richardfjbrown

I love you, you fix my rent

The Renters (Reform) Bill, which had its second reading in the House of Commons last week, should be particularly good news for Londoners. Twenty-nine per cent of households – just over one million – in the capital are private renters, compared to 17 per cent in the rest of England, so the measures in the Bill, including its centrepiece abolition of “no fault” evictions, will be welcomed by many.

The legislation has been a long time coming. The reforms were first announced by Theresa May in April 2019, towards the end of her government’s lifespan. Toby Lloyd, former Head of Policy at Shelter, had been recruited as the Prime Minister’s special advisor on housing the previous year, and he helped make the case for the reform.

“There was definitely interest in the problems in the private rental sector, both moral and electoral,” Lloyd says. “Morally, there were people at Number 10 who really cared about the ‘burning injustice’ of how the housing market operated, and electorally there was growing awareness of the difficulty the Conservatives had in attracting young people. And occasionally, when the clouds cleared on Brexit, the government was keen to advance social reforms, especially if they could also wrong-foot the Labour Party, who hadn’t declared their policies at that time.”

Four years and three prime ministers later, we have the Bill. One of its central measures will be ending “Section 21 evictions”, which allow landlords to terminate a tenancy for any reason after six months. These are currently one of the driving forces behind homelessness in London: just under half of the 5,850 households at risk of homelessness at the end of last year were in that position because of the end of an assured shorthold tenancy was approaching, and in more than half of these cases the tenancy was ending simply because the landlord wished to sell up or rent the property to someone else (presumably for a higher rent).

Under the reforms, landlords will still be able to end tenancies if they wish to live in their property or sell it, and will have enhanced rights to evict tenants who fall behind with their rent or display “anti-social behaviour”. Otherwise, tenancies will be open-ended, with landlords allowed to raise rents annually. To avoid “eviction by rent increase”, tenants will be able to challenge any proposed rent rises above “market value” at a tribunal. This provision always existed in theory, but the risk of arbitrary eviction made it toothless: landlords could simply use the Section 21 process to boot out any truculent tenants.

Taken together, these reforms begin to sound like a version of rent control, though Lloyd’s experience of selling the measures to sometimes sceptical Conservative ministers leads him to prefers the term “rent stabilisation”. They certainly falls short of what Sadiq Khan is calling for – a two-year rent freeze and a rent control commission to set rents thereafter (not least because market rents have begun to rise sharply in recent months after a period of slower growth). However, the Bill’s measures should act as a curb on the most egregious rent rises.

Not everyone is happy, however. Landlord representatives warn that the complexity of evicting tenants under the new rules may combine with a loss of tax breaks to push landlords to sell their properties. However, Toby Lloyd is sanguine: “Landlords have been saying this since I started to work in housing, but the truth is that the sector is still growing.”

And, if landlords did quit, would it matter? They would presumably sell their property, either to another landlord or to an owner-occupier. When I asked about this on Twitter recently, several respondents made the sensible point (Twitter isn’t what it used to be) that moving property from rental to owner-occupation might support a different market. One recalled, “when we sold our rental flat in Hackney, it went from being occupied by a young Bangladeshi family to a single white guy with a taste for modernist architecture.” And, she added, landlords might be more demanding in terms of references if they felt tenants would be harder to evict, which could “effectively bar a cohort of people on the financial margins.”

One solution, of course, would be to build more social housing, so that people at the margins had other options. But there are already different private rental models. Some professionalised “build-to-rent” landlords have endorsed the abolition of Section 21 evictions: Grainger, the UK’s largest listed landlord, welcomed the reforms, saying that “many of the proposals in the Bill align with Grainger’s business model.”

And maybe there is also room for what Lloyd, Rose Grayston and Neal Hudson called in a report published earlier this year an “ethical private rented sector” in which not-for-profit providers could buy property from smaller landlords who wanted to sell up, as community-based housing associations did in the 1960s.

The transition to the new system will inevitably be bumpy, leading to particular problems in specific cases (for example, for student rentals), and Londoners still need more homes and a better choice of affordable rental flats and houses. The Renters (Reform) Bill does not solve all of London’s housing problems, but remodelling the rental market to support responsible private landlords and squeeze out those whose behaviour is little short of criminal is a good start.

First published by OnLondon

Talking to the taxman about demographics

Recent figures suggest that London may already be bouncing back from the twin shocks of Brexit and the pandemic. The figures, based on pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) tax data, suggest that the number of working people living in London increased by just over three per cent between December 2019 and December 2022, an increase of around 138,000.

Tagged as “experimental statistics” by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), they count the “payroll population” – that is, the number of people on payroll, including those on furlough or sick leave, based on their home address. Therefore, they do not show the number of jobs in London (some of these people will commute out, while others commute in) nor do they show the whole population (they exclude self-employed people and people who are not working for whatever reason).

All that said, they provide another strong indication that whatever population exodus London saw during the first year of the pandemic has since gone into reverse. The chart below shows the trajectory of this change. March 2021, the month of the 2021 Census, is at the lowest point of the dip.

The composition of London’s payroll population has changed over this period, reflecting the implementation of Brexit in 2020 and new immigration rules in 2021. London’s EU worker population has shrunk by about ten per cent (80,000 people), while its non-EU worker population grew by around 20 per cent (150,000 people). The UK national workforce fell by about five per cent during the pandemic, and is now two per cent higher than it was in late 2019. The chart below shows how the three populations have changed.

The rest of England also saw growth in its non-EU workforce. Though this growth was largest in numerical terms in London, the proportionate increase in North East and North West England was much sharper: the number of non-EU workers living in these regions increased by 65 and 47 per cent respectively (and the number of EU workers fell less). This largely accounts for faster payroll population growth rates in these regions, as shown in the chart below. London’s growth is just above the English average, but higher than its southern neighbours’.

At the moment, the rise in the number of workers from outside the EU has been spread across the country, reflecting the fact that growth has been sharpest in “nationwide” sectors such as health, construction and transport. As the economy recovers, that trend may continue or else immigration will become more concentrated in London (as suggested in a previous article).

What does this tell us? Despite their limitations, these ONS figures suggest that London has begun to adapt to and recover from the double whammy of the pandemic and Brexit. And they confirm the need for caution urged by the Greater London Authority and others over using the Census figures to argue against investing the capital’s services – 2021 was a very odd year.

First published by OnLondon

AI: reshaping the knowledge economy

Since their earliest days technology has shaped cities. The industrial revolution founded the great manufacturing centres of the 19th Century; trains fuelled London’s growth, replacing market gardens with metro-land; and global information and communication technology networks founded a network of global cities in the late 20th Century.

Right now, social media are clamorous with hype about artificial intelligence (AI), and the pace of change seems dizzying. Anyone who has played with “generative” AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, or Midjourney’s image generators will have experienced the uneasy feeling that they are dealing with something sentient, however much they know that these systems merely aggregate and recombine information.

Prompt engineering is not straightforward, as this Midjourney representation of ‘futuristic London’ illustrates.

What impact is this wave of innovation likely to have in London, and on London’s economy in particular? In recent weeks, a few academic and commercial studies considering the labour market impact of generative AI have been published. This article tries to weave together some of their threads.

One piece of positive news is that London is the leading European city for AI. A 2021 survey by the government’s Digital Catapult identified the UK as the third most important centre for it after the USA and China, with more than 70 per cent of UK AI firms and – judging by 2020 job postings – around a third of all new advertised AI jobs based in London.

London’s tech sector has grown fast and is estimated to employ around 900,000 people. But the impact of generative AI is likely to extend beyond the capital’s silicon centres and suburbs. One team of researchers, Tyna Eloundou and colleagues, have looked at detailed task descriptions for US occupations to estimate the impact that generative AI technologies could have. Overall, they estimate that 80 per cent of the USA workforce could be affected by them, with around 20 per cent being heavily affected. The impact would be greatest for higher paid jobs and those held by graduates.

The research team has not published details of its analysis, but does summarise the impact on different industries. At the top of the list, with more than 40 per cent of tasks affected, are various financial services and IT subsectors, as well as a publishing and broadcasting (non-internet), and professional, technical and scientific services.

A Goldman Sachs report reaches similar conclusions. It argues that the impact of generative AI will be greatest in advanced western and far eastern economies. In Europe, it suggests the greatest impact will be on professionals, associate professionals, clerical support workers and managers, with legal service and office administration likely to be affected most heavily.

These findings map pretty squarely onto the three categories of professional services which dominate the London economy: information and communications; finance and insurance; and professional, scientific and technical services. These sectors have grown in importance in the capital. They made up 31 per cent of jobs in London in 2022 compared to 27 per cent in 2012. They are also concentrated in the capital, accounting for almost twice the proportion of jobs as across the UK as a whole.

Saying that these “knowledge economy” sectors are those most exposed to the impact of generative AI is more or less the precise opposite to what Centre for London colleagues and I found five years ago in our report on disruption to the capital’s labour market. Based on an analysis of how “automatable” different occupations were, we argued that London’s information and communications and its professional, scientific and technical services had the lowest automation potential (finance and insurance was slightly higher).

Why the difference? Were we wrong? Are these new analyses wrong? What has changed? Without re-running our analysis, I suspect part of the difference lies in occupational mix. Many London workers undertake more specialised and knowledge intensive tasks within particular industries. Underwriting risk at Lloyds of London is very different from working in a claims call centre.

But I think our expectations have shifted too. Generative AI is a qualitative change. When we wrote the Centre for London report, we were generally talking about the scope for specialised algorithms to automate specific routine tasks. These new technologies go further: they can draw on huge databases to generate new content. They can respond to simple user requests, writing and refining algorithms on demand. They can draft summaries, presentations, poems and speeches. They are creating visualisations. They are even being deployed in therapy. This is extending their reach much further into professional services than we envisaged.

Will this change destroy jobs? The traditional response is to say, “No! Every other technology has created jobs. This will too.” I think that is certainly right in the short term. The measure of impact used by the Eloundou study is whether generative AI could theoretically speed up tasks by more than half. A recent empirical study found that AI-enabled workers took an average of a third less time to complete certain standardised tasks and produced a better graded submission at the end. Workers also expressed more job satisfaction, spending more time coming up with ideas and editing, and less time drafting.

This sounds like a potential boost to productivity for London’s service sectors – one the capital and country urgently need. Productivity gains can, of course, be realised by cuts in wage bills, but that is only part of the story. AI may also unleash supply of and demand for new products and services. Economics blogger Noah Smith has compared its impact to that of machine tools, which displaced craft manufacture but led to ever increasing demand for goods and employment in manufacturing – at least for a century or so.

London is perfectly positioned to catch this wave of opportunity, creating new software to meet new demands and launching a new wave of hybrid services, following in the path of fintech and medtech. But the impact may go deeper still. Eloundou and colleagues argue that generative AI is already showing signs of being a “general purpose technology” like printing or steam engines, characterised by “widespread proliferation, continuous improvement, and the generation of complementary innovations”. If that is the case, AI will change our world in ways that we cannot yet comprehend.

All this is wildly speculative. At the extremes, London could be left unaffected by AI, though I fear that would be the stagnation option. Or AI may destroy humanity, making predictions moot. Between these poles, job destruction is by no means certain and if AI allows more leisure time alongside more equitably shared prosperity, that might not be a bad thing. But disruption probably is. London could be in for an exciting but choppy few years.

First published by OnLondon

AI: reskilling for the rough beast

I’d like to say that I asked ChatGPT to write me a first draft of this blog, but a) it’s a tiresome cliché, and b) the platform was overloaded when I started writing, so I couldn’t. I’m not surprised. Even over the past couple of months, talk about and use of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Bing seems to have been growing exponentially. LLMs will render essay-writing at universities obsolete, hugely accelerate the production of first drafts, and automate the drudge work of academic research.

I am undertaking research on the skills that we will need in the future, and it feels difficult to get a handle on how LLMs and their artificial intelligence (AI) successors will affect these, given the speed at which innovation is advancing and use cases are multiplying. But it also feels careless going on negligent not to do so. So, what might it mean to work with this rough beast, as it slouches towards our workplaces?

Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations

AI will, I think, transform what we currently call the ‘knowledge economy’. Thinking about this sent me back to Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations, and its analysis of the ‘three jobs of the future’. ‘Routine production’ jobs, he wrote, were poorly valued jobs in everything from manufacturing to book-keeping, often moved overseas when he was writing, but also increasingly vulnerable to automation. Many of Reich’s second category, ‘in-person service’ jobs, are less vulnerable to moving overseas (although many are still low-valued by society): even if some shopping has gone on-line, there are still jobs – from brain surgeon to hairdresser, and from bartender to care assistant – that are defined by the need for proximity. The third category, Reich slightly awkwardly describes as ‘symbolic analysts’, comprising everyone from consultants, software engineers and investment bankers, to journalists, TV and film producers, and university professors. These are the elite tier of the global knowledge economy:

“Symbolic analysts solve, identify and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be re-arranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality… Some of these manipulations reveal how to deploy resources or shift financial assets more efficiently, or otherwise save time and energy. Other manipulations yield new inventions – technological marvels, innovative legal arguments, new advertising ploys for convincing people that certain amusements have become life necessities.”

Reich was writing 30 years ago. Since then, the offshoring and automation of routine production has gathered pace, while the rewards accruing to symbolic analyst jobs have increased. But Reich’s description of symbolic analyst jobs underlines how the very features that protected them from routine automation (the combination of analytical skill, a reservoir of knowledge and fluency in communication) may now expose them to a generation of technology that will become increasingly adept at manipulating symbols itself, even if it cannot (yet) ‘think’ or ‘create’. From an architectural drawing to a due diligence report, to an advertising campaign, to a TV show script, to a legal argument, to a news report – there are very few symbolic analyst outputs that LLMs will not be able to prepare, at least in draft.

Revisiting Osborne and Frey

Another way of thinking about the potential impact of more advanced AI on the knowledge economy workplace is to revisit Michael Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey’s hugely influential analysis. Writing in 2013 Osborne and Frey identified the ‘engineering bottlenecks’ that have held ‘computerisation’ back from specific tasks, and were expected to do so for the next two decades. These included complex perception and manipulation activities, creative intelligence tasks (from scriptwriting to joke-making), and social intelligence tasks (such as negotiation, persuasion, and care).

The growth of LLMs chips away at the second of these, as machines draw on extensive databases to generate coherent content, though their joke-making skills are still a bit iffy. LLMs are also starting to make inroads into the third, as they are deployed as companions or therapists, even if their empathy is performed rather than felt. Engineering bottlenecks still constrain automation, but some are widening much faster than Osborne and Frey predicted. Indeed, one recent assessment suggests that the use of LLM technology will have an impact on around 80 per cent of US workers, with the impact greatest for higher-qualified and higher-paid workers.

That is not to say that AI will ‘destroy jobs’. Like other technologies, AI will probably create new jobs and remodel others. For the moment, there is craft in minding these machines; you need to know how to give instructions, ask questions and evaluate answers. In this, LLMs are like the oracles of classical antiquity, whose riddling utterances contained truth but needed careful interpretation. LLMs can produce good drafts and their accuracy is improving, but they can also ‘hallucinate’ facts, and assert them with a delusional and sometimes aggressive confidence.

This task of interpretation and intermediation is not that far removed from how many professions operate today. Architects, doctors, lawyers, accountants, scriptwriters – even academics – are not pure symbolic analysts, working in an entirely abstract world. Part of their skill, maybe most of it at the top of their professions, is interpersonal – motivating and managing staff, pitching ideas and winning business, convincing clients and colleagues. For these professionals, the current crop of LLMs are best deployed as responsive and multi-talented assistants, which do not get bored, demand pay, or insist on meaningful career development.

Automating menial tasks will disrupt professional development

What does this mean for actual flesh-and-blood assistants and their career development? In many modern professions, life for new recruits is a slog of preparing legal notes, PowerPoint decks, due diligence, and audit reports. I get the sense that some of this is already ‘make-work’, designed to acclimatise a new graduate to the codes and the culture of their profession, but also to give them a chance to see and learn from interactions – in the courtroom, at the client meeting, at the pitch.

If it becomes ever easier and cheaper to commission material directly from machines, that will create a problem not only for future generations of graduates, but also for those at the top of the professions, who will not be able to rely on a stream of graduate trainees to step into their shoes. Even as automation boosts productivity, it will disrupt professional development and may, in the words of one economist, “have stark effects on the value of cognitive labour”.

Furthermore, in the longer term (and I am thinking years not decades), inaccuracy may be less of a problem than the erosion of doubt. A lot of work has already gone into stopping newer LLMs spouting racist opinions like their predecessors did; future models will likely be much clearer about the ‘right answer’ to any question and about the truth of different propositions. Much of this will be helpful, though the lack of transparency and contestability is frustrating.

Minority opinions marginalised and moral judgement at a premium

But as regulation strengthens the guardrails around AI, there is a risk that some minority opinions will be marginalised and eventually expunged. Many of these will be conspiracy theories, junk science and fake news. But they may also be the small voices of gritty corrective to the dominant narrative – the proponents of ‘lab leak theories’ of COVID-19, the dogged campaigners against over-prescription of painkillers, the investigative journalists who stick to the story in the face of denials and threats.

This has inevitably already become a new front in the ‘culture war’, with some media getting angry that ChatGPT refuses to promote fossil fuel use, sing paeans of praise to Donald Trump or say that nuclear war is worse than racist language. So far so funny. But the more the unified version of the truth promoted by AI squeezes out alternative understandings of facts, let alone alternative interpretations of how they should guide our behaviour, the more we will need the ability to challenge and debate that truth, the imaginative capacity to transcend guardrails.

So, what does this all mean for skills? A knowledge economy in which LLMs are increasingly widespread will require critical judgement, a basic understanding of how coding, algorithms and emerging AI technologies operate, the ability to work with clients and colleagues to refine and use results, and the diverse and creative intelligence to challenge them.

Perhaps above all, we will need sophisticated moral judgement. LLMs and their AI successors will be able to do many things, but there will be so many complex judgements to be made about whether and how they should. Who will be accountable for any errors? Is it for a machine to define truth? Should it do so by reference to a consensus, or its own judgements of correspondence to reality? At an existential level, how should we achieve the alignment of AI and human interests? How are the latter to be defined and articulated? What balance of individual and social goods should be struck? Where are the boundaries between humans and machines? Do the machines have rights and obligations?

Today we muddle along, reaching consensus on moral issues through a broad process of societal mediation, with horrible moral errors along the way. Tomorrow, we have the potential for a new age of turbocharged progress and moral clarity, a prospect that is at once scintillating and unsettling.

First published by LSE Business Review.

Working it out

Local and regional employment statistics from the 2021 Census were released this week, giving a snapshot of who is working in London and how this compares with the rest of the country. There are caveats, given that the Census was undertaken in March 2021 at the end of the last Covid 19 lockdown when some Londoners had moved out of the city. Also, these figures are about residents’ economic activity as distinct from the jobs in London’s workplaces. Nevertheless, here are four observations about how Londoners are working, from a brief review of the data.

Employment rates are high in London, but partly for demographic reasons

At first glance, London boroughs are hives of economic activity. There are 331 English and Welsh local authority districts and five of the ten with the highest employment rates were in London. Wandsworth, Lambeth and the City of London took the top three slots, with Southwark and Merton not far behind. All had 65 per cent employment rates or higher.

But these numbers are skewed. Firstly, the headline Census figures look at the entire population over 16 years old, including those above retirement age. London has a younger population than the England and Wales average, and young people tend to work more than older people.

By this measure, therefore, you would expect to find higher employment rates in London. But if you look at employment rates only for those aged 16-64, London boroughs are towards the middle or bottom of the table.

The second factor that seems to have affected London’s figures surprised me. In addition to the effect of having a younger population, older Londoners are much more likely to be working than counterparts elsewhere.

Overall, 14 per cent of people in the capital aged 65 and over are still working, and London boroughs account for eight of the ten districts with the highest employment levels nationally.

The City of London, Kensington & Chelsea, Camden and Westminster all have more than 20 per cent of their older residents in work. London is not so much the city that never sleeps as the city that never retires.

There’s a big employment gap for disabled Londoners, but fewer are economically inactive than in other regions

The employment rate for disabled people over 16 living in London is just under 30 per cent. This is higher than in other regions, though there is a stark gap between employment for disabled and non-disabled people: the employment rate for the former group is 38 per cent lower than for the latter.

There is also a relatively high proportion of disabled Londoners who do not have a job but are looking for one. However, fewer disabled Londoners are economically inactive (ie, not in work, but not seeking work either) than in other regions.

Whether this pattern is because London’s labour market can work well for disabled people, or because economic circumstances and sanctions force more of them to keep looking for work in the capital, is not clear from these figures. Trust for London and other organisations have done extensive work on the subject.

Women’s employment rates are relatively high, but the gender employment gap varies markedly across the city

The employment rate for women in London aged 16 and over was around 57 per cent. That’s higher than in any other English region. Eight inner London boroughs had rates of above 60 per cent.

At the same time, and in common with every other English and Welsh local authority district, employment rates in London boroughs were higher for men than for women. However, there is a very mixed picture across the city.

Newham, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets, Harrow and Barking & Dagenham are five of the eight English and Welsh districts with employment gender gaps of more than 12 per cent, while Hackney, Lambeth and Lewisham have gaps of five per cent or less, which are some of the lowest.

This may partly result from demographics: the boroughs with low employment gaps have many young, single (or newly-coupled) professional people, while the boroughs with wider gender gaps have some of the highest birthrates in London and include communities in which, for cultural reasons, women may be less likely to work.

Worker growth is outstripping general population growth in East London

Between 2011 and 2021 London’s working adult population aged 16 and over and its total population aged 15 and over both rose by around 8.5 per cent. But growth was very unevenly distributed (see chart below).

The east London boroughs have seen rapid increases and in most cases their working population growth has outstripped their general population growth. Other boroughs, particularly in other parts of north and west outer London, have seen their working population grow more slowly than their overall population, and a handful of west-central boroughs have seen a decline in both groups.

Taken together, these figures suggest that London continues to contain extremes of employment and worklessness. Zooming into the ONS’s detailed map, you can find blocks where 15 per cent or more of people aged over 16 are unemployed and looking for work within boroughs that have grown their workforce by 25 per cent over the past ten years.

Londoners are unquestionably working hard. More women, more older people and more disabled people are in the workforce. To what extent this is a result of making positive choices and the general industriousness of urban life, and how far it is driven by the exorbitant costs of living in the capital is another question.

Originally published by OnLondon.

Two directions home

The roots of the UK’s housing crisis run deep. Two reports published last week agree on this much, though the conclusions they draw from looking back over the past 70 years of supply, demand, policy and price changes are quite different.

Last week Samuel Watling and Ant Breach of Centre for Cities published their report on “the UK’s four million missing homes”. It analyses historic housebuilding stats and finds that the alleged golden age of post-war mass housebuilding was not so golden after all. Housebuilding rates actually fell from 1947 onwards compared with the pre-war period, and the UK underperformed many other European countries in terms of building enough homes to keep up with population growth.

From this, Watling and Breach argue that the fundamental blight on UK housebuilding has been the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which established the role of local authorities in setting local plans, identifying land for development and granting planning permissions, rather than the decline in council housebuilding after 1980. They argue that under the auspices of the Act and its successors land supply has been constrained by measures such as Green Belt protection. Furthermore councils’ discretion in granting planning permissions means that even what is proposed in plans may not be permitted in practice.

Consequently, the report proposes planning reform as the key to unlocking faster and more affordable housebuilding, particularly in London and south east England where supply has fallen furthest behind demand and prices and rents have risen most. The authors’ favoured solution is a zoning system, which would establish frameworks for development in local plans (including in Green Belt locations with good public transport). They would then allow developers to build in line with those frameworks without needing additional permissions. The government had plans to move towards a zoning system, but those were dropped in 2021. Centre for Cities urges it not to water down the more modest reforms now included in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.

The other report, entitled Reboot, was published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) the day after the Centre for Cities report came out. Written by a veritable housing supergroup comprising Rose Grayston and Toby Lloyd, formerly of Shelter and the No Place Left Behind Commission, and analyst Neal Hudson, whose insights plot an assured path through the marshes of UK housing market data, it too looks back to the 20th Century to understand the housing crisis of the 21st.

However, rather than foregrounding planning, Reboot focuses primarily on how policy has shaped markets and what this means as we enter our fifth downturn in 50 years. The authors observe that every downturn prompts a response that may deal with the immediate crisis but entrenches chronic problems more deeply. For example, Help-to-Buy equity loans helped revive housebuilding after 2013, but also added inflationary pressure.

The net effect, though the report does not use the term, is moral hazard writ large. Homeowners get all the advantages of house price growth in the boom years, and when the going gets tough governments take action to bail them out and prop prices up, so they soar out of reach of first-time buyers without rich families or lucky lottery numbers.

We are now nearing the end of what Reboot’s authors call the “decadent era” of growth since the mid 2000s, with London at the forefront both of house price deceleration and of slowing construction. The report considers what might happen next – from a rapid return to growth to a fully-fledged crash – and identifies four potential problems: housebuilding drying up as builders wait for the market to revive; an investors’ market where interest rates make life difficult for first-time-buyers but offer rich pickings for buy-to-rent; serious impacts on vulnerable groups, particularly heavily-leveraged recent London buyers; and the market freezing up as sellers, accustomed to rising prices, delay selling or downsizing.

Unlike the Centre for Cities report, which focuses on one big recommendation, Reboot offers more than a dozen, looking at short-term action to protect the vulnerable, medium-term measures to sustain supply, and longer-term action to remodel the housing market. The planning system is only incidentally discussed. Instead the authors look at incentives to implement permissions, flexible funding for affordable housing, better support for low-income homeowners and renters, heavier taxes on landlord investment, and even restrictions on who can buy homes in some “housing pressure zones”.

Reboot sees the value of home ownership, but also prompts deeper questions about what sort of housing market we want – or need. The gains from runaway house price growth are curiously intangible, only realised when downsizing or passing wealth between generations, while the damages done are all too visible. As the authors write, “We must recognise that a housing system beset by regular booms and busts does not meet the needs of the national economy or those seeking safe, secure, affordable housing. A more sustainable, equitable and economically efficient housing system must obviously be one in which house prices do not continue to rise much faster than earnings.”

There are things to argue with in both the Centre for Cities and the JRF reports. Deregulating planning on its own, without substantial investment, is unlikely to build the affordable housing London needs. Conversely, a nationalised property tax, as recommended in Reboot, would impose an unfairly heavy tax burden on Londoners (even if partially offset by the abolition of stamp duty).

However, both reports seriously address the housing crisis as a product of more than half a century of well-intentioned but sometimes self-defeating interventions and policies, rather than as some sudden phenomenon. They are contrasting in analysis, but complementary in conclusion. London needs both planning that will enable growth (including in the Green Belt), and markets that are less stacked against new entrants and poor people in general. Our politicians should not let this crisis go to waste. These two reports offer them a credible programme for action.

Originally published by OnLondon.

Levelling up – everything, everywhere, all at once?

On 2 February 2022, the morning the Levelling Up White Paper was launched, the Today Programme’s Nick Robinson was in West Yorkshire. Towards the end of the programme he interviewed Annie Trueman, who was studying music production at Wakefield College, prefacing his interview by saying that many young people wanted to stay in Wakefield but were unable to do so because it lacked a university. I’m not sure he got quite what he wanted.

Did Annie feel she had a future in Wakefield, he asked.

“If I wanted to go into music production, I’d probably move back to Leeds. It’s just a better scene, there’s more places to work.”

Robinson persisted. “What would persuade you that you could make your future in this city, rather than having to get out of it?”

“If there were more studios?” Annie pondered, as if responding to a slow learner. “I could build my own, but then realistically, how many people would come to Wakefield to record their music? They’d be more set to go to Leeds and other bigger cities.”

The exchange has stuck with me throughout the year since – a year in which “levelling up” has been much debated but not much advanced. Without dissing Wakefield – home of The Cribs – a big city like Leeds will always act as a more of a magnet for musical talent. In many ways, the music industry is the epitome of agglomeration economics – the ability of big cities to nurture productive clusters of expertise. Bands learn from each other; they swap musicians and ideas; they support and are supported by an ecosystem of recording studios, gig venues, musical instrument shops and drug dealers.

The discussion also highlighted some of the tensions at the heart of the White Paper. The government knows it wants to reduce “geographical disparities” but is less clear about how these should be defined or how this outcome should be measured. It professes belief in the power of cities as focal points for modern economic growth (proposing a “globally competitive city” in “every area” of the UK by 2030). But it also celebrates a poster in Teesside, offering “Stay local, go far” as its rallying cry, and decries the idea that in many parts of the UK, “if you want to get on you need to get out”. The kid in Hartlepool shouldn’t have to move to Middlesbrough, let alone to Newcastle or London, to pursue their dreams.

Two Prime Ministers later, Michael Gove is back in the Department for Levelling Up Housing and Communities, and “levelling up” has been supplemented by “everywhere” – one of Jeremy Hunts “Four Es”, and every bit as spatially vague as its predecessor. To borrow the title of the Oscar-nominated film, the government really wants levelling up to be Everything, Everywhere, All At Once.

I’m not sure this destructive ambiguity is sustainable or helps the government. The rows over the distribution of Levelling Up Fund money are a case in point. It is to be spread round the country because “everywhere” needs “levelling up”, and then the allocations are criticised for being awarded to a run-down garrison town in the Prime Minister’s (generally affluent) constituency, rather than spent on inner city projects in Birmingham. The government is stuck between economic and electoral logic – damned if they focus funding in a few places where it can really make a difference, and damned if they spread it more widely.

There is a way through this, but it requires a level of political courage the government has yet to show. The approach should be to say that the UK’s larger cities, including London, are the heart of the economy and will continue to be so. Towns and smaller cities can benefit from proximity, from commuting, from home-working and supply chains, but existing cities will form the foundations of future growth. Government will need to invest directly and swiftly in some significant new projects – such as Northern Powerhouse Rail – but should otherwise stand back, supporting city leaders in raising funds to build the infrastructure they need, just as they supported London in raising funds to build the Elizabeth Line and North London Line extension.

Pursuing these policies would not be obviously in the government’s short-term electoral interests. But their chances of winning the next general election look slim in any case, and a revitalised 21^st Century Conservatism cannot be founded only on the rural villages and declining industrial towns of the 20^th. Refocusing “levelling up” on the UK’s cities may not only be the right thing to do politically. It could even sow the seeds of an urban revival for a party that was once as comfortable and successful in the inner cities as in their suburban and rural hinterlands.

First published by OnLondon.

Re-do the Strand

Some cities do winter merriment better than others. They have the Christmas markets, they have the gluhwein, they have the blankets and hot chocolate outside ornate cafes. London is not like that. London’s winter life is interior: it’s the “the pubs and the bookies where you spend all your day”, as the Pogues’ Shane McGowan put it. All the more kudos then to the new Strand Aldwych public space scheme, which opened to the public last month.

Aldwych’s arc marks as abrupt a transition as any in London. To the west, Covent Garden and theatreland, to the east, universities, lawyers, consultants and bankers. It has a rich history – Aldwych was at the heart of the post-Roman city of Lundenwic – and fine buildings, including Marconi House and Bush House (birthplace and nursery of the BBC) and St Mary le Strand Church. But Aldwych and its hinterland can easily be shrugged off as an interspace, between the cities of London and Westminster, rebranded as Midtown or Northbank, identified by what it is not.

It was terrifying too. The traffic tearing round the gyratory made Aldwych and Strand a glorified roundabout, where pedestrians and cyclists risked their lives darting between buses and taxis. It was no place to linger.

The Strand Aldwych project is designed to change all that. In 2014 Northbank Business Improvement District, led by Ruth Duston, appointed research and urban design specialists Publica to rethink the public spaces on their patch, and then to develop the idea of reinstating two-way traffic on Aldwych, thereby allowing around 200 metres of Strand to be pedestrianised between Bush House, King’s College and Somerset House.

Traffic plans were refined, project boards set up, stakeholders engaged, options reviewed, visions workshopped, artists involved, traffic orders drafted, “meanwhile uses” planned and consultants appointed – including LDA Design – who led the Games-time and legacy landscape design of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park – as lead designers of the new public spaces.

In 2020 Westminster City Council allocated funding for traffic rerouting and new public space. Works commenced in January 2021, with Strand closed to motor vehicles between Waterloo Bridge and Surrey Street from September of that year. From conception to opening the scheme took around eight years – lightning fast in London terms.

The new public space, which is (of course) “the size of a football pitch”, is divided into two by St Mary’s, an elegant early Baroque building whose vicar was enthusiastically welcoming visitors the afternoon I visited (and which has a ‘Sound and Light Installation’ explaining its history until the end of February).

Nighttime image of the public space from the east

To the east, between the King’s Strand Campus and Bush House, there are benches interspersed between flowerbeds and new street trees, and a slightly scruffy lawn in front of the church. A few cars and vans are still allowed in for servicing and for a hotel car park, with sliding bollards to control access. Watching these glide is hypnotic, though the paint scalps on their flanks suggest they have already encountered some over-confident drivers.

West of St Mary’s is a more expansive space in front of Somerset House formed of stripes and slabs of differently toned asphalts, feeling almost oversized. Tables and benches for summer carousing sit to one side – it will be interesting to see what rules will be applied – and spindly coloured chairs are bolted to the tarmac in a slightly awkward row, as if hanging around on the fringes of a teenage party. It is a stage waiting for a show and has been made big enough to accommodate temporary pavilions and installations.

But even on a grey January afternoon, with the temperature hovering close to freezing, these new spaces are busy. Students and workers sit around the church, chatting, smoking, eying phones and laptops. Cyclists weave between bollards (there has been some criticism of a lack of segregated cycle routes) and walkers saunter through the square with boulevardier relish rather than with the pace and momentum that drives most London journeys on foot.

Precise numbers are hard to come by, but I get the impression that the traffic rerouting took most of the budget. That is to say the landscaping, though well-designed, is functional rather than sumptuous. The flower beds and benches are edged by brown-painted steel, perhaps intended to look like costlier CORTEN from a distance, and most of the road surface is asphalt rather than stone paving.

This is not really a criticism. City centre spaces need to be robust and flexible rather than perfected and fragile, and Westminster City Council has already copped some criticism (including from Westminster Labour before they took over the Council in May) for spending money here rather than in needier parts of the borough. The expanses of tarmac can give these new spaces a bare look, more like the road they used to be than the public piazza they are becoming. However, the 45 new trees and 2,000 square metres of planting will soften them over time, as will more people spilling between the buildings as the days lengthen.

And I think they will come, drawn by temporary events and artworks such as Nick Ryan’s ‘The Voiceline’ – an audio installation drawing on 100 years of BBC archives – by new perspectives on previously half-glimpsed buildings and by the chance to watch the amazing gliding bollard show (or perhaps that’s just me).

The scheme creates a peaceful and breathable space, a pause on one of London’s major crosstown routes and an open-ended quadrangle for King’s College, though it is a shame that, unlike other London universities, the King’s campus remains sealed off from passers-by.

My only remaining kvetch, which has dogged me in almost every paragraph of this piece, is that there doesn’t seem to be a name for the space or spaces. ‘Strand Aldwych’ is the project, and ‘Strand’ refers to a longer road. Is this to be Strand Place, Bush House Plaza, King’s Court, St Mary’s Walk? We need a name we can complain about, adapt and eventually adopt, for this well-conceived and promising new piece of city.

First published by OnLondon.

Drifting back

After the turbulence of recent months, many Londoners will be hoping for a return to normality, albeit under the shadow of a cost-of-living crisis and a looming recession. But is the city’s office economy returning to pre-pandemic patterns of commuting and working, or have we settled into a “new normal” of hybrid working, empty office blocks and diminished city centre businesses?

London’s streets certainly seem busier, and on the days that they are running, so do London’s tube trains. This is borne out by Transport for London data: trip volumes have been increasing since the summer and now average around 80% of pre-pandemic levels. There are some spikes and dips to this trend, (such as Jubilee celebrations and bank holidays elevating usage, and strikes and heat waves reducing it), but Tube use is now just 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

There is a persistent rhythm emerging too. Weekends are still busiest, with nearly 90% of pre-pandemic trips. Monday, Tuesdays and Fridays are quieter with averages of 65-70%, and Wednesdays and Thursdays slightly busier with averages of 70-75%. However, since the beginning of September, the recovery in trip numbers has been particularly sharp around the City of London and Canary Wharf, suggesting that an increasing proportion of passengers are office workers, as opposed to leisure visitors or workers in other sectors.

Other figures confirm the impression of a gradual return to offices. Remit Consulting have been collecting data on office occupancy throughout the pandemic, based on access control systems (swipe cards and so on) from a sample of around 150 large office buildings in the UK. After advice to work from home was lifted at the end of January, office occupancy figures rose quickly to around 25% and stayed at that level throughout the summer, but since the beginning of October have climbed above 30%.

Remit estimate that “normal” office occupancy levels were 60-80 % before the pandemic, so 30% occupancy in fact equates to offices being around “half full” on the average day. Remit also have a more detailed breakdown by London office ‘submarket’ which shows West End offices back to around 42% average occupancy in October, with City and Docklands offices lagging behind.

Further west, in the SW1 corridors of power, offices are busier. When Jacob Rees-Mogg told civil servants to return to their desks in April, there was an immediate, but amusingly short-lived, effect on behaviour. Office occupancy leapt up from a departmental average of less than 50% of capacity, hitting 65% in mid-May, but had fallen back again by the end of that month.

Jubilee celebrations, summer holidays and industrial action kept numbers low over the summer, but occupancy has been back above 65% since the beginning of October. This is not far off pre-pandemic levels – though to be fair there have been an awful lot of ministers to clap in and out of Whitehall offices over the past few weeks.

While the higher levels of civil service return may reflect a tougher line from ministers, it seems that the return to offices has in fact gathered pace just as politicians and newspapers stopped demanding it. But it remains a trickle rather than a surge. Where do we go from here?

Many workers welcomed more flexible working, and are keen to retain its benefits. The survey commissioned by Kings College London this spring as part of their Work/Place project (on which I worked) found London workers embracing hybrid working patterns enthusiastically: 61% reported hybrid working, defined as working from home at least one day a week (compared to less than 20% before the pandemic). A further 13% worked only from home.

Workers expected the changes to stick too: 75% said they were “never going back” to a five-day week in the workplace, with three days a week at home the most popular option. The results of a second phase of the King’s survey (undertaken in the summer) are due to be launched at a joint event with Central London Forward next week, so we will have some idea of whether these views have shifted over time.

But there is a big difference between these workers’ expectations and those of employers. The UK-wide Business Insights and Conditions Survey found that the proportion of employers (weighted by employee numbers) planning to use home-working as a permanent part of their business model rose from 16% in October 2021 to 24% in May 2022. It was much higher in the ‘office-based’ sectors (professional, scientific and technical services, and information and communications) that account for around one in five London jobs.

However, in the latest wave of the survey (August 2022) that proportion appears to have started to fall across the board, suggesting that bosses may be becoming cooler about long-term home-working (a finding which seems to be mirrored in trends tracked by the WFH Project, a consortium of north American universities).

This gap between employer and employee expectations suggests that we have not yet reached equilibrium. Hybrid working certainly poses challenges – both for planned communication within and between organisations, and the “watercooler moments” of serendipity and casual interaction that form the foundations for corporate culture. Mixing digital and real-life interaction is tougher in many ways than the world of universal home-working during the pandemic.

Over time, new ways of working may diminish or overcome these challenges – through enhanced technology, or changes in culture or behaviour. Managers may tighten rules to ensure that teams can meet effectively and to prevent working from home becoming a perk for those with the privilege of controlling their own workflow (at the moment, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in more senior managerial and professional roles), or conversely to prevent a culture of office attendance and preferential treatment for those (mainly male) workers without caring responsibilities.

But as the recession bites, employers may feel emboldened to push for more presence in the office. There are already stories of companies such as Meta (formerly known as Facebook) retreating from the highly permissive approach they took during the pandemic, and some bosses may share Elon Musk’s views about home-working if not his cack-handed approach to employee relations. Even if returning to the office is not mandated, the threat of redundancy may boost presenteeism although, alternatively, tighter economic times may push employers to seek savings on property costs.

There may also be some polarisation: primarily remote working may become the norm in some sectors or companies, while being in the office becomes more established in others. The King’s College research showed that the biggest increase in home-working was among those who were already working from home at least one day a week before the pandemic.

Where more people are in the office, “fear of missing out” – on advancement, on collaboration, on gossip – may draw even more people in. Conversely, where online meeting and collaboration tools are the norm (perhaps augmented by periodic spells of intense in-person collaboration), employees will respond accordingly – not just in their daily habits, but in long-term decisions about where they live.

London’s office economy has not yet returned to its pre-pandemic state, but nor do I think it has settled into a “new normal”. Huge challenges for the real estate sector and the ecosystem of city-serving businesses remain, and some of these will be discussed at the King’s College/CLF event next week. But the future looks less bleak than it did during the pandemic, and any case for stripping back transport seems much weaker than it might have done even a few months ago. The debate about Crossrail 2 even seems to have restarted. Reports of London’s demise look to have been premature at best.

Originally published by OnLondon.

Spend spend spend!

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, is finalising his Autumn Statement against the backdrop of what Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called a “profound economic crisis”. As the two men prepare to take decisions that will shape fiscal and spending policy for the rest of this Parliament and beyond, what are the public’s priorities on taxation, welfare and public spending, and how have these changed in recent years?

The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)’s flagship British Social Attitudes survey has tracked views on public expenditure priorities since 1983. Cutbacks in taxes and spending have never been popular, but opinion has see-sawed between wanting to keep taxation and expenditure stable, and seeking an increase in both (see Figure 1 below). After the years of austerity, which saw cuts to many public services, the balance tilted towards increased tax and spending in 2016. While the gap has narrowed since 2017, this remains the majority position.

Figure 1 – Attitudes towards taxation and public spending, 1983-2021

These attitudes are reasonably consistent across the main political parties. Conservative Party supporters are more likely to favour keeping tax and spending as it is now, but there is very limited appetite for cutting both taxes and spending from any major party’s supporters. There is also a degree of consensus between different income levels, although modest and higher earners (those with a pre-tax household income of £30,000 or more) are those who – perhaps surprisingly – express most support for increased taxes and expenditure.

However, there are more striking differences between age groups (see Figure 2 below). Younger and older adults, who may be beneficiaries of higher spending on services such as education and health, are more likely to favour higher taxes and expenditure. In contrast, people aged between 25 and 54, who may be more exposed to higher taxes, narrowly favour maintaining current levels of taxes and expenditure.

Figure 2 – Attitudes towards taxation and public spending, by age group, 2021

The BSA survey does not specifically ask views about which public services could be cut, but has regularly asked about priorities for increased expenditure (see Figure 3 below, which shows only the most popular options). Education and health have consistently topped the list. The relative importance assigned to these services was perhaps reflected in government commitments to ‘ring-fence’ them from spending cutbacks in the years after 2010.

Figure 3 – Priorities for increased public spending, top 5, 1983-2021

This perceived protection may also explain why other services became a higher priority for survey participants in recent years – though support for more spending on health bounced back during the pandemic. The priority attached to more spending on police and social security benefits has increased in the past five years, and support for more spending on housing has trebled since 2000.

There are also party-political differences in priorities. Education and health are prioritised across the spectrum, but sharper differences can be seen in relation to other services (see Figure 4 below). Conservative Party supporters favour increased spending on police and prisons, support for industry, roads and defence, while Labour Party supporters focus on housing, social security, public transport and overseas aid.

Figure 4 – Top ten priorities for increased spending, 2021

There has also been a noticeable shift in which social benefits people prioritise (though our survey only asks this question every two years, so our most recent data in the Figure 5 below is from 2020). In 2005, 80 per cent of the population prioritised an increase in state pensions; in 2020 this had fallen to 55 per cent; this may partly be explained by the “triple lock”, which has meant increases in line with or above inflation in pensions since 2010. More recently, between 2018 and 2020, there was a rise in relative support for increasing child benefits and unemployment benefits, while support for increased disability benefits, which had risen sharply in the previous ten years, also fell back.

Figure 5 – Priorities for increased spending on benefits, 1983-2020

The Chancellor has described the preparations for the Autumn Statement as “decisions of eye-watering difficulty”. Our survey was undertaken towards the end of last year, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine precipitated the current cost-of-living crisis. At that stage, survey participants expressed no more appetite for public spending cuts than they have in nearly four decades of the BSA survey.

On the contrary, our figures suggest that public opinion has noted the relative protection of old age pensions, education and health budgets over the past decade, and wants this extended to other services and benefits in the future – though precisely which other services and benefits should be prioritised is a matter for considerable debate.

Written for NatCen and first published on their blog.