London community groups had a rare hearing at the London Assembly’s Planning and Regeneration Committee on 7 September, making it very clear that a new London Plan is urgently needed, with genuine co-production with Londoners from the outset and a very different kind of London to be forged.
It was a breakthrough by this committee that it devoted an entire meeting to taking evidence from a panel of community activists and invited people whose organisations were among the 60 which had contributed to the Just Space Community-led Recovery Plan for London.
Many of the questions posed by the Committee focussed on participation in the London Plan process. Responses were clear that active and deep participation requires proactive support and resourcing. We have a considerable section in our document on participation that sets out some useful ways or mechanisms. However, not only does the input of communities have to change profoundly but the city itself must be different, prioritising meeting social need, especially of those in greatest need, and tackling the climate and nature emergencies. The current plan is seen as a developers’ charter; ‘recovery’ doesn’t mean getting back to business as usual; the Covid pandemic has shown us that the future really must be different from the past.
The next review of the London Plan is not scheduled until May 2024 onwards and Just Space said to the committee that we cannot wait. We should start now to be more open, free-ranging, supportive and innovative in community engagement.
You can review the whole 3-hour meeting and it may help to have our notes [ download PDF ] beside you which are indexed to the time stamp as the video goes along. A complete official transcript will appear on the Committee’s web site shortly.
All eight of the community speakers spoke with the urgency and authority which came from their experiences of Covid’s awful impacts on top of the cumulative effects of austerity. The existing (old) London Plan, initiated in 2016 and adopted in 2021 was a business-as-usual plan which did nothing to challenge the dominance of real estate profits over identified need. A different kind of plan is needed to give centre stage to meeting the backlog of unmet need, tackling some of the major structural inequalities while taking the climate and nature imperatives seriously.
Florence Nazziwa, a practice nurse from the Equal Care Co-op London stressed the work pressures on carers, mostly women from minoritised communities on insecure contracts. She herself has to do 21 home visits daily: 7 in the morning, 7 at lunch time and 7 in the evening. People in her position have to fit in the care of their own families with that work schedule. Asked what could be done to reduce inequality, she said innovation in care commissioning, valuing community development work . A person’s wellbeing depends on the quality of their relationship to the people, places and things that make up the community. She also stressed the need for local care hubs – places that connect care workers to local resources and give them more visible presence in the community – and for neighbourhood mapping which brings communities together.
Asked whether she had ever been involved with the GLA or London planning, Florence said no, but she gave thanks and credit to Just Space for this opportunity to speak and would value more.
Saif Osmani was a founder of the Bengali East End Heritage Society which was set up in response to the activity of the East End Preservation Society which had been concerned more with the buildings than the people and failed to represent the culture and material life of the strong Bengali community. He spoke of the isolation of this community, especially of the antagonism and lack of interest shown by staff of the councils (Tower Hamlets and Newham) which made Bengali people feel that they were unimportant and their views somehow not valid. The Save Brick Lane campaign challenges the expansion of the City which would decimate the Bengali culture because the land is seen as worth more than the people. Many of the social and community services round Brick Lane have been closed down in recent years. At Upton Park we have been fighting 20 years in the Friends of Queen’s Market which is our source of cheap food for the large households we typically cook for. The market was crucial in feeding people during Covid. Why isn’t this valued?
Asked whether their interaction with the GLA had been any better, Saif said that they had felt listened to by the Assembly and some individual Assembly Members but that did not mean that their needs were any better reflected in policy. The exception had been when Andrew Boff AM had helped draw the Mayor’s attention to a tall block of flats threatening the Queen’s Market at Upton Park and thus got that threat removed –though not out of respect for the market’s crucial role in the food culture of East London and of south Asian communities, but rather on tall buildings policy.
Saif said that few people would engage with planning authorities on the terms usually offered: digesting and commenting on huge PDFs or going to meetings where the talk was of ‘vibrancy’: who experiences their own community in these words? Newham has started Citizen Assemblies, which are in some ways a credit but they have created a huge area of digital disengagement.
Portia Msimang from Renters Rights London focused on the churn imposed on private renters in London, with the average tenancy lasting only 2 or 3 years, as explaining why private tenants were normally under-represented in planning and housing discussions: few people stay put long enough to identify with a locality. The views and needs of private tenants (now a third of Londoners) are systematically under-represented for this reason. People are also too stressed by time and financial pressures to go to meetings. If you want to meet people go to them, where they are. ‘For example I was able to meet a lot of people very effectively by going to the works canteen and meeting workers during their breaks.’
Meeting places in localities can be very important but “most of the community hubs near me have been closed by the councils”. The nearest we have is the office of the housing coop where I live. But most consultation exercises are experienced as tick-box operations and that feeling is reinforced by never getting feedback. Even to be told why your demands are not being met would be better than nothing. It would be invaluable to get people deciding how funds like section 106 payments would be spent. Asked about prior contact with the GLA, Portia said that she had experience only of a (failed) bid for money for a CLT. That had taught her how hard it would be to win such a bid without having a housing association as a partner – but that would have contradicted the central point of their organisation’s approach. A fair bidding process would include investment in some consultancy support for applicants – housing coops in that case.
Natalia Perez, brought a very different perspective from Latin Elephant, an organisation set up to support and help the traders threatened with displacement (and now all displaced) from the Elephant and Castle shopping centre as part of a ‘regeneration’. The majority of these traders are Latin Americans, many Colombian, and the struggle to secure reinstatement elsewhere or get viable accommodation via the developers and Southwark was very frustrating. Half the traders remained unable to trade and faced difficulties in dealing with the authorities because of the technicalities and obscurity of planning language and limited English. But Natalia said that the traders had been perfectly well able to understand when they conducted workshops for them in Spanish.
The Equality Impact Assessment needs to include the people affected within the methodology. Latin Elephant had made representations on successive London Plans and had done a report to City Hall on the Social Value of the Latin economy.
Yasmin Moalin youth engagement lead for the Anti-Tribalism Movement is specially concerned about making things accessible to young people and letting them present their perspectives. Yasmin spoke powerfully of the pandemic’s impact on young people of Somali origin, with whom she works, badly hit by the difficulties in studying in overcrowded homes when schools and colleges were shut.
While coping with their own problems, so many had to help parents navigate their own situations across language barriers with officialdom. She reported very little trust for authorities among young people, especially boys, so participation in planning or policy was out of reach for most. Their organisation has a housing programme which trains Somali women to help them represent their communities in regeneration areas, on boards and committees and this is valuable. Yasmin spoke about the need for access and choice, and to educate and train so that young people are supported and prioritised in the planning process.
Christine Goodall from HEAR, a pan-equality network of London equality and human rights voluntary and community sector organisations, was forthright on many of the topics of the meeting, stressing the intersecting impacts of multiple protected characteristics and how the pandemic had added to the stresses on those who are poor alongside some other characteristics. She identified the closure of community hubs, libraries and other centres as having been very damaging for individuals, removing digital access and the opportunities for affected groups to meet and self-organise. Putting everything online had caused difficulties to so many people, even though some had gained by remote access. The high cost of internet access and equipment were major barriers alongside lack of familiarity and fluency with IT. She strongly supported the proposals in the Just Space plan for community hubs and spaces where people can get onto free Wi-Fi.
One planning problem in the pandemic had been the imposition without due consultation of many traffic schemes like floating bus stops and bike lanes which – while beneficial for some and contributing to cleaner air which is good for everyone – can have very adverse effects on some older people, children and those with mobility or sensory problems. The problems of households without access to outdoor space at home were bad enough but they were sometimes amplified by the management of parks who had banned people from sitting on benches and thus in effect banned some people from their parks altogether.
Christine and a number of other speakers, asked whether they would favour a Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) or something similar being developed for the GLA gave a tentative support but all emphasised that statements of intent were a waste of time and would further undermine trust. Rules and procedures to govern community involvement in GLA planning could be useful if there were ways for citizens to invoke and enforce them and if they were available in various languages. Public bodies must go to people where they are. Financial recompense for sharing your expertise can be a valuable help for individuals and small groups. Better feedback too should be automatic.
Pat Turnbull, regional rep for London Tenants Federation, stressed that London Plans so far had failed to meet the basic needs of the majority of Londoners, failing to halt losses of existing social housing, failing to stop the growing backlog of unmet need for social housing and generating acute problems for family households through enabling too many small flats where larger ones were needed. LTF had used every opportunity to try to influence the London Plan and other plans and policies but were endlessly frustrated by the way that all levels of government now attach higher priority to developer profitability than to meeting social needs. The first priority for successful public consultation was that the public body must want to know what people think (they often don’t seem to care). People must also believe that what they say can lead to changes of policy and get feedback and that conformity with key policies will be monitored and enforced. It is a scandal that, even in Opportunity Areas, there is no decent data on whether the social-rent targets, so hard won in policy, are carried through into agreements and actually delivered.
Francesca Humi, Kanlungan Filipino Consortium (the word means safe haven) spoke of a community multiply affected by deprivations, by Austerity policies and by Hostile Environment policies. Most Philippine people here are women, a high proportion work in the NHS or care sector jobs in low-paid positions or as private carers or domestic servants, sometimes even living in the homes where they work. Even what may appear to be a living wage can become inadequate because people have to pay for visas for themselves and any children, pay charges to use the NHS if they need it, often pay for solicitors to help secure rights and, in many cases have ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) so are unable to access many public services or social housing. Finally, many are here to send remittances home. This is a very stressed community and their housing costs are a major burden: often they are reduced to sharing beds to live near enough to their work.
In the pandemic, especially early on, we have been overwhelmed by deaths in our community, because of our jobs, our working conditions, our homes and living conditions. We have supported each other as best we could. Consultation with communities like us should disseminate information widely, often in relevant languages, and a high priority topic within the crucial housing subject would be the need for (London government) to provide emergency accommodation for people in these very very hard conditions.
So far this has been a summary of evidence given. The longer summary here and the complete transcript include also the questions asked by the Committee.
Clearly the Committee was focused on public consultation, especially in the production of the London Plan, and on some specific issues: the need for an SCI, the scope for activating the ‘socio-economic’ dimension of the Equality Act 2010 to make the London Plan less regressive in impact and other ways in which the London Plan could learn from the Covid experience and respond to its impacts.
Insofar as the community speakers focused on consultation the message was that it would need to be a lot better than it has been to secure the commitment of time and energy of people. It would help if people were paid for their time spent in this socially important work. It would help if planners engaged with people where they were gathered for work or other purposes and because true deliberation isn’t done individually but when people listen to each other in groups. It would help above all if consultations were felt to be genuine: if councils and officers were actually wanting to know what people thought and would act upon the results and report back. This set of conditions is rare at the moment. A Mayoral SCI or a differently named document with similar scope might help provided that it could be invoked and enforced by citizens.
The application of the Equality Act was not much discussed but those who responded to this question were clear that Equality Impact Assessments they had seen so far – including the ones on the London Plan – were seriously deficient.
The strongest link with the London Plan was clear: that the next London Plan would need to produce a very different kind of city — a city which housed and cared for the people who make it work, at costs which are viable in relation to their actual incomes. The majority of these speakers had strong demands to voice but the co-production of a new plan would clarify for them which of the issues count as ‘planning’ issues in today’s London and which fall to other spheres of public policy. Co-production just might be getting under way in sessions like this.
