Britain, it’s painfully obvious, is getting poorer. Growth is failing. Incomes are stagnant. And with that lives, opportunities and ambitions. But what few people realise is that growth is failing right here in London. The city is falling behind its rivals with lagging productivity. This isn’t just the Brexit-hit to its service economy. London is lagging because growth is being strangled.
The entire system is broken, maintaining stagnation with thousands of vetoes. Instead of a real Mayor with the power and instruments to power up the economy, we’ve got a hamstrung one who ends up being largely symbolic. And that’s by design. The way London works is that councils hold lots of economic power — from planning and permitting to licensing — but aren’t responsible for the economy they operate in, or benefit from any rewards by growing it. This means they have the worst incentive structure possible for growth. Which is to throttle it and keep things the same for activist (read Nimby) local residents.
The councils are suffocating London. It is happening across the city. In east London, you’ll find Newham council, which blocked plans to expand City Airport’s jobs-fuelling expansion plans on grounds it would disturb local residents who had brought flats overlooking its runways. Who benefits? Not London.
The entire system is broken, maintaining stagnation with thousands of vetoes
In central London, you’ll find Westminster council, which vetoed the Mayor’s — again growth powering plan — to pedestrianise Oxford Street, again, on grounds of residents off Britain’s busiest shopping street might not like it. These geniuses, instead of cutting the ribbon on a world-class attraction, have now been forced to literally pay retail stores to open up there to stop the proliferation of candy stores. Again, who benefits? Are a few millionaire flat-owners happier? Though I doubt it as Oxford Street decays. The answer: not London.
This same council — which frankly, given how concerned it is about the good night’s sleep of inner London millionaires, is Labour in name only such is its enmity for jobs — has been trying its best to asphyxiate Soho. Remember the brief period of outdoor dining? That was growth. The council nixed it. Should a few streets in London’s nightlife core be turned into a real late city with more 3am licences? Absolutely. Businesses are ready to do it. But they say Soho residents have rendered this all but impossible. A clutch of boomer millionaires are vetoing the 24-hour city.
But above all the Green Belt is asphyxiating the city. Growth means letting people move to where the jobs are. It means accommodating the immigrants that arrive. It means freeing their incomes from servicing spiralling rents and mortgages. But the way the Green Belt is currently administered means it is blocking house building: even within a 10-minute walk of commuter rail stations feeding our economic hub. It is absurd that a stroll away from Taplow, now a Crossrail station, there are agricultural fields — inaccessible to the public and of no natural merit whatsoever — wedged between there and the M4. Release them.
The disastrous Conservative mayoral candidate campaign, resulting in an unknown London Assembly member, Susan Hall, being picked, has failed the city even when it comes to the debate about growth it needed.
The next government, and that looks like Sir Keir Starmer, needs a plan to let the city’s economy grow. This should involve a new government for London Act empowering the Mayor to champion the city’s economy and neutering the councils who do much to harm it.
Good policies are at hand. Ant Breach, an expert at the Centre for Cities, in a forthcoming report proposes that an empowered mayor be given the power to zone areas with automatic planning approval for certain types of housing, ending the discretionary system, overrule obstructionist councils and the tools to fund projects like social housing or infrastructure with devolved business rates.
This is the kind of thinking London needs. Simply zoning 3.7 per cent of the Green Belt within 10 minutes walk of a commuter rail station could allow for a million new homes. This must happen — but with a deal where for every square mile released an equal amount will be converted into parks and trails. This is a vision of the growing, greener and above all fairer London we need. And the rest of Britain needs to power it to a better future.
