a sense of agency. We probably do need less time on mobile phones, strengthened local institutions, and a public discourse that focuses on possibility rather than disempowerment. But we may also need to think more fundamentally about what can be done to address the causes as well as the manifestations of this disquiet.

Long ago, I wandered in my mind – Black Sabbath, the midlands and me

I was probably sixteen, working in the kitchen of the village pub, when I first heard Black Sabbath.

“You like heavy metal,” said my boss, a hairy biker avant la lettre.

“I so do not,” I replied, thinking of Def Leppard, Iron Maiden and Bon Jovi.

“Nah, you do. You liked that Led Zeppelin tape I played. Now try this.”

What the…?

The churning, sludgy guitar sound, the desperate voice of a man struggling against the mire of the music and his mind. The sense of grubby doom, then suddenly tempo changes, keyboard washes and jazzy drums, and guitar solos that sounded like they had been recorded in a cave. I loved it all.

I grew up near Banbury. Not that close to Birmingham, but not that far either. The Mercian dankness could creep down the A41. Black Sabbath followed me when I started working at a greenhouse factory a few years later – pressing aluminium, not forging steel, but still. We had Radio 1 on all day (Kylie and Jason, Cliff Richard, Mike and the Mechanics), but Sabbath and Zeppelin ruled in the rattly old Mini Metro that I drove home. Those heavy guitar sounds are as much a part of those days as the styrofoam boxes of chips and beans from the food van at lunch.

As Quietus founder John Duran has argued, Black Sabbath’s was defiantly modernist music. It didn’t hark back to blues, to skiffle, to folk, to chanson, or to big band. It lived in its own world, a world of factories and factory closures, a world of managed decline and derelict mills.

And I think that’s the point. Black Sabbath’s early albums are constantly surprising, because they don’t know what they are meant to be. The perfect powerpop of Paranoid is sandwiched between lumbering leviathans War Pigs and Iron Man. Proggy epics such as Wheels of Confusion sit next to the blissed-out hippy bongos of Planet Caravan. Of course Black Sabbath didn’t know how to play classic heavy metal; they were too busy inventing it.

RIP Ozzy Osbourne

Two days in July 2005

6 July 2005

It’s lunchtime in London, and I’m in a thronged and anxious Trafalgar Square, watching the big screens broadcasting from Singapore, where it is early evening; a smaller crowd is gathered in Stratford, the hub of London’s bid for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. London and Paris are the final two cities in the running; reflecting a thousand years of rivalry and friendship.

In Singapore, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge steps to the podium, and grim-faced IOC members stand to attention as the interminable Olympic anthem is played, like politburo members reviewing a Mayday parade.

Finally, an envelope is brought forward and Rogge opens it: “The International Olympic Committee is proud to announce that the Games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of…London.”

In Singapore, the euphoria hits the London delegation before the city’s name has left Rogge’s lips. Tessa Jowell is cheering and waving her arms in the air, Denise Lewis is airborne, David Beckham is embracing anyone within reach, Ken Livingstone looks slightly bemused but then breaks into a broad grin.

In London, Trafalgar Square erupts; Stratford erupts. People are hugging; I think I might be crying, though I’m not entirely sure why. People rush to share their excitement at our win. Some of them have been doing everything they can to scupper the bid, but still. We’re going to need all the allies we can get now. Rosanna Lawes from the London Development Agency (LDA) has tears in her eyes too. “Now we’ve got to deliver it,” she says.

With Heather Small’s booming voice asking what I have done today to make her feel proud (I really don’t know, Heather, I feel scared more than anything), I pick my way through the jubilant crowd. I join some Greater London Authority (GLA) colleagues in a hotel overlooking the Square for a beer, then announce rather piously that I have to go back to work. I’m leading transition planning for the GLA and Government, and this is it. The Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) is a few moments away, and I’m soon back inside, sending out tender documents (by post, how quaint!) for headhunters to find a chief executive for the Olympic Delivery Authority, an organisation that doesn’t even exist.

The DCMS Bill Team are there too, readying the legislation that will be introduced into Parliament in a matter of days. I have a conversation with Tony Winterbottom from the LDA: he needs authorisation to let contracts for tunnelling works in the Olympic Park, to enable high voltage power lines to be buried, to enable construction of the 80,000 seat stadium that the world will be watching in July 2012. Timings are tight and budgeting is complicated by government rules. It can’t be done; it must be done. I’m feeling elated, but also slightly sick; it’s going to be a busy summer.

7 July 2005

I’m up early, and scoop up all the newspapers at Stockwell station on my way into the office. I want to remember this moment, when the bid was hailed as a triumph, before delivery becomes vilified as a disaster. We had been told by people involved in Sydney 2000 that the celebratory moment would be fleeting.

By 10am, we are hearing rumours. Major transport disruption. An ongoing incident. Bombs on buses and in crowded rush hour tube trains. Mobile phones stop working; nobody knows what is happening. We worry about people who are not in the office. Are they running late or in trouble?

I step outside, despite security guards trying to dissuade me, my need for a cigarette overcoming their caution. Cockspur Street is almost silent. No buses. Hardly any cars. Very few people. Sirens in the distance. For all its urgency, work is desultory suddenly, incidental.

By early afternoon, I’m speaking to Jeff Jacobs, my DCMS boss. He is in Singapore with the London contingent. Someone has told them that Thelma Stober, one of the LDA’s principal lawyers, has been injured in the bombing, but nobody is clear how badly. A stunned Ken Livingstone makes a powerfully defiant speech in Singapore before boarding a plane back to London.

I leave work early, joining subdued crowds walking home, across St James’s Park, down a traffic-free Vauxhall Bridge Road to the river. I wonder whether to stop in at the White Swan for a drink. Surely that’s what we do; we carry on as if everything is normal, even though it very clearly is not?

First published by OnLondon

Glad-ish to be gay

London is the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning) capital of the UK and one of the gay epicentres of the world. In the 2021 Census, 4.3 per cent of the capital’s population aged over-16 identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual or “other sexual orientation” compared to 3.2 per cent across England and Wales. In the City of London, Hackney, Lambeth and Southwark, the proportion was more than eight per cent.

Pride in London, which will be held on 5 July this year, is an all-singing, all-dancing, all-inclusive celebration of London’s sexual diversity, which regularly draws more than a million people from across the capital and beyond. However, a trawl though recent polling suggests that Londoners’ attitudes to homosexuality are more complicated than the joyful throngs at Pride might indicate.

For example, a 2018 Ipsos poll asked interviewees how they would react if a teenage child told them they were gay or lesbian. The most common reactions, for Londoners and people living in other parts of the UK, were to be happy and proud, but Londoners were also more likely than people in other regions to say they would be surprised, sad or even disgusted.

The same poll also found that Londoners were less likely than others to intervene personally if they saw an LGBT person being verbally abused for their sexuality (but were more likely to call the police). This is worrying, not least because LGBT Londoners are more at risk of harassment than other UK residents. An open survey commissioned by the UK government in 2017 found that Londoners in same-sex relationships were more likely to avoid holding hands in public than people in other regions, and that LGBT Londoners were more likely to have experienced physical violence, harassment or threats related to their sexuality (though they were also most likely to say they were comfortable being LGBT in the UK).

Londoners are more worried (according to 2020 polling, again by Ipsos) about children learning about LGBT sex and relationships in schools, with 46 per cent supporting such content in relationship and sex education classes and 27 per cent opposing it (compared to 55 per cent supporting and 20 per cent opposing across Great Britain, and higher levels of support across England). However, this should be seen in the context of Londoners being generally more conservative about the age at which any sex education is appropriate.

London also seems surprisingly polarised. While the 2018 polling found that 22 per cent of Londoners had attended Pride (compared to 15 per cent of people across the UK), a 2022 poll found that 19 per cent of Londoners said they had never knowingly met gay or lesbian people (compared to nine per cent of Britons).

This all paints what might seem a rather gloomy picture – of London as a city of segregation, home to deeply conservative communities as well as sexually diverse and progressive ones, with limited interaction between them. But perhaps that’s part of London’s diversity: the capital contains multitudes, people with radically different moral values, both progressive and conservative.

For example, as well as being the UK’s gayest region, London is its godliest. It is more religious than other parts of the country, and some religious leaders and teachers remain hostile to same-sex relationships. It is interesting to note that London’s most religious boroughs are also those where more people declined to answer the 2021 Census questions on sexuality.

However, while it is sad to see the hostility of some London parents to the idea of their children being lesbian or gay, and sadder still to see the persistence of homophobic harassment and violence on the capital’s streets, Londoners’ views on LGBTQ rights overall are much more in line with the rest of the country’s. In 2022, only 19 per cent of Londoners said LGBT rights had “gone too far”, compared to 20 per cent of Britons (though London also had a high proportion of “don’t knows” which may suggest some reticence). The 2020 Ipsos poll asked a similar question with similar results.

A substantial majority of Londoners (like other UK citizens) sign up to equal treatment. Ipsos polling from 2019 found that four out of five Londoners said that homosexuals should be treated just like other people, in line with the UK average, and a 2023 YouGov poll found that Londoners’ support for same-sex marriage (76 per cent) and for the validity of same-sex relationships (77 per cent) was much the same as in other parts of England.

Even more positively (at least, if you are gay and/or liberal), the 2019 Ipsos polling also asked interviewees to consider whether a series of different issues or behaviours – from drug use to pornography to football hooliganism – were morally wrong. Londoners were generally liberal in their views, and only six per cent said homosexual relationships between consenting adults were wrong, less than half the proportion that said so across Great Britain.

This all presents a more nuanced picture – of a fundamentally liberal city where people can separate their personal opinions about their families and children, from their civic and political opinions about the rights granted to different groups.

We may be saddened by how some people feel personally – I certainly am – but there is little sign of them wanting to impose their views on other adults, or to roll back hard-won rights that now command a consensus of support. Not everybody in London may be waving the rainbow flag in Pride Month, but the capital is still a place where most people are happy to live and let live. That is something to celebrate too.

First published by OnLondon

Past caring

Let’s start with the good news, such as it is. The immigration white paper published on Monday re-affirms the government’s commitment to a “fair pay agreement” to improve the terrible pay and conditions faced by care workers. This cannot come soon enough, but whether it will be sufficient, alongside withdrawal of the social care visa, to avoid a social care staffing crisis is another question.

London is at the sharp end, as the Skills for Care dashboard shows. The capital has the highest care worker vacancy rates in England: 11 per cent compared to an average of eight per cent across the country, with vacancies highest in the “independent” sector (that is, not directly employed by the NHS or local authorities), which accounts for four fifths of the city’s 250,000 adult social care workers.

These include workers in care homes, nursing homes and ‘domiciliary’ carers who visit mainly elderly clients (precise numbers are hard to come by, but around 60-70 per cent of adult social care clients are over 65) in their own homes to help them with food, getting dressed, washing and personal care.

London’s care workforce is older than elsewhere and includes more foreign nationals: 54 per cent are British, compared to 73 per cent across all England and 80 per cent-plus in the north. Workers directly employed by London local authorities are paid an average of £15.52 per hour, but these are only a small minority.

Those in the independent sector receive an average of £11.54 – little more than their counterparts outside London and substantially less than the London Living Wage of £13.85. Lastly, and these factors may all be connected, London’s care workers are far more likely to be employed through an agency and on zero hours contracts.

So, if a staffing crisis hits, London will be in the front line. A fair pay agreement may help over time, but if there are vacancies across the country during a transition period, London’s care workers may vote with their feet, seeking better pay and conditions beyond the M25.

But – and I don’t think this point is made enough – it’s not just about pay. The best care workers I have met are those who feel a genuine sense of vocation. As well as the patience, gentleness, and physical and emotional strength to deal with frail bodies and failing minds, these carers genuinely love the work they do, looking past the difficulties to take pride in looking after other humans. We shouldn’t exploit their calling with poor wages. But I’m not sure a pay boost, together with some general gesticulating towards economically inactive people, is enough either.

Setting that to one side, how would a 20 per cent pay rise (based on raising the average to London Living wage) for London’s care workers be funded? Though local authorities only employ a minority of care workers, they generally pay care costs for anyone with assets of less than £14,250 and a proportion of costs for those with up to £23,250. (Hammersmith & Fulham Council is one of the few local authorities not to apply a means test for domiciliary care and day care).

In London around 70 per cent of people in care homes and 85 per cent of those receiving care at home are local authority-funded – some of the highest proportions in the country, reflecting the relative poverty of London’s older people. Given growing demand from an aging population, national insurance rises and adult social care overspends mounting up every year, boroughs would struggle to pay an extra 20 per cent on care home and care agency fees. And it doesn’t look as if the government is inclined to pay them more.

For those paying fees themselves, an increase in costs might mean quicker draining of capital reserves (and recourse to local authority support), or attempts to cut back on spending. But cutting back on care provision could be a false economy. Battling on, as many older people are inclined to do, can raise the risk of accidents at home and send more older people into hospital. Finding enough carers to provide short-term “re-ablement” support for them when they leave hospital is already a challenge. Shortages of care staff will likely mean longer hospital stays for “medically fit” older people – adding to pressure on beds, and often resulting in worse health when they do leave.

Alternatively, family members could be asked to do more, as Conservative ministers have occasionally suggested. But is it right or economically sensible to ask people (generally women) to leave careers at a time of peak earnings to become full-time carers? Families need to be involved in care but abandoning other plans to become a live-in carer for elderly parents, as many women of my mother’s generation did, is not going to work for everyone.

The whole thing is a mess, and is going to become messier as the population ages. Yes, we need to improve pay, conditions and esteem. And yes, we probably should enable some continued immigration for the care sector. But the whole system needs a rethink. It’s not new to say this. There have been plenty of reviews (the Casey Review announced earlier this month is the latest in a long line), and more or less sensible ideas for caps on care costs, for compulsory insurance policies and for levies on estates. But all have been shot down or proved electorally toxic.

The problem is, as the Financial Times’s Stephen Bush observed this week, “at any given time, most people are not experiencing the care crisis”. And when we stop experiencing it, we don’t want to think about it any more. I don’t really want to think and write about it. My parents no longer receive care and I hope it’s a few years before I need to. But we need to find a better way. What we have now simply isn’t good enough, and I fear it’s about to get worse.

Hard lessons about soft power

On holiday recently in George Town, on the Malaysian island of Penang, I visited the Khoo Kongsi “clan temple”, a semi-fortified compound that testifies to the difficult history but also the success of Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese population. One room there is lined with brass plaques commemorating the successes of local children at universities – in Singapore, in Australia, at Oxford and Cambridge and in London. Soft power, written on a temple wall.

Debates about tightening the graduate visa, which allows its holders to work in the UK for two years after graduation, tend to focus on the consequences of reducing international student numbers for university finances and the UK economy. Falling foreign student numbers would be deeply damaging for both. London and its universities would be particularly hard hit. There were more than 200,000 foreign students in London in 2022/23, nearly 30 per cent of all those in the UK. University College London and King’s College London alone had 44,000 foreign students between them.

Losing even a small proportion of these, whose fees help bridge the funding gap for domestic students, would deal a further blow to balance sheets that are already buckling, following eight years of frozen tuition fees. There would be a direct hit for the economy too: research has estimated that foreign students in London are worth £10 billion to the UK.

But in the long term, the damage could go deeper. The UK is probably the world’s leading exporter of higher education, relative to the size of its economy. We export around £28 billion of education services, the vast majority of which are at university level. The sector makes up just under 10 per cent of service exports. The United States of America, our main competitor, exports around $50 billion (£37.5 billion), despite having an economy almost ten times larger than the UK’s. Higher education is one export sector in which the UK is genuinely world-beating, and London is the nation’s shopfront and brand leader.

It wasn’t always like this. The capital didn’t even have its own university until 1825. But agitation for more modern and accessible education – “the people would learn and must be taught”, as one pioneer proclaimed – led to the establishment of University College London, King’s and the University of London in short succession. These radical new institutions triggered a period of rapid growth in higher education at home and abroad. By the end of the 19th Century, examinations for “external” University of London degrees were being taken in centres across the world, from Mauritius to Malta.

As Britain decolonised after World War II, newly-independent states established their own universities (some with support from University of London). Demand for external study was expected to fall: University of London closed its external programme in the late seventies. But appetite for London degrees persisted. Today, 150,000 “transnational” students are studying in their home nations for London university courses, with around 40,000 of them on University of London programmes.

The reputation that drives demand for London degrees attaches to London itself, as well as to specific courses and institutions. That’s why so many UK and international universities have established a presence in the capital. And, despite its unaffordability, London is repeatedly identified as the best student city in the world.

While some people who come to the capital to study may settle here, most return home. But soft power persists: if students had a good experience here (or studying remotely for London courses) this will further bolster the city’s and the country’s reputation and influence. Today’s students are tomorrow’s decision-takers, on international trade and investment and in politics. In today’s world of shaky alliances, the 58 world leaders who studied at UK universities are a diplomatic asset, each one a potential ally in tackling global challenges such as climate change and security.

Panicked debates about immigration obscure the huge benefits – financial, cultural and diplomatic – that foreign students bring, and risk creating a “hostile atmosphere” that could drive them away. There are abuses in the system, and universities and regulators should address these. But responding to specific frauds by imposing blanket constraints on a UK success story seems perverse.

This is a moment when many international students will feel nervous about studying in the US, given reports of deportations and increasingly aggressive policing of immigration, and many US students, too, seem to be looking to the UK. This is the time for extending a welcome and building on our strengths, not erecting barriers that could be as self-defeating as Trumpian tariffs.

First published by OnLondon.