Exploit London’s spaces for more housing, stop squabbling over T5 and beware of the new planning regime, says John Gummer
I remember being laughed at when I suggested that London’s falling population would soon be on the increase again. Now, so dramatic has that upturn been that the Independent can talk of “the explosion in London’s population” and worry itself sick about meeting the demand for homes.
Yet, even 10 years ago you could see the change was coming. Tougher planning legislation that defended the green belt and squeezed out-of-town development, more congestion, the exponential growth in single-person households and the young leaving home earlier were all factors that fed the urban renaissance and brought many to see that life in the town could again be an ideal to be sought.
The latest figure for London, long a declining city, suggest that the present population will rise from 7.4m to more than 8m by 2018. By 2025 the number of jobs will have topped 5m from only 4m in 1999. Once we bemoaned the loss of employment to the new towns and salubrious Surrey and Hampshire. Now they are coming back with a vengeance and the people with them. Nonetheless, if the Independent is right, where can these newcomers expect to live?
Any aerial view will reveal how much even of inner London there is that could be developed. Huge council estates are underpopulated and ripe for rebuilding to much higher standards and greater density. All kinds of former industrial and utility sites remain, particularly in the east where there is real potential for serious redevelopment. Many other areas, within a few miles of the centre, are immensely underused. The huge Elephant & Castle regeneration scheme, once it gets under way, will show just what can be done to lift a huge area by mixed development and imaginative planning.
Only ourselves to blame
It is all there – the jobs, the people, and the potential. The building of Terminal 5 guarantees the special place of London as a world hub from which every major city in the world can be reached by air, every day, non-stop. No wonder it is the number-one destination for global business relocation. All it lacks is the driving commitment that a world-class city demands.
There are too many cooks and none of them can agree a menu, let alone produce a meal. Successive governments have messed up the Tube, havered over Crossrail, failed on the infrastructure and pushed the level of street crime higher than that of New York. Livingstone is all posters, PR, and posturing. The boroughs feel blocked and besieged. They are underresourced and second-guessed by ministers, the government office for London, the Mayor for London, and the GLA, not to mention English Heritage, CABE, the press and all the articulate and well-connected commentators.
All that potential, all that opportunity, all that talent and we can’t get our act together to make the most of the world’s favourite city. Even the London Chamber of Commerce couldn’t manage to unite with London First! Yet, despite our ability to turn opportunity into failure, everything outside continues to go our way. Can’t we just get it together for once and make the most of a chance every other city would beg for?
Crooked flows the Don
The planning scandal at Doncaster (see p42) has hit the national headlines and is an awful example of local government graft, with the near-bankrupt developer and the planning committee chairman on the fiddle. Big sums involved and lots of people paid off – it’s the stuff of a crime thriller. It’s also a story that should remind us how rare is this kind of thing in Britain. Most of government, local and national, is clean and untainted. It’s not always imaginative, competent, or quick but it is rarely crooked. We have every reason to be thankful for that.
Thankful but not complacent. Planning, from Poulson to the present, is vulnerable precisely because so much money rides on the decisions of the planners. Hardly anywhere else in the system are politicians in so direct a position to confer advantage and therefore so open to bribery. Nor is it always for personal gain. All too often the bung is a cut for the community. Permissions are given not on planning grounds but to finance or facilitate some pet council scheme or much needed public improvement.
It is this kind of corruption that the government’s planning proposals will make more common. Once the tariff takes over and payment for permissions becomes the norm, the opportunities for personal graft are enhanced. It is just not worth the risk and the government should think again.
