Author: richardfjbrown

Housing in London – every cloud has a cloudy lining

There’s a German word, “dunkelflaute”, which translates as “dark doldrums” – periods when there is no wind or sun to generate electricity (making you reliant on coal and Russian gas, if you happen to have shut down all your nuclear power plants). London’s housing market seems to be facing dark doldrums at the moment: prices are stuck in a rut, residential planning permissions are at half the level they were five years ago, and transaction volumes and new building have slowed to a crawl.

Property prices in London shot up after the financial crisis, but have risen far less dramatically since 2016, as a result, property analyst Neal Hudson suggests, of tougher regulation of residential mortgages and more taxation of property investment. The market boomed briefly from 2020 to 2022, but has fallen back since then. According to the Nationwide Building Society’s index, average prices were ten per cent higher in 2024 than eight years earlier, but that is a 15 per cent fall once inflation is taken into account.

After decades of soaring prices, surely cheaper housing is good news for somebody? The Nationwide data show that the average price paid by a first-time buyer in London is now less than nine times median earnings, the lowest ratio for ten years. Rental affordability also seems to be improving, with government figures showing average rents taking up around 40 per cent of median income of renting households in 2022/23, compared to 57 per cent in 2016/17.

But neither of these figures tells the whole story. To paraphrase Withnail, living in London is becoming cheaper for those who can afford it, but remains prohibitively expensive to those who can’t.

Cheaper houses are only cheaper if you don’t need to borrow money. For first-time buyers, rising interest rates have gobbled up any savings from price falls: in 2020-22 Nationwide calculated that mortgage payments accounted for around 50 per cent of first-time buyers’ take-home pay.

Rising interest rates pushed that up to 66 per cent at the end of last year, though it has fallen back to around 60 per cent since then (a similar level to 2016). And, even with lower prices, London buyers still need to find deposits of £110,000 – a gargantuan sum for anyone without blockbuster bonuses, access to the Bank of Mum and Dad, or at least somewhere to live rent-free (and possibly holiday and fun-free too) while they scrimp and save.

As Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently observed, this means that anyone without wealthy parents or somewhere to stay rent-free will find it much more difficult to move into their own property in London and to enjoy everything the capital offers.

This might not matter if the Levelling Up dream of excellent jobs everywhere had been realised. But it hasn’t, and London should be able to offer opportunities for all, not just those lucky enough to have been born within the M25.

Apparent improvements in rental affordability also obscure a less positive reality. Government figures show that between 2016/17 and 2022/23, rents fell from 57 to 40 per cent of household income for people renting. But for someone earning median wages in London, rent fell from 59 per cent to 53 per cent of gross earnings over the same period – a significant drop, but much smaller than that implied by the official figures.

Why have renters’ household incomes increased faster than median wages? It could be a result of an increasing number of renting households having more than one earner, or maybe lower earners being squeezed out of the private rental market altogether.

Every cloud has a cloudy lining. If stagnant house prices are not doing much for renters or first-time buyers, they are doing even less for housebuilding. In 2023/24, around 32,000 dwellings were added to London’s housing stock, the lowest level since 2014/15, when the city was still emerging from the financial crisis. These include conversions and changes of use (including the dwindling number of office-to-residential conversions). And only 33,000 new residential units were given planning permission in 2023/24 – way below the peak of 80,000 plus each year between 2014/15 and 2018/19.

When prices fall, housebuilding slows, almost as a thermostatic reaction. Developers base their business plans on a range of projections, including changes in house prices and build costs. If prices go up faster than costs, building goes ahead. But in a stagnant market with high construction inflation, plans are paused or slow-pedalled.

After the financial crisis, housing associations were able to take up some of the slack, completing an average 7,000 homes each year in the five years from 2008/09. But their output in the past five years has been half that, as the need to fund safety improvements and squeezed grant levels have reduced capacity. Local authorities have started building more, completing 3,000 units in the past two years alone, but there is still a gap.

The dark doldrums cannot last forever. Interest rates are forecast to fall next year (if not as fast as previously predicted), which may help more first-time buyers to take advantage of lower prices. In addition, while provisional figures for housing starts in 2023/24 are the lowest since 2020/21, construction economist Noble Francis has observed that brick deliveries, a good leading indicator for housebuilding activity, were 21 per cent higher in October than a year earlier.

There is also Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner’s shake-up of planning, heavily trailed in interviews and newspaper pieces last weekend. Will this be enough to treble London’s house building rate in order to achieve its 80,000 homes a year target? What other changes might be needed? Watch this space.

First published by OnLondon.

Back to work

Londoners have been slow to get back to their desks compared to workers in other large cities, according to Return to the Office, the latest report from think tank Centre for Cities. Why is that, does it matter and what can be done?

The report’s polling, carried out in June, finds that central London office workers are spending an average of 2.7 days per week in the office, less than their counterparts in Paris, New York and Singapore, though pretty similar to those in Sydney and Toronto. As in  those other cities, their office days are concentrated in the middle of the week, with London showing the sharpest drop-off on Fridays, when just 40 per cent are traveling in to work.

London’s sluggish return is explained by two main factors, the report suggests. On the management side, London bosses seem more reluctant than those in other cities to specify when workers need to be in. And while workers and bosses alike value the chance to develop relationships and collaborate in person, London’s workers particularly also appreciate the cost savings and time flexibility offered by working from home – more than those in other cities.

The Centre for Cities findings reflect those of the King’s College Policy Institute’s London Returning survey of 2022. This found that most London workers felt positive about being in the office, but that 80 per cent said that avoiding the commute, its costs and its time demands was a good reason to continue working from home.

London government has sought to address this issue through the “Off Peak Friday” trial that ran from March until May on Underground, Overground, DLR, Elizabeth line and some National Rail services. It led to a modest increase in commuting on Fridays, but awareness and take-up was limited. Speaking at the Centre for Cities launch event on Tuesday evening, Deputy Mayor for Business Howard Dawber said City Hall was still mulling the outcomes of the trial.

However, while London commuting costs are high compared to most of the other cities in the study, I suspect the bigger problem lies outside the capital. On commuter lines beyond Sadiq Khan’s control, both expense – despite the paltry savings offered by flexi season tickets – and chaotic performance, worsened by rolling strikes in recent years, make a trip to London a pricey roll of the dice.

These costs and inconveniences may explain one area where London bucks the trend: in London, unlike the other cities, younger workers were spending most days in the office and saying they work most effectively there. They are also the workers most likely to live in London, while many older ones commute in from the Home Counties – a trend that was accentuated during the pandemic – or at least used to. Anyone who has joined an online call with younger workers balancing laptops on washbasins in shared flats with iffy WiFi while older workers dial in from their immaculately-restored half-timber country cottage may understand why the former are keener than the latter to get back.

At the launch event, panel members Dawber, Kat Hanna (Managing Director at Avison Young) and David Wreford (Partner at Mercer) agreed that the return to the office seemed to have plateaued in London, and that the pandemic had accelerated and intensified trends towards more flexibility. But there was less consensus among panellists and audience members on whether this was a good thing, and about what if anything could be done about it.

A fundamental question was, against the backdrop of government’s “Growth Mission”, how does hybrid working affect productivity? Intriguingly, Return to the Office finds that most workers could see individual productivity benefits from working at home, but were concerned about the long-term impacts on skills, pay and promotion prospects, all of which affect organisational productivity. The skills gap could particularly affect younger workers, unable to learn from working alongside more experienced staff, if the latter continued to stay home for most of the week.

The evidence on productivity is still emerging and tentative, though face-to-face interactions and proximity are the lifeblood of the agglomeration benefits that cities offer – even if these apply more for some teams and some sectors than for others. The report recommends that more research be done on the productivity impacts of hybrid working, but the risk is that we will only know the impacts when looking in the rear-view mirror; that we won’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone. So we need to make some informed judgement calls and watch for early signs of long-term effects.

In the meantime, more flexible working patterns were transforming working life for people with caring responsibilities – generally women, who the London Returning survey found were more positive about working from home and more reluctant to be told to work more days in the office. Reduce flexibility and these workers might once again be excluded from the workforce. The Mercer research confirmed this, Wreford added: women were most likely to switch or stay in jobs as a result of flexible working incentives, while men were more likely to be motivated by financial rewards.

Furthermore, while parts of central London’s economy were struggling with new work patterns, suburban areas might be thriving (though ONS analysis suggests local spending patterns have returned to their pre-Covid levels). And Hanna observed that a broader shift to mixed use might strengthen central London’s offer as a place of leisure, as well as work: “It’s called the Central Activities Zone; that doesn’t tell you what those activities need to be.” While peak hours Tube use remains below 2019 levels, evening and weekend riderships are already higher, suggesting that London’s offer to visitors – short and long distance – is stronger than ever.

Finally, what, if anything, should be done to change the situation? Mayor Khan wants central London to be busy, Dawber said, but can only offer incentives and encouragement. British bosses are reluctant to impose tougher “back to the office” mandates according to the polling, and government policy is pointing in the direction of more flexibility, not less.

So, is this the much discussed “new normal” – neither citypocalypse nor a snap back to the heady days of February 2020? It may be an equilibrium for the moment, but perhaps not a stable one. As panellists noted, climate change and artificial intelligence may dramatically change where, how and by whom office work is performed in the future. We may be only at the beginning of a period of rapid change.

First published by OnLondon.

The Lady Kennaway’s last voyage

This is a family story, an unexceptional but striking vignette of the British Empire.

On 20 November 1857, The Lady Kennaway made anchor at East London, South Africa, having sailed from Plymouth, England, two months earlier. The ship was a rough passenger ship (in poor shape by then, judging by the fact that it had been refused insurance that year), about 121 ft long. Following its launch in Calcutta in 1817, it had been chartered by the East India Company, and subsequently transported convicts and settlers to Australia.

East London River Port, 1870s

The Lady Kennaway was wrecked a few days after landing, but not before its passengers had been disembarked. They included 153 women and girls, collected from orphanages and workhouses across Ireland (filled to bursting point by the Great Irish Famine of 1845-49), and taken to South Africa to marry demobilised soldiers.

These soldiers were not British, but mainly German mercenaries, recruited to fight for Britain in Crimea, and relocated to South Africa after the war (which they had barely fought in) had concluded. The British governor’s idea was that they could form the basis of a colonial settlement (and be rescued from the twin perils of intermarriage and homosexuality) by bringing out marriageable women. One of those women was my great-great-grandmother, Margaret Gallagher.

What must it have been like for her, plucked from the trauma of Ireland aged 20, where she had probably seen friends and family die from hunger, transported across the ocean in an ageing hulk and dropped into the heat of East London, the bright sunshine of a Cape spring, with the uncertain prospect of being married off to a soldier she had never met?

Margaret seems to have been lucky. She took up with Patrick Lowry, one of soldiers escorting them to King William’s Town, the provincial capital (now called Qonce). They married and had numerous children (family sources seem unsure of precise numbers), the second-youngest of whom, Annie, was born in Gibraltar, presumably a new posting for Patrick. Annie subsequently married and settled in Essex, where our lives overlapped for a year in the early 1970s.

As I said above, the story is far from exceptional – there must be 152 others like it from that one journey – but it is one little instance of how the great machine of the British Empire scooped people up and moved them halfway across the world, like so many pieces on a chess board.

It recruited foreign mercenaries for a Black Sea war, found it couldn’t use them, and shipped them to settle the lands from which the British had displaced Dutch settlers (who had in turn displaced the indigenous Khoikhoi through warfare and disease). It created orphans through negligent famine in one place, and sent them halfway across the world as soldiers’ concubines. It could be a surprisingly mobile and inter-connected world, but a cruel one too.

Right on target, most direct?

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Angela Rayner’s housing announcement on Tuesday was its tone. Revealing the surprise reduction in London’s annual target, from 100,000 to 80,000, the Deputy Prime Minister said this was “still a huge ask, but I know it is one that the Mayor is determined to rise to and I met him last week about this”. Warm words and a sense of common cause and deals to be done, rather than brickbats, blame games and bunker mentalities. It may be just a honeymoon, but it’s a refreshing change.

What of the changes themselves? Are they an acknowledgement of London’s persistent failure to fulfil its potential or a token of a more reasonable ambition? The first thing to note is that London’s target is still more than twice the capital’s historic delivery rate – averaging 38,000 homes in the three years to 2022/23 – and requires a much higher jump from these rates than is expected from any other English region. It also represents more than two per cent of existing stock being built every year, which, as Jim Gleeson shows, is a much bigger ask than in any other region. London contains 16 per cent of England’s population, yet is still being asked to contribute 22 per cent of its new housing.

The reduced target should not be seen in isolation either. As Nick Bowes has observed, the new housing targets reflect the challenges of accommodating London’s population growth within its boundaries – challenges that were noted by London Plan inspectors ten years ago. South East England’s annual target has risen by the same number as London’s has fallen, with particularly sharp rises in some areas on the capital’s periphery.

The new targets could be said to reflect the reality of London being part of a southern conurbation, rather than a city alone. It will be interesting to see whether the New Towns Taskforce proposes urban extensions that straddle the M25 to help meet this combined need, and to see how London and surrounding local authorities might work together on these.

There are some anomalies within London too. Targets have been halved for the eastern boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Newham and Barking & Dagenham, even though these areas have been the policy focus for London’s growth for two decades and accounted for more than 20 per cent of its new homes in the last three years. On the other side of town, Kensington & Chelsea’s target has trebled, reflecting the impact that high house-price-to-earnings ratios have on how targets are generated.

We can expect these quirks to be ironed out as city-wide targets are fed through to borough targets in the new London Plan. The bigger question is whether London has any chance of actually building 80,000 new homes a year. Recent indicators show that build rates are still struggling to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Registrations of energy performance certificates for new homes, usually taken as a leading indicator of housebuilding, numbered 36,000 in the year to June 2024 and have been falling since 2021, though may have started to turn round in the past six months.

The big problem, as On London recently reported, is not planning permissions – London has planning permission in place for 300,000 homes – but the money, materials and muscle to build them out. The government has had less to say about this so far. There is a reference in the Rayner’s speech to allowing the Greater London Authority more flexibility within its Affordable Homes Programme, but this only helps supply a small proportion of homes in the capital.

In the medium term there may be more policy support and more money. Funding for infrastructure and affordable housing might be found as fiscal conditions improve, skills shortages may ease and changed perceptions may bring more investment to London and the UK. The National Planning Policy Framework consultation also starts to grapple with one of the knottiest issues in development: how the land market can be better managed to stop inflated value expectations making development unviable.

Meanwhile, London’s housing affordability challenges persist. The lowered housing target has been criticised, including by some of the YIMBY activists who have been the loudest cheerleaders for the government’ town planning reforms, but it is a nod towards realism about the scale of the task facing London.

Maybe the Mayor, boroughs and government can join forces with developers to double London’s building rates. It’s a Herculean task, but the will to work together is there, even if resources remain sparse. When London gets near to building 80,000 homes a year, then we can start debating whether 100,000 would be a better target.

First published by @OnLondon.

My back pages

I was going through newspaper archives (researching the London restaurant boom of the late 1980s, if you really want to know), when I stumbled upon a double-page spread I wrote for The Times in 1994 on Britain’s university cities. I did have a paper copy, long since lost, so hadn’t read it for decades.

I had been working at The Times, having failed to secure a place on their graduate programme, researching its Good Universities Guide league tables, and ringing round universities to find out what spare places they had in clearing (to ‘spoil’ the official clearing deal agreed between UCAS and The Independent). I think they let me write this piece as a treat. (I remember being swollen with pride when The Times’ terrifying chief subeditor told me it had needed very little work. “You write like a sub,” he said. My boss, John O’Leary, looked at me sorrowfully: “The trouble is, you think that’s a compliment, don’t you?”)

The tone is cringe and patronising in places, but I was 23 and had just graduated from a university that specialised in affectless snydery (or maybe that was just me and my friends). I don’t think I had even visited most of the towns and cities profiled, so my write-ups were derived from a mixture of received opinion, cheap one-liners, and I seem to remember some desultory ‘research’ phone-calls to student unions.

All that said, it’s an interesting flashback to thirty years ago, when the ‘binary line’ between universities and polytechnics had just been abolished: the piece deliberately looks at the ‘two uni’ towns and cities as places for students, rather than at the institutions themselves. One or two sentences even made me smile.

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940525RBonUniTownsDownload

Boomer Boom Bang-a-Bang

London’s population reached a historic high of 8,945,300 in the middle of last year, according to new estimates released by the Office for National Statistics. After slower growth at the end of the 2010s and a slight decline between 2019 and 2021, the number of people living in the city rose by 0.9 per cent – around 75,000 – between 2022 and 2023, the fastest growth rate since 2015-16.

Does this suggest that London has escaped the twin shadows of the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit and is returning to its turbo-charged growth of the late 2000s and early 2010s? Well, maybe and up to a point.

Certainly, the capital has defied some of the more apocalyptic predictions that emerged during lockdown – of the age of cities stuttering out in an “urban doom loop”. But it is still growing more slowly than other UK regions and metropolitan areas, most of which grew by one per cent or more in 2022-23. London’s growth rate is in fact more like what other regions were experiencing ten years ago, when the capital’s population was surging by 100,000 or more every year – a growth rate of up to 1.4 per cent.

London is also growing a bit more slowly than experts forecast. The mid-2023 estimate is very slightly lower than that of the most cautious Greater London Authority (GLA) population projection, which was based on the 2021 Census and projecting forward the slower growth trends from 2017-21.

Borough patterns suggest a mixture of recovery and longer-term trends. In some places, the return to growth looks like a post-pandemic rebound. This is most notable in Camden, which saw one of the steepest declines in population at the beginning of the pandemic but has now more than recovered, with 2.9 per cent population growth between 2020 and 2023.

But there appear to be broader trends operating too. Hillingdon, Tower Hamlets and Newham have each shown persistent growth, adding at least four per cent to their populations between 2020 and 2023. On the other side of the equation, Lambeth, Lewisham, Haringey and Waltham Forest all have populations that remain two to three per cent below their pre-pandemic levels.

Even if London’s growth has slowed, its population dynamics remain distinct from those of other parts of England and Wales. The capital continues to see much higher international inward migration (around 154,000 in the year to mid-2023) and domestic outward migration (130,000 in the same year) than other regions.

The capital’s population is also buoyed by natural change – the surplus of births over deaths – which accounts for growth of 50,000 in the year to mid-2023. Meanwhile, across England and Wales this has dwindled to nothing or gone into reverse, with as many people dying as being born for the first time in 42 years.

London is still younger than average (both a factor in and a result of its natural growth rate): its median age is 35.9, compared to 40 or older in every other region in England and Wales. The age groups that have seen the fastest growth since the pandemic abated (2021) are people in their twenties and in their sixties. However, longer-term (since 2011) the twenty-something population has declined, and the fastest growth has been among Londoners in their fifties and sixties – maybe those who lucked out by buying property in the 1980s and 1990s.

International comparisons suggest that London is not alone in its population growth patterns. Slow recovery is the norm following Covid, and other large northern hemisphere cities were already seeing a slowdown before 2020. US Census Bureau estimates suggest that in 2023 New York City’s population was still six per cent below its April 2020 total, though population loss is slowing. Paris has also seen a long-term decline, largely as a result of falling birth rates, which accelerated during the pandemic.

Cities have not gone away, but their slow recovery perhaps reflects the unexpected “stickiness” of changes in working habits and a sedate return to international migration patterns. If that is so, London’s slow growth may just be a delayed bounce-back. Comparisons with the GLA projections suggest this might be the case: those projections modelled growth slowing in 2022-23, whereas in fact it speeded up.

It may also be that growth is constrained as the cost of living in the capital remains sky-high and London struggles to meet the London Plan’s housebuilding targets, let alone the more ambitious goals suggested by the last government and think tanks such as Centre for London.

This should be a cause for guarded optimism. If policy and delivery are constraining growth we can turn that round, adopting the “Get Britain Building” mantra of the new government. London can build its way back to sustainable growth as a liveable and exciting destination for UK citizens and international visitors – provided of course that other measures, such as arbitrary immigration restrictions, do not stifle the UK’s world city.

First published by @OnLondon.

Makes no sense at all

In a small Midlands town at the weekend recently, I saw a stall for NONPOL, the ‘New Open Non-Political Organised Leadership’. This non-party party, whose leader Neil O’Neil won 166 votes in the 2024 General Election, presents party politics as a blight that distracts our leaders from common-sense solutions.

Disregarding the fact that many of these ‘common-sense’ solutions appeared on the flakier fringes of the paranoid right, it reminded me of how I used to rail against the idea of political parties. They made no sense, I thought, they were an impediment to true democracy and freedom of thought (too much classical education, you might say).

I didn’t like first-past-the-post voting either, whereby a party could – as Labour just have – win a huge majority of seats with only a plurality of votes. Monarchies and unelected second chambers I saw as ridiculous throwbacks. The idea of owning land seemed absurd, as did private property more generally. How could individuals lay claim to these things that pre-existed them and would live on for many years after?

All these opinions (and many more) were pretty average for a young person, and all were founded on reasoning from (not unreasonable) first principles. At one level, our system of government is deeply undemocratic, inherited political power is an absurdity, and the foundations of capitalist economics are hard to justify.

But these are no longer the principles that animate me. It’s not so much that I no longer believe what I once did; it’s more that other considerations – of what seems to work practically in creating a viable state – have gained more prominence. I’m sure others have had a similar experience. Some people call it ‘growing up’; teenage me would call it ‘selling out’; I prefer to think about it as adapting your perspectives as you see how things work.

Thinking about this made me think about the much-reported failure of younger generations to shift rightwards as they get older. This is often attributed to their inability to buy houses in early middle-age, and therefore to adopt the more conservative views that naturally accompany property ownership. That’s part of it, for sure, but there’s a bit more to it. All the things that seemed to work OK in the 1990s and 2000s, when I was in my twenties and thirties – capitalism, economic growth, government – have been rocked since 2008. The ensuing chaos has not given people a few years younger than me any reason to think that the system does actually work.

And I can’t help thinking, they may be right. But I hope the new government can prove them wrong.

Get Britain Building Again…again

The 2024 Labour manifesto stands in curious contrast to the Conservatives’. Rather than wacky suggestions for turning inner London into Paris, we have a document with more than 130 mentions of “change” but tantalisingly few specifics about how this change will be realised. A Labour government “will introduce effective new mechanisms”, “will strengthen”, “will take steps to ensure”, “will review”, “will work with partners to drive”.

You have to think/hope that the Labour front bench has some idea how they will actually achieve these aims, but they are certainly not telling us what they are – understandably so when they are riding so high in the polls and staring down queasily at the rocks below.

On housing, the target of 1.5 million new homes over the next Parliament is 100,000 less than the Conservatives have pledged to “deliver”, but still way ahead of build rates in the past 25 years. With the exception of a crowd-pleasing stamp duty surcharge for foreign buyers there is not much detail, but the manifesto does sketch out some of the bottom-up carrots and top-down sticks that will “get Britain building again”.

These carrots and sticks are presented as working together in single-minded pursuit of Labour’s mission to “kickstart economic growth”, but you can see some internal tensions. There will be more money for planners, but also tougher sanctions where local plans are absent or outdated. Communities will shape housebuilding, but a Labour government will intervene where necessary. Development will be “brownfield first”, but there will also be a “strategic approach” to Green Belt designation and release. There will be new towns, but planned and built in partnership with local communities.

There is a commitment to “exemplary development” and a careful pledge that, in some cases, compulsory purchase prices will be based on “fair compensation” rather than on the values that could be achieved once planning permission is granted. The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act introduced limited provision for this at the discretion of the Secretary of State, so Labour would presumably extend this. A wider application will be particularly important for new towns or planned urban extensions in the Green Belt, where unknown speculators are rumoured to buy up options on “strategic land” in the hope of untold rewards if planning permission should ever be granted.

Metro Mayors and combined authorities will be given a role in planning for housing growth, perhaps modelled on the powers that the Mayor of London has today. This looks like a good way of bridging between the central and local priorities, but could also create clashes between elected Labour Mayors and an elected Labour government. Sadiq Khan has already taken a stronger line against Green Belt development than the Labour leadership does, and the London Plan has been criticised by Michael Gove’s department for overloading developers with planning obligations. There are good reasons to be optimistic about what Khan can achieve with a Labour government, but there may still be storms ahead.

Renters will get protection from unfair Section 21 eviction and arbitrary rent rises (as promised but not delivered by the Conservatives). In addition, the manifesto pledges “the biggest boost in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation” – somehow achieved with existing Affordable Homes Programme funding – and to reduce the scope of Right-to-Buy.

The flagship policy to help first-time homebuyers – a mortgage guarantee scheme to reduce the deposits needed – is not described in any detail. However, if it is anything like the one introduced by the current government in 2021, it will have limited impact in London: buyers still need to put down a minimum five per cent, which can easily be £20,000 or more in the capital. Recent government statistics show that the scheme was only used by around 1,500 London first-time buyers (with an average household income of £95,000) between April 2021 and September 2023, fewer than any other English region. The deposit gap will remain a huge challenge for many Londoners.

This general election campaign has been odd in many ways, and the main parties’ manifestos underline this. The Conservatives’ document reads like a challenger’s – full of shiny, eye-catching initiatives gleaned from think tanks and special advisors. By contrast, for all its change-y vibes, Labour’s is cautious, sensible and careful not to leave a flank exposed to enemy fire, but with some inherent tensions half-glimpsed beneath the surface.

Serious discussion of London and its problems is absent from either manifesto (Labour only mention the capital twice: once as a case study voter’s workplace and once as the party’s postal address), but this may not be a bad thing after a decade when the capital has been used as a general purpose scapegoat for everything from regional inequality, to Brexit division, to populist discontent. Maybe that type of debate feels a bit beside the point given the challenges the whole country faces today. It would be good if we could use this election to move beyond it.

First published by OnLondon.

How do they expect to be taken seriously?

The 2024 Conservative Manifesto, like the RMS Titanic’s Spring 1913 entertainment programme, should probably be seen as “aspirational” at best. There’s an insouciance in the way it raises the quota for annual housing delivery in England to 320,000 from the 300,000 promised in 2019 – a target that has been undershot by at least 50,000 in each of the past five years – which suggests they are not really engaged.

The manifesto is not all bad. There are glimmers of light in the housing section. Leasehold reform and the abolition of Section 21 evictions are good ideas, just as they were in 2019, though the fact that the pledges need to be repeated does not reflect well on the government’s record in office.

The manifesto also proposes temporary Capital Gains Tax relief for landlords who sell to their tenants – a good incentive for those who want to quit the sector, though some mechanism for sharing the benefit with tenants would help bridge the huge deposit gap that renters face, in London above all.

The document’s references to London are sparse and generally weird. They largely focus on attacking Sadiq Khan (recently re-elected with an increased majority) and his deputies: Night Czar Amy Lamé is held culpable for the closure of 3,000 pubs bars and nightclubs since March 2020, as if nothing else of note has happened since then.

But on housing the manifesto’s grasp of reality becomes shakier still. To achieve its super-Stakhanovite target for housebuilding, it promises “gentle densification” of urban areas – apart from inner London, where densities will be raised to “those of European cities like Paris and Barcelona”.

I’m a big fan of density, and of Paris and of Barcelona, but this is loopy. Comparative density is tricky to measure, but a rough read-across is possible using Tom Forth’s Circle Populations website, which calculates populations around particular points. The 5km radius around London’s centre, traditionally the statue of King Charles I at Charing Cross, has around 1.1 million residents.

The equivalent area in Paris, drawn from outside Notre Dame, has around 2.1 million. Barcelona is harder to compare because of its position on a strip between mountains and sea, but scaling up a 3km-radius circle around Eixample, which includes most of the city centre, yields a population of around 2.4 million.

The idea of doubling the number of people living in central London within five years seems even more of a stretch than the national housing target, and the manifesto contains no clues about how this would be achieved.

The population of the capital’s Central Activities Zone (an area slightly smaller than a 5km-radius circle) only increased by a quarter between 2010 and 2020. Even looking at a wider, 10km-radius, circle would require population growth of around 30 per cent to match Paris compared to ten per cent population growth in inner London between 2011 and 2022.

Central London could certainly be denser. Delivery on some opportunity areas has been slow – though in the case of Euston the government is hardly clean-handed – and as working patterns change there are opportunities to re-allocate some lower-grade commercial space. But short of razing the City of London – which the manifesto pledges to “support as the leading global market” – and other business districts, or lifting conservation area restrictions from the capital’s historic core, it is hard to see how these uplifts are achievable in the next decade, let alone the next Parliament.

In any case, who will be able to afford to live, or at least to buy their own home, in the capital? The manifesto also pledges to relaunch the Help to Buy scheme, which offered government loans to help first-time buyers of new builds to afford their deposit. The scheme’s subsidies have been much derided for boosting house prices and/or being scooped up by developers.

Personally, I think the scheme could be refocused to help those without family wealth, rather than to boost new build, but that’s another issue. The previous scheme allowed a maximum loan for 20 per cent of value across England. This was raised to 40 per cent in London from 2016, following very low take-up. The new version makes no such special provision, so it is hard to see who will be able to use it to buy property in any newly tower-lined streets of the city centre.

Perhaps the plan is for a cataclysmic property price collapse so that London’s house prices are levelled down to those beyond the capital? Perhaps all the buyers would be those few lucky foreigners who the new “legally binding” cap on immigration allows in? Yes, we know the Conservatives will struggle to win seats in inner London, but treating the capital and its housing crisis so casually seems irresponsible. If this is all they can come up with, how on earth can they expect to be taken seriously?

First published by OnLondon

Licence too ill

London’s nightlife has been taking a pasting: a recent (not very scientific) survey suggested that the city has the worst nightlife in the UK; pubs and clubs are being closed down, their numbers falling by eight and 30 per cent respectively since 2010 according to UK business counts; industry bodies say that London is losing nightlife faster than other regions; and social media reports frequently bewail empty pubs, dead streets and early closing times.

What is to blame for this thinning out? There is a grim alignment of factors: changing drinking habits, higher prices and constrained wages, staff shortages following Brexit, changed working and commuting patterns following the pandemic, cautious licensing authorities and the rise in take-away (or delivery) culture.

Some critics point the finger at Amy Lamé (pictured, front left), the Night Czar appointed by Sadiq Khan in 2016. How, they ask, can her six-figure salary can be justified when London’s nightlife is crumbling? More recently, Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall has weighed in, presenting Lamé’s appointment as symptomatic of Khan’s “chumocracy” approach to administration and promising to bring in “real experts committed to reviving our city’s night economy” if she is elected.

Lamé has mounted a vigorous defence of her record, both in keeping venues open and making nightlife safer for all. And I don’t think it is fair to blame her every time the shutters roll down on another London venue (full disclosure: I don’t really know Lamé, but I did spend many 1990s Saturday nights at Duckie, the arty club night she co-founded). But there is a deeper problem too: neither she nor Khan have access to the levers that can keep venues open or close them.

This seems strange, given the wide-ranging remit of London’s Mayors. Nightlife is an essential part of a city’s economy and culture, but licensing late night entertainment and hospitality remains a local authority function.

Licenses are granted by the 33 local authorities in London and governed by central government policy objectives focused on preventing crime, nuisance and negative impacts on children or public health rather than on fostering cultural or economic vitality.

Furthermore, substantial areas of central London are subject to “cumulative impact” policies, which restrict the opening of new premises and extensions of opening hours in order to minimise strains on local infrastructure and the risks of disorder.

The deck is stacked against the hospitality industry. Some boroughs, such as Camden, have sought to relax policies in response to headwinds that have battered the sector since the pandemic, though this has been controversial. In many other cases, restrictions either haven’t been reviewed since 2020 or have been reaffirmed. At the heart of the issue is a balancing act. How does licensing weigh the concerns of local residents, who vote, against the interests of local businesses and visitors, who don’t, and the representations made by the police, who are in the front line when things go wrong?

There’s a similar challenge in town planning – balancing local community interests and the strategic needs of the city. This is why the Mayor was given powers to set policies on issues such as density and use mix, and to intervene in significant cases where local decisions might undermine those policies. Indeed, Khan has already used his planning powers to support London’s nightlife through the “agent of change principle”, which makes developers rather than pre-existing entertainment venues responsible for sound insulation and other mitigation measures.

Should London’s Mayors, who already have oversight of the capital’s police force, take a greater role in licensing, setting a framework for local decisions and perhaps intervening where there is a strategic case for doing so? Giving them more power in this area could take the heat out of local debates and allow for a more consistent and strategic approach to the capital’s night-time economy.

Such an extension of mayoral power might be restricted to central London, where nightlife serves capital city and world city functions, as well as the needs of local communities. Again, there’s a read-across to town planning: the Mayor already has an enhanced planning role in the Central Activities Zone, though interestingly many of London’s nightlife hotspots are distributed around its fringe.

All that said, licensing is difficult. I’m not sure whether the current Mayor or his successors would welcome responsibility for decisions that almost invariably annoy someone. But if we want London to be a successful, liveable and thriving 24-hour city, intelligent licensing has a vital part to play.

First published by OnLondon.