Tag: Community groups

  • A citizens’ plan for London

    A citizens’ plan for London

    We have been silent here for a long time. It must have seemed that City Hall had succeeded in shutting down debate on the next London Plan. See our earlier complaints.

    In fact, though, community groups have been busy, working on an alternative London Plan and will be meeting this Saturday 8 November to make further progress. The new plan is centred on the idea of the Caring City, in many ways the opposite of what we have seen in past plans. Details in events.

    Londoners are impatient for change to response to the multiple crises affecting us: climate change and environmental breakdown, mounting inequality, a catastrophic housing system which is both a symptom and a cause of the inequality and a city which seems to have learned so little from the pandemic. After housing development in London grinds to a halt from falling sales, government and Mayor unite to propose changes to housing and planning which would appease housing developers at everyone else’s expense. And the Mayor’s prospectus Towards a new London Plan seems to be preparing us for a plan in some respects even worse than the previous ones.

    Grassroots pressures are mounting at national and London levels, from private tenants pressing for further reforms on top of the Renters Reform Act, from housing association and council tenants and from leaseholders and tenants trapped by the failure of governments to deal with building safety and tenure issues. At local level two major public inquiries are under way driven by Just Space groups. Communities and traders in the East End are fighting commercial interests at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane (see also here) and in Peckham there is a major battle between communities and Berkeley Homes who are appealing against the local planning authority refusal of planning permission for their massive over-development of expensive housing at the Aylesham Centre.

    We shall go back to our old habits of posting here more often.

    Meanwhile some bits of news.

    We heard today that Lisa Fairmaner, Head of the London Plan team at City Hall, is leaving (or may already have left) and will be joining Arups. It seems unexpected that someone should leave such a job in the middle of the drafting of the next Plan. Perhaps someone will take over who feels more positive about fostering and contributing to public debate on the big issues facing the capital. We would be delighted to work with them.

    The government’s Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) has been modified so that its income component is calculated AFTER payment of housing costs, whereas in the past it has been incomes before housing costs. This should be a great help for the way London is viewed: no longer as just a rich city, but as a city where housing costs are so severe that on average we are struggling while poorer Londoners are in desperate poverty. Central government grants to many boroughs should improve as a result. Guardian article.

  • Influencing plans in Opportunity Areas

    Influencing plans in Opportunity Areas

    Just published: The London Tenants Federation and Just Space held a conference of people trying to exert some community influence on what happens in London’s Opportunity Areas —the 33 large parts of London where major developments are under way or proposed. It drew on the experiences of campaigners at King’s Cross over 25 years and the results are now published by LTF as an important report: http://bit.ly/1n84K3U  The conference was part of a two-year project supported by the Trust for London to foster community engagement in 6 rapidly-changing areas.

    The conference also saw the launch of a web-based map (broken link) linking community activity in London which is part of the same project.

    Checked by Michael Edwards 17 07 2025 (LTF website is under repair)

  • Strong criticism in community responses to plan

    Strong criticism in community responses to plan

    Community groups across London are releasing the comments they submitted on 10 April to City Hall on the Mayor’s draft Further Alterations to the London Plan FALP. #FALP14

    A common thread in the responses is that the plan will be a waste of paper because it doesn’t begin to meet the housing implications of growth while it welcomes the growth itself. A linked problem is the way the plan fans the flames of land and property speculation which in turn impoverishes the majority of Londoners while enriching a minority and sprinkling skyscrapers along the river and in arbitrary spots elsewhere.

    The Mayor has been shifting the emphasis of his housing policy away from those in the greatest need – and indeed from most average Londoners – for years. In his last round of alterations to the London Plan he followed government instructions to scrap ‘social-rented’ housing and use the new concept that rents up to 80% of local market levels shall be deemed – and named – “affordable”. He even took power to forbid Boroughs from setting lower rent levels within their areas.  The London Assembly was so incensed that—quite exceptionally—it voted to reject that Plan. Unfortunately, however, a 2/3 majority would have been needed for the Plan to fall. The changes proposed in this 2014 set of Alterations further shift the emphasis of policy away from London’s real needs.

    Other comments on the plan include calls for much more decisive action on air quality and climate change, stronger defence of jobs in industrial zones and suburban centres and much more effective democracy in which local councils meet their people’s needs rather than—as so often—just siding with developers and displacing low- and middle-income communities.

    Submissions made to City Hall are available here, as they come in.

    Checked 17 07 2025 Michael Edwards