London – Richard Brown

Bridges over troubled waters

London’s bridges are the city’s sinews. They hold the capital together, enabling movement and ensuring stability. But, as recent reports of structural problems on Waterloo Bridge indicate, their construction and maintenance has often been troubled and contested.

For centuries, the only permanent connection between north and south London was the old, stone London Bridge. Alternative ways of crossing the Thames were confined to the ferries and other boats that carried passengers back and forth. As Peter Ackroyd tells it, the completion of Westminster Bridge in 1750 “entirely changed the relationship between the northern and southern sections; instead of being isolated and apart, almost like different countries sharing the same border, they became interrelated.”

A flurry of bridge-building followed. Over the next 100 years, Blackfriars, Vauxhall, Waterloo and Southwark bridges arched over the river. These were initially commercial ventures, funded by toll revenues. However, over the course of the 19th Century, tolls were lifted and responsibility for the bridges passed to the Metropolitan Board of Works (and after that to the London County Council and the Greater London Council) or to City Bridge Foundation, which was established in the 12th Century to maintain London Bridge, drawing revenues from tolls and land rentals.

Today, the foundation manages Tower Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Millennium Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. Since 1995, it has also been able to use income from its £1.5 billion endowment to support organisations tackling disadvantage across London. A further seven bridges (Westminster, Lambeth, Vauxhall, Battersea, Chiswick, Kew and Twickenham) are owned and maintained by Transport for London (TfL). The rest are boroughs’ responsibilities.

Building new bridges has often been tortuous or abortive. By definition, most proposals span at least two local authorities (as borough boundaries tend to lie in the centre of the Thames), and need support from the Port of London Authority, which oversees river transport. In 1994, the Cross River Partnership was set up by Westminster, Southwark, Lambeth and City of London to promote river crossings such as the Millennium Bridge and the Golden Jubilee Footbridges, though it has now widened both its role and its partnership.

The construction of the Golden Jubilee Footbridges at either side of Hungerford Railway Bridge nearly ground to a halt in 2000, when the risk that pile-driving might set off off unexploded World War II bombs on the riverbed just next to Bakerloo line tunnels caused costs to spiral. A timely intervention by Ken Livingstone, newly-elected Mayor of London, pulled together the funds to cover the overrun and the project continued.

But plenty of plans for bridges have not been realised. In recent years alone, we have seen Boris Johnson’s cancellation of the proposed Thames Gateway Bridge (primarily for budgetary reasons rather than the environmental concerns that generated intense protests) and Sadiq Khan’s cancellation of his predecessor’s chimerical plans for a “garden bridge”. Other projects, such as Cremorne Bridge between Battersea and Chelsea, and the Rotherhithe to Canary Wharf Bridge, have stalled owing to disputes over funding or rising costs.

Rows about bridge renewals are not new either. In 1924, London County Council (LCC) closed Waterloo Bridge because of concerns about its safety. A temporary steel structure enabled it to re-open, but in 1930 LCC argued for its demolition and replacement by a new bridge, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott of Battersea Power Station and red telephone box fame.

A coalition of artists was mobilised to save the old one (“the classic battle of the artist against the engineer, the aesthete against the philistine” in the words of one protestor) and Parliament initially refused to provide any money. In 1934, to break the stalemate, LCC leader Herbert Morrison theatrically took a crowbar to the old bridge and Parliament eventually relented, putting up funding in 1937. The new bridge was constructed by a predominantly female workforce during World War II.

Today’s problems with Waterloo Bridge join a long list of concerns about the capital’s Thames crossings. There is the seemingly endless saga of Hammersmith Bridge, which has been closed to motor traffic since 2019 (and was only intermittently open for the 20 years before that). In July, Hammersmith & Fulham Council paused plans for repairs, citing a disagreement with TfL and the Department for Transport over the £300 million funding package for getting it fixed. Other bridges with restrictions include Vauxhall Bridge (where TfL imposed a weight limit in May) and Albert Bridge (which, in February, Kensington & Chelsea closed to motor vehicles to enable repairs). Westminster and Lambeth bridges also need urgent repairs.

So, London’s bridges are a mess. Responsibility for their upkeep and enhancement is contested and their governance is split, in a characteristically London manner, between a medieval endowment, central government, a handful of local authorities and a city-wide transport body. Allowing this mess to continue (or quite likely worsen) is risky: closing bridges damages business, impedes free movement and makes London look pretty shabby internationally.

A city-wide approach is needed. After all, bridges are strategic transport infrastructure for London as a whole, not just for the citizens of the boroughs in which they land. But it’s no surprise that TfL, already under financial strain, seems reluctant to take on the associated costs.

Where could the money come from, given the fiscal constraints facing all tiers of government? Looking at the City Bridge Foundation’s impressive cash pile might seem tempting, but taking £80 million away from London charities would be controversial, even before the legal complexity of unwinding a 900-year-old organisation.

Tolls, recently introduced, for the Blackwall and Silvertown tunnels have worked. However, this method has a more chequered history for central London bridges, often being dodged or kicking off riots. And aside from the rich comic potential of charging north Londoners to visit the capital’s cultural heartland (adjust polarities to taste), bridges should tie London together, not segregate it.

There would be a logic to using some of the forthcoming tourist tax for bridge maintenance, as London’s bridges are particularly heavily used by overseas visitors, but there will be many other claims on those revenues. The longer-term solution is almost certainly to be found in a comprehensive scheme of road user charging for the capital, so that the costs of all London’s surface transport, bridges included, can be shared among those who use it. We just need a Mayor of London who will make the case for that increasingly urgent change.

First published by OnLondon.

This is what they want… this is what we get

The sense of glee was palpable yesterday in the Daily Telegraph’s reporting that London’s population fell last year for the first time since the pandemic. Office for National Statistics mid-year estimates for 2025 suggested a fall of around 27,000 people, resulting in a total population just over 9.1 million.

Conservative London Assembly member and former mayoral candidate Susan Hall was quick to lay the blame at Sir Sadiq Khan’s door, describing the fall as an “indictment” of him and proof that he has “failed the city”. But a close look at the mid-year estimates data suggests the bulk of the blame may lie elsewhere.

London’s population change was, as ever, composed of three trends: positive natural change (more births than deaths), negative net internal migration (more people leaving for other parts of the UK than arriving from them) and positive net international migration (more people arriving from outside the UK than moving overseas).

The first two have been heading down for some time (as the graph below shows), but the overwhelming shift last year was a second sharp fall in net international migration. In 2023, during the height of the post-pandemic “Boris-wave” of immigration, 235,000 more people arrived in London from overseas than moved the other way. In 2025, this number fell sharply to just 52,000 – the lowest level since 2020, and around 45 per cent lower than the 2010s average.

This fall in international migration, the result of both fewer arrivals and more departures than in recent years, is not an accident or the result of the Mayor’s actions or inactions. It is the intended result of policies brought in by the last Conservative government and intensified by Labour, to bring down immigration. Salary thresholds have been raised, social worker visas have been cut back and stricter limits have been placed on the ability of family members to join people working or studying in the UK. Migration Observatory research reports a 78 per cent fall in skilled worker visas issued across the UK in 2025 compared to two years earlier.

Such restrictions on international migration inevitably hit an international city like London particularly hard. When they are coupled with an atmosphere of hostility to immigrants in the UK, and by the mendacious propaganda about London’s supposed lawlessness put about by the UK’s enemies, it is hardly a surprise that fewer people are choosing to come to or stay in London than in previous decades.

That is not to say that there are not more localised problems too. Though estimated arrivals from the rest of the UK reached a historic high in 2025, these were outstripped by the highest level of departures since 2021. Net internal migration out of London has been level since 2022, but is twice as high as it was ten years ago. And the number of births has also been falling consistently, slightly faster in London than in England as a whole. There is no doubt that London’s housing costs and challenging jobs market play a part in making it tough to stay and raise a family in the capital.

But London’s population decline is largely the result of a political choice on immigration. To quote Public Image Limited, “This is what you want…this is what you get!” Or, perhaps more accurately, given attitudes to Brexit and immigration, in the capital, ‘This is what they want…this is what we get.”

First published by OnLondon.

The Streets of Your Town

New Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s first-day pledge “to end long-term rough sleeping across the UK” is interesting, not only for confronting head-on a persistent and complex problem that shames our society, but also in choosing one which is at its most acute in London.

Rough sleeping is the most visible symptom of a system in crisis. On one night in autumn last year there were 1,277 people recorded as sleeping on the capital’s streets, around 27 per cent of the total number in England. These figures have more or less trebled (both in London and nationwide) since 2010, with a decrease during the pandemic when space was found in hotels to get “everyone in”. A different survey found that around 13,000 people were sleeping rough in London during the course of 2025/26.

As the Mayor’s Rough Sleeping Plan of Action (published in May last year) observes, London’s numbers are high not only because people in crisis often move to the capital when they have nowhere else to go and because London is a first port of call for many migrants, but also because other parts of the system are under such intense strain. London’s local authorities have a duty to prevent homelessness but have to deal with many more households in need than in other parts of the country: 55 per cent of English households in temporary accommodation are in London and 59 per cent of those with children.

This massive caseload means that councils’ ability to intervene to prevent homelessness, or to help those who are not defined as in “priority need”, is constrained. It also results in London boroughs placing more people in temporary accommodation in other towns and cities, causing additional stress for homeless people and knock-on effects for housing availability outside the capital. There is no way to tackle the crisis nationally without tackling it in London.

The exceptionally high number of households being supported in temporary accommodation (75,000 in London towards the end of 2025) is in turn a symptom of the deepening unaffordability of private rented accommodation and the shortage of other move-on options for people living in B&Bs or hostels. London Councils research from 2024 found that only five per cent of London rental listings were affordable to people receiving housing benefits (compared to the 30 per cent that are meant to be).

Through a system-wide approach to these interlocked crises, the Mayor’s plan sets out an objective for 2030, which reflects ambition but also reality: “We will aim to prevent rough sleeping wherever possible, and where it does occur we will aim to make it rare, brief and not repeated.”

The plan seeks a boost to provision of affordable and specialist housing supply to enable people to find sustainable and affordable homes. In the medium-term, it argues for local housing allowances that reflect the price of private renting in London, so that people are not evicted for being unable to afford their rent. And in the immediate term, it proposes better co-ordination between public services and voluntary organisations, simpler ways for people at risk to access services before they end up on the street, and targeted support for vulnerable people such as migrants and those leaving prisons and hospitals.

There is, of course, a list of “asks” for central government. I suspect Andy Burnham knows that other cities and city authorities are dusting down their own lists following his remarks on Monday. The problem is, many of those requests involve more money (for housebuilding, for housing benefits, for local authority services) in the short-term with longer-term returns on that investment quite possibly enabling savings in the long-term, though these might benefit other departmental budgets, be elusive or difficult to clearly quantify.

Burnham may already be hearing Whitehall whispers that his pledge can only be delivered by a major new national programme co-ordinated across different government departments with which he can be personally associated. This would entail grants being distributed to local authorities for delivering a package of reforms that central government experts think will make a difference. He should ignore ignore these voices, and instead devolve faster and further, so that London and other big cities can make the necessary changes themsleves.

The Greater London Authority’s integrated funding settlement for the next three years already includes more than £100 million for homelessness, rough sleeping and supported housing services. Tying this in with welfare payments, with health services, with prisons and probation budgets offers the opportunity to share investment, risk and returns. More importantly, it could save more people from the trauma, danger and indignity of having to sleep on London’s streets.

First published by OnLondon.

We are Devo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by OnLondon on 2 July 2026

Plotting triumphant returns to the city

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by OnLondon on 22 June 2026

It’s educational

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by OnLondon on 16 March 2026

A storm coming?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon

Have to admit it’s getting better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon

Mansions on the bill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by On London

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.