Mayor of 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.

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

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.

Housing in London – every cloud has a cloudy lining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon.

Licence too ill

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published by OnLondon.

Come together

Interviewed on Radio 4 for the launch of his re-election campaign on Monday, Sadiq Khan said this year offered “a moment of maximum opportunity for Londoners, for there’s the prospect not just of a Labour Mayor, but of a Labour government working together [with a Labour Mayor].”

Even if the tone was more bullish than the Labour leadership might like, Mayor Khan has a point. Since he was first elected in 2016, he has lived with a chaotic kaleidoscope of Conservative governments. When these have shown any interest in the capital, it has generally been to frame it as an overheated reservoir of “wokery”, or to attack Khan’s record on policing and planning – most recently through directing a review of industrial land and opportunity area policy, announced the day before the pre-election period formally began.

Khan’s predecessors were luckier. Ken Livingstone’s first term started with him politically homeless, expelled from Labour for running as an Independent against their official candidate, Frank Dobson. The early days, when I was working in the Mayor’s office, were notably scratchy: Livingstone’s first meeting with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott was cryogenically chilly, his battle against the London Underground public private partnership poisoned relations with HM Treasury, and I remember the air turning blue as he offered London minister Keith Hill his frank thoughts on provisional spending settlements.

But Livingstone benefitted from coming to power when the public spending taps were being turned on, and when the Labour government led by Tony Blair wanted to show that its new devolutionary settlement was a success. By 2004, following back-channel discussions with Number 10 and a more publicly visible collaboration with culture secretary Tessa Jowell over the London 2012 Olympics bid, he was back in the party.

Buoyed by London’s unexpected success in winning the Games, Livingstone’s second term saw substantial public spending in London, government and parliamentary approval for Crossrail – today’s Elizabeth line – and new legislation that extended the Mayor’s powers on housing, planning, culture and waste.

Boris Johnson benefitted from this legacy following his election in 2008. And from 2010 Livingstone’s Conservative successor had the following winds of a Conservative-led coalition in his sails.

He too secured more powers, through the Localism Act and and the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, both passed in 2011. And although London boroughs’ budgets were cut heavily – as were those of other urban councils – the government was surprisingly generous in investing in the Olympic Park legacy, including Johnson’s pet project, Olympicopolis (now East Bank), perhaps aware that just as a successful Olympics can show off a city, a tumbleweed-strewn legacy can show it up.

The only initiative that failed to make any headway was the London Finance Commission, a deliberately non-partisan campaign for fiscal devolution, which was beached on the sands of Treasury insouciance in 2013, and again in 2017 when Khan had a second go.

Khan came to power in spring 2016, as the five years of public spending cuts started to take their toll and the European Union referendum campaign slouched to its self-harming conclusion. The years since have been dominated by a grim procession of crises – Brexit contortions, the Covid pandemic and spiralling inflation – which have seen the Mayor and the government on the opposite sides of arguments, with spending decisions marked by public spats and denunciations rather than the private haggling and public consensus that operates between political allies.

While the “metropolitan elites” of London became useful villains, “levelling up”, the regional policy boondoggle Johnson wielded in the 2019 general election campaign, has little to show by way of results apart from cancelled and delayed projects, funding and tax decisions that do down the capital, and occasional outbreaks of opportunistic culture war posturing.

So Mayor Khan can be forgiven for believing, in words that still carry a faint resonance from the 1990s, that “things can only get better” if he wins a historic third term. Labour have said little about their plans for devolution beyond a promise of legislation and speeches focused on bringing some consistency to the patchwork quilt of devo deals spread across England. Furthermore, the UK’s dismal fiscal outlook suggests that “turning on the taps” of public spending is still a distant prospect. But Labour’s economic growth mission cannot pass over the opportunities London offers.

There could be a golden moment ahead. By the end of the year, a Labour Mayor and a Labour Prime Minister could be simultaneously in post, short of cash but rich in political capital. Starmer and Khan have their differences – on relations with the EU and Green Belt development, for example – but must be able to agree a shopping list of measures that are cheap and capable of having a real impact on growth and prosperity, even if some are controversial.

Such measures might include selected urban extensions in the Green Belt, more fluid European work permit arrangements for young people, performers and professionals, rail devolution in London, and maybe one more push for a system of fiscal devolution that enables London (and other English cities) to manage local taxes and local development.

Sadiq Khan has been quick – on occasion too quick – to point the finger at central government for everything wrong in London. A double win in the capital this year would give Labour a chance to show just how much better the relationship between City Hall and Whitehall could work.

Originally published by OnLondon.

You Gove to see it?

In the sense that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, Michael Gove’s big housing speech had some grains of good news for London and Sadiq Khan.

Sure, there was a slightly formulaic spot of Khan-bashing – the allegation that “the Mayor’s failure on housing, like his failure on crime and his failure on transport, undermines the vitality and attractiveness of our capital.” We are coming up to an election and presenting Khan’s mayoralty as a cautionary example of Labour’s inability to deliver was clearly just too tempting, especially in the wake of the Uxbridge & South Ruislip by-election.

But alternately attacking and ignoring London and its Mayor have been a consistent government theme in recent years. Gove’s predecessor Robert Jenrick took more than a year to agree Khan’s 2020 London Plan, describing his housing delivery as “deeply disappointing”, demanding he water down protections for the Green Belt, open spaces and industrial sites, and allow lower densities and more car parking in suburban locations. And two years ago, in articulating his “levelling up” agenda, London’s previous Mayor, the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, spoke of the capital only as the engine for an overheated housing market and as a drain on talent in the rest of the country.

So, while Gove may have been stating the obvious when he said making the most of the capital’s potential is “critical to the nation’s success”, the statement was nonetheless welcome. What’s more, the Secretary of State committed to working with the Mayor to “unlock all the potential of London’s urban centre, while preserving the precious low-rise and richly green character of its suburbs such as Barnet and Bromley”.

There’s quite a lot going on there, both lofty principles and low politics. At one level, Gove’s was a classic urban renaissance prescription: focusing new development in highly accessible central locations, where infrastructure such as school places is already present. But there was also electoral calculation. Ever since Johnson ran for Mayor in 2008, pledging to save the suburbs from the encroachment of high-rise apartment buildings, protecting the suburbs – and London’s safest Conservative seats – from new development has been at the heart of Conservative policy.

To unlock potential, Gove proclaimed the launch of “Docklands 2.0”, invoking Michael Heseltine, the patron saint of urban renaissance (who lost the Conservative whip in 2017 as a result of his opposition to Brexit). This “mission of national importance” would see 65,000 homes built in east London’s riverside, from Beckton and Silvertown to Charlton and Thamesmead.

Such plans have a rich heritage as part of the original Heseltine vision for the East Thames Corridor, as the heart of London Thames Gateway, and as the focus for the City East scheme developed by my former colleagues in Mayor Ken Livingstone’s architecture and urbanism unit.

Current London Plan targets already suggest that 65,000 homes are achievable in these “opportunity areas”, but realising that potential has been slow. Many sites lack the infrastructure needed to develop at scale, or need investment in remediation to make them suitable for housing. In that respect, Gove’s commitment to look at the transport investments needed, and to invest government money where it can make a difference, will be welcomed.

There is a catch, though. Gove offered the carrot of working with Khan, but also issued an explicit threat in bellicose terms: “I reserve the right to step in to reshape the London Plan if necessary and consider every tool in our armoury – including development corporations.” It doesn’t sound as if these would be mayoral development corporations, such as those set up by Johnson to oversee the Olympic Park and Old Oak projects, but 1980s-style impositions from Whitehall.

Gove’s political jabs at the Mayor have been reciprocated. Tom Copley, Deputy Mayor for Housing, has defended Khan’s record and described the government’s commitments as “thin gruel”, with funding decisions for vital infrastructure lost in the long grass of Treasury tactics. London Councils housing lead Darren Rodwell, also leader of east London borough Barking & Dagenham, has called for more funding for affordable housing and a permanent relaxation of rules on using Right-to-Buy receipts.

But behind the point-scoring and alongside genuine arguments about resource allocation, the Secretary of State’s speech does seem to mark a dawning awareness that ignoring the UK’s capital when seeking to grow the nation’s economy is a dead end. If Gove can back his vision for Docklands 2.0 with funds and facilitation, and can resist the temptation to take over and micro-manage, he may find himself in an awkward alliance with Khan, even as general and mayoral elections approach.

First published by OnLondon