London – Richard Brown

Mansions on the bill?

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

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

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the historic reasons for the imbalance, from the tax’s origins as a post-Poll Tax hybrid of service charge and tax, to outdated valuations and variable price changes since 1991, to the relative performances of councils in different parts of the country.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by On London

Hard Times in London Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by On London.

Gimme shelter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon.

Two days in July 2005

6 July 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 July 2005

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon

Glad-ish to be gay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon

Past caring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hard lessons about soft power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon.

Who needs remote control, from the City Hall?

This is a big year for London government anniversaries. The London boroughs are celebrating their 60th birthday this month and the Greater London Authority (GLA) will be 25 in May or July, depending on whether you choose the date of the inaugural elections for a Mayor of London and the London Assembly in May 2000 or the formal “vesting” of powers that took place in July of that year.

By way of a birthday greeting, London Councils has proposed joining the Mayor’s party by establishing something similar to the mayoral “combined authorities” that operate elsewhere in the country. In Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the seven other mayoral combined authority areas, a directly-elected metro mayor presides over a council of local authority leaders and mayors and needs to secure its agreement for budgets, strategies and plans.

In London, a council of 34 members – the Mayor and the capital’s 33 local authorities – would be unwieldy, so London Councils has proposed a “combined board”, comprising the Mayor and its own 12 “executive members”, a party-proportional cross-section of council leaders holding specific Londonwide remits. This board could take decisions on “relevant powers and funding”.

Such a change would be a big deal, perhaps bigger than London Councils is admitting. The GLA model of a strong executive mayor and a scrutinising assembly was specifically designed to minimise overlap with borough remits. Although this principle has been eroded over time – for example, by giving the Mayor more powers on housing and land – establishing a London Mayoral Combined Board suggests something rather different.

For a start, it would call into question the role of deputy mayors. The original Greater London Authority Act (1999) gave Mayors limited powers to appoint staff. Ken Livingstone used these powers to appoint senior advisors on economics, housing, transport, the environment and other relevant policy areas.

Under Boris Johnson these were renamed “deputy mayors” (there is also a “statutory deputy mayor”, a London Assembly member appointed to succeed a Mayor unable to continue in office). If there was a deputy mayor for housing and a London Councils executive member for housing, who would speak for the Mayoral Combined Board on the issue?

A similar issue arises with the London Assembly. London Councils argue that there would be no change to the Assembly’s role, but this doesn’t feel right. As well as scrutinising the Mayor, the Assembly signs off his budget and strategies and has other powers which, though quite modest, give it authority and influence which can be significant, if judiciously used.

Were the Assembly to continue in its current form under the London Councils proposals, there would be a situation in which a (directly-elected) Mayor proposed a budget or strategy to be first agreed by a Mayoral Combined Board (representing 32 elected boroughs plus the City of London Corporation) and then passed to a (proportionately elected) London Assembly for confirmation.

This would seem to be an onerous exercise in triple-handling and a recipe for disputes over mandates and remits. But if the Assembly lost those powers it would lose much of its bite. In which case, why not replace it with a borough grouping like the Overview and Scrutiny Committee in Greater Manchester?

In such respects, the London Councils plan is more radical than it might appear to be at first glance. But most importantly of all, is it a good plan?

London Councils argue that London’s current arrangements have become anomalous in the new devolution order. With mayoral or other strategic authorities set to be established across England, London’s “could become the only upper-tier council leaders in the country without a formal say over the decisions of their region’s Strategic Authority”.

It is true that London’s arrangements are different, but so is London. The Devolution White Paper published in December appears to acknowledge this. It pledges to apply an integrated financial settlement for London “while retaining pe-existing bespoke London arrangements…[and] existing ways of working with London Councils”.

Ironically, Sir Sadiq Khan has gone a lot further than his two antecedents in working closely with the boroughs. The recent London Growth Plan was developed in partnership with them, building on the work of the jointly-chaired London Recovery Board and London Partnership Board during and after the pandemic.

Mayoral strategies and budgets are all subject to consultation with the boroughs, but there are some areas where the Mayor has, by design, an independent and overriding role. The main example is powers over planning policy, where borough local plans must reflect London Plan policies (following consultation) and the Mayor retains a right to take strategic decisions over the heads of individual boroughs. (The White Paper, by the way, pledges that all metro mayors will receive similar powers, which seems hard to square with the “collegiate” model of combined authority government.)

It is true that Greater Manchester has prepared a joint plan, Places for Everyone, which was adopted last year. But the document took ten years to finalise, one borough (Stockport) withdrew from the process, and the plan has been criticised as merely drawing together unambitious local housing plans rather than seeking to take a strategic – and sometimes disputed – view of need and opportunity.

But maybe there’s a bigger picture approach that might be taken to reform in London. Perhaps new arrangements could be devised that would allow London’s boroughs to have greater formal involvement in the development of the city’s economic strategies and plans, but also enable the Mayor to have more say in overseeing and co-ordinating council services and regulatory functions – from licensing to social care to street cleaning.

It might also be an opportunity to look again at the structure of the boroughs themselves. One thing that the West Midlands and, to a lesser extent, Greater Manchester have is a single local authority overseeing the whole of the core of the cities they serve. The LSE’S Greater London Group suggested such an authority for London to the Herbert Commission in the early 1960s, but this was not followed through when the 1965 reforms were put into place.

The Greater London Authority has already outlived the Greater London Council by five years. While few would wish to repeat the chaotic and politically-motivated abolition of the GLC, the 60th and 25th anniversaries may be a time for reflection on how well current set-ups are serving London. But whether the London Councils proposals are a basis for a new settlement, a contribution to a more far-reaching debate or destined to be just a footnote in London government history remains to be seen.

First published by OnLondon.

Where will they go to, the robotaxis, when we’re asleep in our beds?

The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 received royal assent on 20 May last year, but was rather overshadowed by a rain-soaked Rishi Sunak announcing, two days later, that he was calling a general election. While the Act leaves a lot of detail to secondary legislation (an explainer by Scarlett Milligan of 39 Essex Chambers is helpful), it sets out a structure for regulating the use of self-driving cars, which could see them on Britain’s roads as early as next year, according to a Department for Transport press release.

The year 2026 is suddenly very near, and it seems unlikely that regulations will be in place by then. But there have already been London trials of autonomous vehicles – in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and in Woolwich – and Waymo self-driving taxis are commonplace in several US cities, including San Francisco, where the urban environment is as almost complex as London’s. This particular future seems to be drawing closer.

You can debate whether self-driving cars (more likely to operate as “robotaxis” than as individually-owned vehicles, for the next few years at least) are a good thing. Advocates say they could reduce accidents and congestion, and offer liberating point-to-point transport for people who are currently excluded by price, location or physical conditions – a case argued in an excellent blog by James O’Malley, which set me thinking about what abundant robotaxis would mean for London.

Not everyone is so positive. Sceptics argue that robotaxis could divert people from healthier walking and cycling, lead to more sprawl, congestion and pollution, reduce social interaction, and undermine the viability of mass public transport. Transport for London’s 2019 position statement takes a fairly guarded view, pointing to the Mayor’s strategic priority – that 80 per cent of journeys should be made by walking, cycling and public transport by 2041.

Progress towards that target has been slow: around 63 per cent of journeys were made by walking, cycling and public transport in 2023, a level that has barely changed over ten years. But in any case, it seems to me that readily-available and cheap robotaxis would be very attractive to people – including those who do not like walking, cycling or using public transport, or are not able to use those ways of getting around.

So, unless the government chooses a highly restrictive approach (essentially banning autonomous vehicles), the question becomes one of what policies cities such as London should adopt in order to manage their impact on urban mobility, on the built environment and on public health.

At the moment, it costs more – in time and money – to use Waymo taxis than to use Ubers in San Francisco, but that gap is likely to narrow and reverse as the technology improves; McKinsey estimate that by 2030 in the US the cost per mile will be little more than using your own car. If the cost fell that low or further, the challenge for public transport systems and for urban streets would be acute. People could switch to robotaxis en masse – causing gridlock and stripping London’s trains and buses of paying customers (even if gridlock would eventually choke demand).

One inevitable policy response to the arrival of autonomous vehicles is the (much discussed and much can-kicked) introduction of road user charging. As my former colleagues at Centre for London have suggested, this could be targeted so that using roads (and robotaxis) is made more expensive where journeys can be easily made by public transport, walking or cycling, and cheaper in places where those options are not available, and for people to whom they are not accessible.

Switching from car ownership to robotaxi use could also potentially free up road space. Car ownership is already declining faster than car use in London, and abundant robotaxis could accelerate this, with many privately-owned cars disappearing from kerbsides and suburban driveways, opening up new public spaces across the city.

But where would the robotaxis go, while we’re asleep in our beds? A dystopian, polluting and congesting, scenario would see empty cars cruising London roads until summoned by passengers, like electric Marie Celestes. A better option would be to place limits on empty circulation, and to provide local parking hubs with charging facilities and waiting space.

This would require some adaptation of existing car parks (which could hold many more cars if no human drivers needed to get in and out), and perhaps transport hubs being incorporated into new developments; again, Centre for London has undertaken research in this area.

From a public health perspective, you might go further, requiring or incentivising most users to walk to a transport hub to pick up a car, rather than to expect door-to-door service. This might be too nanny-ish for some tastes. But not only would it incorporate a (minimal) level of walking into most journeys, it would also discourage people from using cars for shorter, walkable or cyclable, trips.

The 20th Century city was shaped by private car ownership. If robotaxis become commonplace, their impact on the 21st Century city could be just as great. Policy action will be needed, and soon, to make that impact positive.

First published by OnLondon.

Fade to Grey (Belt)

Last week, Angela Rayner gave Marks and Spencer permission to demolish and rebuild their flagship Marble Arch store, in line with plans first submitted to Westminster City Council in February 2021. In between those dates, the proposal was considered by Westminster and by Sadiq Khan (both of whom approved it), by a public enquiry and by Michel Gove (who overruled them all and turned it down), by the High Court (which overturned Gove’s decision) and by Rayner (who gave the go-ahead). Whatever view you take of the proposals, these layers of decision-taking and months of delay cannot be right – the reconstruction phase of the Notre Dame project took less time.

Against this backdrop, you can see why the Deputy Prime Minister has announced major reforms of planning this week – a consultation on planning decision processes on Monday and now a new National Planning Policy Framework. The consultation paper proposes a national “scheme of delegation” to ensure that more planning decisions are taken by planning officers, rather than by planning committees. The paper also proposes smaller strategic committees to agree documents such as opportunity area planning frameworks, and seeks to beef up training for planning committee members.

The proposals have been widely welcomed as a helpful act of streamlining, which reduces the risk of capricious committee decisions to reject proposals even when they are in line with local planning policy. Such refusals may lead to amendment and a new application, or to appeals to the planning inspectorate, but cause delay and incur cost either way.

For some commentators, this approach is also a helpful first step towards a “zoning” process that shifts the political focus from considering individual applications to agreeing policies and design codes. “Shouldn’t we be aiming for a system which makes [planning committees] redundant entirely?” architect Russell Curtis asked. If proposals comply with policies and codes, they can go ahead with minimal paperwork, though agreeing local plans and policies would become more complex and contested were they to give an automatic green light to compliant proposals.

As ever, London is a bit different. The capital already leads the way in delegating planning decisions and in processing applications fast. The most recent government stats show that in the year to June 2024, 97 per cent of decisions were delegated to officers, more than in any other region. Some boroughs delegated nearly all decisions.

London boroughs work fast too, deciding an average of 93 per cent of major applications within government-mandated deadlines (or other deadlines agreed with applicants) in the two years to June 2024, compared to 90 per cent or fewer in other regions. The capital also has lower rates of decisions being overturned on appeal than most other regions. The system works efficiently.

But it is not enabling the homes London needs to be built. London planning authorities turned down more applications than in other regions: 20 per cent across the capital compared to 15 per cent across England, and as many as a third in some outer London boroughs. Total application numbers are for around 60,000 homes per year, and their number has fallen by a third since 2016, significantly faster than in other regions.

This fall off in planning activity and low rate of approval feed off each other – if it is difficult to get planning permission in London, some developers stop trying or look elsewhere. London’s problems look like problems of policy as well as process.

That is where the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) comes in. It confirms binding targets for local authorities across England. London’s new target is around 88,000 homes per year. That’s higher than the 80,000 target proposed after the general election, but lower than the 99,000 target that the Conservative government set in 2020 (though in 2022 the Conservatives also made targets “advisory”). It is, nonetheless, a huge jump from the current London Plan target of 52,000 homes per year, let alone the average 38,000 net additional homes built over the past five years.

The big policy change in the NPPF is its very careful relaxation of Green Belt rules. The Framework says that if a council is unable to meet its target through using previously developed land and densification, and if it is unable to collaborate with a neighbour to plug the gap, then it can consider using Green Belt land.

It must first look at previously developed land in the Green Belt, then at “grey belt” land which does not strongly contribute to the Green Belt’s core purposes – checking unrestricted sprawl, preventing urban areas merging into each other and preserving the setting of historic towns.

Other rules, relating to affordable housing, new and enhanced green space, design quality and infrastructure provision, still have to be followed, and land that is protected for special scientific interest or outstanding natural beauty, as a “local green space” or as part of a national park is excluded.

Even with all those caveats, the new policy makes London’s edges ripe for review. The definition has helpfully moved on from an aesthetic focus on “poor quality” Green Belt (which may be in entirely the wrong place), to considering whether Green Belt land actually does what it is meant to do.

On the face of it, a lot of the inner Green Belt within Greater London could meet the criteria for consideration: there’s still plenty left to separate London and surrounding towns, and a managed release is not unconstrained sprawl. But governance and geography are tricky: some of the boroughs facing the biggest shortfall don’t have much Green Belt land, and even when they do the land may not meet the government’s tests.

That could be a recipe for mess and disagreement but could also be the opportunity for a metropolitan solution. The Mayor could work with boroughs to marginally redefine London’s edges, to share the load of housebuilding, and to plan for urban extensions that make the most of existing and new infrastructure.

Could that happen? Khan opposed Green Belt reviews in the past (when a Conservative government would have vetoed them anyway), but times have changed. Khan’s 2024 manifesto was silent on the Green Belt, and a London-wide review would be a good way of demonstrating the value of a Labour Mayor to a Labour government, and vice versa.

But Green Belt extensions will not solve all of London’s housing delivery problems. London needs more planning permissions and more building, including of the around 300,000 homes that already have permission. But a viability crisis is holding back both. Former Southwark leader Peter John has argued that affordable housing requirements without sufficient grant subsidy are stifling development in some cases, and pushing up prices of market homes to enable cross-subsidy in others: “a vicious circle of non-affordability is made worse by demanding ever higher levels of affordable housing without some other grant subsidy being provided.”

Other commentators, such as Beacon Partnership’s Steve Beard, have argued that it is the sheer weight of design, carbon offset and infrastructure obligations imposed in London that is making schemes unviable. Centre for Cities’ Ant Breach argues that the London Plan duplicates local plans and suppresses development, pointing to the London Plan review commissioned by the last government, which found “persuasive evidence that the combined effect of the multiplicity of policies in the London Plan now works to frustrate rather than facilitate the delivery of new homes, not least in creating very real challenges to the viability of schemes”.

Given London’s slowing rate of housing delivery, and its stock of permitted but stalled developments, these arguments should be taken seriously. Are the policies that worked in a boom, when rising prices washed away the costs of planning obligations, also the right ones for when house prices are stagnant and delivery is stuck? After the financial crisis, quantitative easing, a cheap pound and open borders helped fuel a property boom, but these engines have fallen silent.

At the same time, affordable housing provision has become increasingly dependent on market housing. Around 50 per cent of affordable housing in London is now delivered as a planning obligation, so when private housebuilding slows, so does affordable housebuilding. Recent Greater London Authority (GLA) analysis shows the impact of this. In 2023, 38 per cent of the homes granted planning permission in London were affordable – a total of 11,725 units. In 2015, only 26 per cent were affordable, but this totalled a higher 14,000 units.

If a system based on cross-subsidy has stalled both affordable and market provision, either policy or funding need to shift. London has an urgent need for more affordable housing, so lowering targets too far seems perverse. But 35 per cent of something is still better than 50 per cent of nothing.

Alternatively, higher grant levels would enable boroughs, housing associations and private developers to build more affordable homes. A recent Centre for Cities report suggests that the government’s £500 million Affordable Homes Programme (administered by the GLA within London) would need to triple in size to get public housebuilding rates back up to their mid-20th Century levels. A tall order, but maybe one that could be justified as an investment to save on long-term housing benefit and temporary accommodation costs.

Finally, central government should recognise that it too needs to be part of the solution. Successive governments’ accumulation of policy prescriptions (including new duties such as “biodiversity net gain”) represent a tax on development, adding to those imposed by local and regional government.

Everything is introduced for good reason, but maybe the time has come for an open discussion of where other policies and stakeholder interests are strangling the government’s declared growth imperative. And, to end where we started, if an application has been considered by London’s elected local authorities and by its Mayor, does Whitehall really need to have a go too?

First published by OnLondon.