5 January 2026 The Mayor is legally required to consult on a draft of how they plan to evaluate the next London Plan. They have been postponing the consultation for a year or more and now they have slipped it out under cover of Christmas. Consultation closes at the end of January so nearly half of the period has expired already. We interrupt our work on the alternative plan to alert Londoners to the need for urgent action.
The Draft Scoping Study for the Integrated Impact Assessment can be found at https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/planning/london-plan/towards-new-london-plan-consultation
We have no trace of receiving any notification about this, despite us being on the Mayor’s email lists for updates. We discovered today 5 January from a friend who had received an email on 23rd December, telling them that the consultation had started on 19th December. This is very bad practice indeed.
Those who weren’t around in 2016 may be interested to know that the London Plan team initially worked well with Just Space and community groups on the Integrated Impact Analysis for the current (2021) London Plan. [ link ] We failed to agree, however and they went ahead with a process which we considered seriously inadequate. In the event their analysis of impact on inequality was so weak that we persuaded the Panel of Inspectors to insist on more work; then the further work was found still quite inadequate and the London Plan team were sent away by the Inspectors to attempt an appraisal of how each policy in the plan would likely affect each of the sections of the population. The resulting report confirmed our worst fears about the inability of the plan policies to arrest the growth of inequality or reverse it. But it was by then too late to influence the content of the plan. Catch up with that story here: https://justspace.org.uk/2019/04/28/actual-equalities-study-at-last/
‘The IIA includes Sustainability Appraisal/Strategic Environmental Assessment (SA/SEA), Health Impact Assessment (HIA), Community Safety Impact Assessment (CSA), and Equalities Impact Assessment (EqIA). In addition, information from the parallel workstream of the Habitats Regulation Assessment (HRA) will inform this IIA but be reported separately.’
Individuals and groups concerned about the equality and/or environmental impacts of the Plan are urged to read the scoping report (link above) and comment to us so we can prepare a collective response to City Hall before the end of January. If we can, we’ll organise a briefing between now and then.
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