richardfjbrown

We are Devo!

Devolution is a good thing. Delivering services locally or regionally can make them more responsive to the needs and circumstances of places and communities, as well as enabling innovation and experiment. It can support integration and prevention, so that people do not fall through the cracks between services, and so that early action can tackle problems before they turn into crises. And bringing services closer to local people (“subsidiarity”, to use the European Union jargon) should aid accountability.

Fiscal devolution adds to the possibilities. It allows local councils and regional Mayors, such as Sir Sadiq Khan, to raise more taxes from their areas or to keep more of the taxes that would otherwise go to national government. Done well, this type of arrangement can create a virtuous circle: if the local economy grows, taxes grow, supporting services for local communities and enabling investment in transport and other infrastructure that will support continuing growth. This benefit has already been illustrated in London by the way the city and its businesses paid for the Elizabeth line and the Northern line underground extension to Battersea Power Station.

Speaking in Manchester this week, Andy Burnham had quite a lot to say about the first aspect of devolution, but rather less about the second. There were harsh words for the “adversarial culture” of Whitehall “departmental silos battling each other and battling the Treasury rather than getting things done”. Even the capital, the PM Presumptive assured us, needed more “powers…over education and housing, so that London can do more for itself and remain the world’s greatest capital city.”

On funding, his language was more opaque. “Power and resources” will be redistributed across the UK, and government departments will be expected to “support strategic and local authorities with funding and resources”. What exactly did that mean? The devolved powers needed in order to raise or retain taxes locally? Or just a new round of grant-funding from the centre?

Such vagueness is understandable: devolving taxes is complicated and campaigns for reform have struggled to make headway for decades. But the tide seems to be turning. In her Mais Lecture in March, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves pointed out the awkward asymmetry of accountability and reward: “While local leaders are asked to plan for the long term, to be accountable for regional outcomes, the fiscal reward for local economic success flows straight to the Exchequer”. Since then, meetings have been taking place to plot the “roadmap for future fiscal devolution” that she promised.

People involved in these discussions suggest the Treasury is receptive to the idea of using tax revenues to create incentives and conditions for growth locally. But other parts of Whitehall still regard the idea with horror. Departments have become used to managing local expenditure through a fiendishly complex set of formulas and grants that top up Council Tax (raised and spent locally) and redistribute Business Rates (raised locally but mainly distributed nationally). This charade of local tax-raising masks one of the most centralised tax regimes in the developed world. In the words of the LSE’s Professor Tony Travers, this “infantilises” local government, by making councils supplicants for centrally-allocated grants.

Tricky issues persist. As well as being highly centralised, the UK has high regional inequality (which may or may not be related to centralisation). Could allowing some taxes to be retained actually exacerbate the problem? If retaining taxes results in areas that are already doing well doing better still, will it also lead to others losing out?

A recent Centre for Cities report set out one approach to squaring this circle. Regional authorities, including the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the 15 mayoral strategic authorities (MSAs) across the country, could receive a share of Income Tax and Corporation Tax equivalent to their current grants from central government. This would amount to between two and six per cent of the local tax take. If the tax take grew, MSAs would keep some or all of the gains, but above a certain level these would start being clawed back to support areas that were not doing so well. But the hope would be that most areas could benefit. Growth should not be a zero-sum game.

The Mayor of London already uses retained local Business Rates to fund services, as do other MSAs, so this type of model has been tried and tested. The Centre for Cities research suggests that retaining two per cent of income tax raised in London would cover the GLA costs currently funded by government grants (reflecting both the scale of services funded by the GLA and the size of the tax base in the city).

But there are still other difficult questions. One is how much tax growth London should retain if revenues rise. London’s share of UK Income Tax and Corporation Tax has been growing quite sharply in recent years, so there might be an argument for the capital to retain a smaller proportion of growth than other cities, not least as some Corporation Tax raised in London relates to profits generated across the country by corporations whose head office is in the capital.

London (and other cities) would also need to be on guard against periodic attempts by central government to “reset” the proportions of taxes that can be retained as a way of redistributing the proceeds of economic growth. Such “levelling up” (and down) resets might be thought fairer to other parts of the country, but they create uncertainty and make it riskier for organisations such as the GLA or Transport for London to borrow money against future tax revenues – and riskier means more expensive. Better, surely, to allow long-term certainty on tax retention, and to use other revenues to support places with smaller tax bases.

Fiscal devolution could go a lot further, as proposed by the London Finance Commission: Mayors could set additional Income Tax rates (as happens in Scotland) or new Council Tax bands (as has happened in Wales). Retained taxes could also be shared with local authorities, and Andy Burnham’s reported interest in land value taxes could lead to a more wholesale process of reform. But, as discussed at a Centre for Cities briefing event, the risk of arguing that fiscal devolution can only be taken forward part of a radical restructuring of the tax system is that nothing continues to happen.

Andy Burnham in his speech spoke of a “10-year mission”, but he also expressed a sense of urgency and frustration with how Whitehall has worked to frustrate the transfer of power to the UK’s cities and regions. This sense of urgency suggests that this could be a moment of change, an opportunity for Mayor Khan and the other Mayors to push for faster and fuller devolution of services and taxes, if they are really going to be able to do things differently and deliver for their communities.

Published by OnLondon on 2 July 2026

Plotting triumphant returns to the city

Andy Burnham arrives in London like a victorious warlord marching south. How will he treat the capital? Will he plunder its coffers, poison its wells and send chests of treasure north? Or will he pause to think about where the treasure came from and consider how it can be grown?

It’s easy to get carried away with the “King of the North” schtick. But even without it, Londoners may worry about the Prime Minister Presumptive (is that the right constitutional title?) and his views on their city.

Burnham has railed against the “London set” who run the Labour Party (that sinister cabal comprising Keir Starmer and…err…Jeremy Corbyn). He has complained of unbalanced transport funding. Some argue that shifting economic growth away from London is a keystone of his programme.

This may all be politically convenient, particularly when seeing off a challenge from Reform UK in a Manchester suburb, but is it politically or economically sustainable as a programme for government?

Politically, such an approach might have made sense a year or two ago. London could be safely taken for granted electorally as the last Labour “Red Wall” standing, electing Labour MPs in 59 out of its 75 constituencies in 2024. However, following May’s local elections, in which Labour lost 40 per cent of the council seats that they won in 2022 and saw a 17 per cent swing against the party, that wall looks a lot less robust and lot less red. As Business London’s Muniya Barua said last week, “London is now back in play.”

The economics are questionable too. London generates 22 per cent of the UK’s economic output and raises a similar proportion of tax revenues with only 13 per cent of the country’s population. But, while the capital’s productivity (economic output per hour worked) remains nearly 30 per cent higher than the UK’s, it has been slower-growing than average since 2008, and particularly slow growing in London’s traditional economic core (City of London, Westminster and the north of Tower Hamlets), as well as across most of outer London (with the notable exception of Croydon).

This is an issue for the whole of the UK: London tax revenues support public services and public investment across the country, including the transport investment urgently needed in northern England. If London declines economically, the beneficiaries are as likely to be in Singapore as they are in Salford.

Andy Burnham probably knows all this. He will certainly be aware that Manchester is the only major conurbation that has outstripped London’s productivity growth since 2008. There has been much talk of what the secret sauce of “Manchesterism” might be and how its lessons could be applied more widely.

There are the much-vaunted public transport reforms (which Wes Streeting acidly described, in an interview last month, as the “TfL model”). There has also been a focus on attracting new investment, new development and new businesses to the city centre, a process which has been at the heart of Manchester’s revival and boosted by its charismatic Mayor.

Burnham has successfully ridden and amplified the wave of Manchester’s revival (as Ken Livingstone did when he became Mayor of London in 2000). The process began under Manchester City Council’s leader Richard Leese and its chief executive Howard Bernstein 30 or more years ago. Bernstein, who died in 2024, was tireless in deal-making and partnership-building, driven by a sense of place and the ability to work with government to get Manchester what it needed for growth. As the city centre grew, so other boroughs in Greater Manchester began to see the benefits.

There are lessons here for Burnham and for London. Manchester developed a strong vision and lobbied relentlessly for the powers and resources to turn that vision, at least partly, into reality. London’s civic leaders should be ready to make their case – the case for infrastructure investment, the case for control of tax revenues, the case for the resources to address the capital’s persistent problems of poverty, inequality and homelessness. As the politician who has benefitted most from devolution and who put it centre stage in his campaign, Andy Burnham should be receptive to their argument.

But London should also look to its own government structures, and consider whether these work as well as they could in enabling “good growth” in the capital. As Andy Burnham will know, other English city regions have an urban core that is more or less within one local authority; Greater Manchester certainly does. By contrast, London’s Central Activities Zone, which contains London’s and the UK’s economic, civic and cultural core, is spread between ten local authority areas, including the City of London.

While there are great examples of collaboration between these bodies, there are also plenty of areas – from planning and licensing policy, to street cleaning, to regulation of car clubs and bike hire – where central London would benefit from a more unified approach, as discussed in Friday’s OnLondon Extra newsletter.

This could mean new structures, local government re-organisation, or simply more rigorous partnerships and shared service arrangements. In making their case for the powers and resources they need, London’s civic leaders should also show how they will work together to use these to support economic growth in the capital and across the country.

Published by OnLondon on 22 June 2026

It’s educational

London’s universities are deeply embedded in the city’s streets and its global city status. But it wasn’t always like this. Two hundred years ago, its lack of a university was keenly debated in London’s taverns and coffee houses, decried as an impairment of the capital’s global status and an impoverishment of its citizens.

University College London (UCL), initially established as a private venture, led the way in addressing this deficit from 1826 – it is now marking its bicentenary. King’s College London followed in 1831, and by 1836 the University of London was constituted as an examining and degree-awarding body.

The mere existence of these start-ups was a signal of changing times. While Scotland and Wales had their own universities, Oxford and Cambridge had stymied the establishment of new universities in England, threatening to prosecute any graduates who participated in them.

As Degrees of Innovation, a new report written by me and published by University of London, explores, these new universities were radical in their approach. At a time when Anglicanism and Englishness were seen as two faces of the same coin, neither UCL or King’s set religious tests for admission (though King’s was more closely allied with the Church of England).

The creation of a separate examining body enabled rapid and unintended expansion. By the 1850s more than 100 institutions across Britain and Ireland were affiliated to the University of London, and from 1858 its degrees were opened up to anyone who met entrance requirements.

University of London exams were taken and degrees awarded in centres across Britain and its empire. London’s universities were also relatively quick to open up to women: the first women’s colleges were established in 1850 and University of London awarded degrees to women from 1878 – 50 years before Oxbridge.

These new universities were lampooned in conservative publications such as John Bull magazine, which derided UCL as a “cockney college” that would teach dustmen to speak Latin and Greek. But a 1859 magazine article, possibly written by Charles Dickens, pushed back:

“The Oxford don may smile over his old port at an university that will extend her hand and offer a firm grip even to the young shoemaker who studies in his garret. He may feel a little scornful of a university that gives, to the poor as well as to the rich, to the man of few opportunities as to the man of many, at the cost of hard toil and years of self-denial, the name and rank of a scholar.”

Alongside London’s new universities, the 19th Century saw explosive growth in polytechnics and working men’s institutes. These sought to extend the benefits of adult education to all neighbourhoods and classes, and to bridge the widening skills gap between Britain and other industrialising economies.

By 1900, the new London County Council (LCC) had established a Technical Education Board, led by Quintin Hogg, founder of Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) and Sidney Webb, founder of the London School of Economics. The LCC took on responsibility for funding further and higher education, alongside City of London charities and guilds, while University of London awarded degrees across London.

By the 1930s, polytechnics could be found in every part of the capital, while two central clusters of universities had been established in South Kensington and Bloomsbury. In the latter, Senate House stood out – for many years the tallest secular building in London, its height only justified by the fact that its higher floors were not inhabited but occupied solely by books (and presumably librarians).

In moving into these areas, universities had been pioneers and catalysts for what we would now call “regeneration”, a tradition that continues today with UCL’s new campus in Stratford (pictured), Imperial’s in White City and King’s College’s in Canada Water.

Two centuries on from its first university establishment, London is seen as one of the best student cities in the world and has two of the top ten universities. Half a million people study in London every year and a further 100,000 study for London degrees from overseas. Young people from all social backgrounds have much higher rates of participation in higher education than in other parts of the UK, and London’s universities have an impressive record of enabling people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get good degrees and good jobs.

But universities and students in London face the same stresses as those across the country – fees that have been squeezed over the past decade, immigration policy changes meaning fewer foreign students and therefore less cross-subsidy, new technology threatening traditional models of teaching and learning, and questions being raised about the cost and value of degrees.

As the essays that accompany Degrees of Innovation suggest, London’s higher education history may offer inspiration for the future – offering more flexible courses, mixing in-person and online learning and allowing learning to become a lifelong process rather than a one-hit investment. London’s further and higher education institutions are a success story. With government help they can continue to support and showcase the capital and the nation as a whole.

Published by OnLondon on 16 March 2026

A storm coming?

Sir Sadiq Khan was right to highlight the potentially “colossal” impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on London and its economy in his Mansion House speech last week, but “controlling” this still-emerging technology may be a tall order.

As the Mayor argued, the dominance of knowledge economy sectors in the city puts London “at the sharpest edge of change”. Three such sectors – information and communication, finance and insurance, and professional, scientific and technical services – account for 31 per cent of jobs in the capital, almost twice as many as across the UK.

These are the roles that are most exposed to AI. Human-centric, a report written by me and published by University of London in October, argued that generative AI’s ability to “precis, to research, to generate ‘ideas’, to structure arguments and data, and to produce text and images make it a close fit for tasks that are core to knowledge economy roles”. AI boosters and think tanks alike predict that these sectors may be as dramatically shaken up as agriculture and manufacturing were during previous spates of technological change.

However, the impact is hard to discern at the moment. There may have been a fall in graduate recruitment, but the evidence is contested and the impact of AI hard to disentangle from other factors. And corporate adoption of generative AI has been slow. This is partly about accuracy and accountability, but also reflects the ways in which generative AI use is spreading: individual workers are using chatbots on mobile phones and desktops rather than technology introduced through complex, top-down corporate roll-outs.

But it is still early days, only three years since ChatGPT 3.5 was launched, even if it seems longer. And so, while things may feel calm for the moment, there could be a storm coming, with London’s economy directly in its path. The impact on employment could, as the Mayor said, be dramatic.

It bears repeating that generative AI does not simply “take jobs”. The technology can be used to support particular tasks (“augmentation”) or to fully automate those tasks (“substitution”). If this saves time and money, it boosts productivity: more output for the same input.

Productivity gains may be realised by redeploying workers to build more products or serve more customers, or to develop new products and services. Such gains can also be shared with workers in the forms of reduced hours or higher pay. But they can also be cashed in, to return money to shareholders or taxpayers, through “efficiency savings” – that is to say, job losses.

There are ways to slow this down, but they are not necessarily desirable. The US think tank Brookings has proposed a “robot tax” on automation to tip the balance in favour of keeping humans in work (and to create revenues that could support workers who lose out).

Regulations could also be used to slow AI adoption. But keeping humans working on tasks that could be done more efficiently by AI makes productivity gains much harder to achieve and poses a particular threat to cities like London, which export and compete globally. We can throttle back AI adoption here, but will Singapore, New York and Dubai follow suit?

London is actually well-placed to seize the opportunities that come with AI: the city is a world leader for AI investment and innovation, with a highly educated, cosmopolitan population and a bedrock of world-class universities. The city is also a centre for innovation, for creating new products and services, and for the highly personalised and specialised professional services that may be most resistant to automation.

Even if AI adoption in London leads to job losses, history suggests that technological change leads to the creation of as many jobs as it destroys. We have done this before: automation of London stock market transactions – part of the Big Bang of 1986 – took work away from hordes of back-office clerical staff, who previously had to reconcile every trade on paper. These jobs went, but new jobs – in IT, as analysts, in compliance – led to a net growth in financial services employment.

That said, there is a time lag, and the net gain in jobs can obscure the traumatic impact on those people who lose out. The Mayor’s commitment to offer AI training to all Londoners will be valuable. Human-centric argues that universities should play a part too, helping workers to develop the skills they will need to thrive in and shape the new world– part of the much vaunted shift towards lifelong learning.

Universities can also ensure that the next generation of graduates has the resilience and skills to thrive. This is partly a matter of technical skills, but also about knowing how to use a deceptively “easy” resource critically and ethically, putting this in the context of a wider understanding of citizens and society, and nurturing the human skills – of judgement, understanding, collaboration – that employers still see as paramount.

The Mayor’s Mansion House speech touched on a bigger issue too: the “unprecedented concentration of wealth and power” that could result from AI adoption. The risk is that productivity gains from the use of AI flow mainly to big tech companies and their shareholders, rather than to workers and the public at large. This is beyond the reach of city or even national governments, but will become increasingly urgent if AI adoption does create a boom. What good is growth if its fruits flow to a few people in Silicon Valley?

There are ideas out there – from a levy based on how many hours of computational time individuals and firms use, to an endowment that takes a proportion of the value of AI companies launching on the stock markets and uses it endow a “universal basic income” that enables everyone to share in the benefits of AI.

However, adopting any of them will require a level of international cooperation that seems almost impossibly remote in today’s fractured geopolitical climate. Perhaps this is an issue where cities can take the lead, hoping that their national governments will catch up over time.

First published by OnLondon

Have to admit it’s getting better

London is an exceptional city. Anyone who lives or works here knows this, but its exceptionalism has been turned against it in recent years. Far-Right activists have sought to paint the capital as a hostile and misgoverned hell-hole and UK pundits such as Paul Collier and David Goodhart single London out as both the cause of the nation’s ills and a dysfunctional hotbed of cosmopolitans (“anywheres”, in Goodhart’s phrase) connected to place and each other by the weakest of ties.

Is there anything in this critique, even in its milder forms? In early December, the government’s annual Community Life Survey was published, based on questionnaires completed earlier this year by 175,000 people in England. On some measures (feelings of loneliness, volunteering and charitable giving), the differences between London and other regions are marginal. But in three areas the capital seems to stand out.

Out of England’s nine regions, London has the lowest proportion of people saying they feel a sense of belonging to the local area. This is most pronounced in boroughs such as Tower Hamlets and Newham. Similarly, Londoners are least likely to say that they talk regularly to neighbours, that their neighbours pull together to fix problems or that their neighbours can be trusted.

So far, so Goodhart-ian. However, while London is the lowest-scoring region, many of the lowest scoring localities are outside the capital – places such as Southampton, Reading, Boston, Mansfield, Nottingham, Crawley, Oxford and Cambridge. These are quite diverse in terms of prosperity, but share relatively large levels of population mobility – people moving in and out of the area – often because of large student populations. Weaker social ties should not be a surprise among populations that are continually changing.

Significantly, while London scores low on these indicators, it remains above average for perceptions that people from different backgrounds get on together: weak social ties do not mean hostility or intolerance. That said, some London boroughs (notably Barking & Dagenham, Bexley and Havering, a trio that will feature again in this piece) have lower than average scores for this indicator too.

A second set of polling questions asks about relationships with place: do people think their local area is attractive, are they proud to live there, how satisfied are they overall? London is less of an outlier here, generally scoring a bit below average, more like the northern urbanised regions than the rural and small-town populations of south east and south west England.

Within London there is a consistent pattern: outer London boroughs in the north east and west of London give their local area a lower rating than the English average; Bromley and relatively prosperous riverside boroughs of south west London tend to score higher – as do other more prosperous places outside the capital. A second unsurprising finding, maybe: people who can afford to live in more affluent places tend to like them more.

More interestingly, London is a strong outlier on whether their local area has improved recently, even though positive responses to this question are scarce. Eighteen per cent of Londoners said their local area had improved as a place to live over the past two years, compared to 11 per cent of people across England (59 per cent nationwide say their area has not changed significantly one way or another, but we don’t have the regional data for this).

The 12 top scorers among nearly 300 local authorities were all in London. Waltham Forest, Southwark, Hackney, Lambeth and Wandsworth top the list, with 23 per cent or more of residents identifying positive change.

This last finding may connect with Londoners’ relationship to local politics and public services. London as a whole had higher levels of civic engagement (from contacting councillors, to demonstrating, to responding to consultations). Londoners from across the city reported more engagement and believed they had more impact on decision-making than people living outside the capital.

Five of the ten areas with the highest participation rates were in London (Waltham Forest, Haringey, Hackney, Richmond upon Thames and Lewisham). And Londoners from across the city wanted to engage more in decision-taking (33 per cent, compared to 28 per cent across England).

Results are not uniform, and there are a few boroughs – principally Barking & Dagenham, Bexley and Havering – that buck the London trend, but the overall message is one that should give some comfort to London’s leaders. Citizens of the capital feel more engaged with the way their city is governed and more positive about the way it is changing than people in other places do.

This may partly result from the type of people who live in London (more educated and engaged in general), but could also be seen as a vote of confidence in the Mayor of London and its boroughs. The President of the United States can rant all he likes about the “terrible job” done by London’s leaders, but that’s not how it looks to Londoners.

There is a more specific relevance too, as we peer blearily into 2026. Nigel Farage has high hopes for the borough elections in May, but Londoners’ views may yet scupper these. Research by Kings Policy Institute suggests that a feeling of powerlessness over public services is strongly associated with planning to vote for Reform UK.

The flip side is that if people feel more positive about their ability to make a difference, as nearly 30 per cent of Londoners do, their likelihood of voting Reform UK should decrease. Londoners’ relative positivity about how their city is changing and their sense of civic engagement could be powerful bulwarks against change in May. Borough leaders will want to bolster both in the next four months.

First published by OnLondon

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.