Tag: London

  • 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.

  • Is the Mayor restricting our participation?

    Is the Mayor restricting our participation?

    Just Space and many of its member organisations are seriously frustrated by what seem to be reductions in citizens’ role in the formation of the next London Plan. We have today written to Lisa Fairmaner, Head of the London Plan Team at City Hall, as follows:

    16 September 2024

    Dear Lisa,

    Participation in London Plan preparations

                I am writing on behalf of the Just Space network to express our grave concern at what we experience as a narrowing of the scope for community participation in the next London Plan.

                For some years you and Deputy Mayor Jules Pipe have promised that the GLA would produce a document akin to a Statement of Community Involvement. We appreciate that the law which defines and requires an SCI does not apply to the GLA but that the proposed document would cover the same sort of ground. It continues not to appear and in the resulting vacuum we consider that the GLA is reducing the scope of participation and thus undermining the legitimacy of the London Plan.

                We appreciate that over 7000 people have taken part in the ‘Planning for London’  programme and many of us have been part of that process. However that has been a one way traffic: the GLA has harvested ideas from citizens and businesses but with none of the interaction or openness to scrutiny which is an essential feature of valid consultation. Is the Mayor a control freak?

                We also know that you have the open call for submissions and have ourselves submitted our Recovery Plan for London and our Manifesto 2024. Many other organisations and individuals have presumably made submissions but these are all invisible: none of us can see other submissions or even see who has submitted. This contrasts strongly with the proper consultation for Local Plans, or the EiP process, where all consultation responses are online for public access. This one way traffic of ideas further undermines the legitimacy of the Plan and prevents citizens discovering what developers are urging on the Mayor. So much for transparency.

                Last time around, community organisations (ourselves, plus London Tenants Federation and London Forum) were members of the Steering group for the SHLAA/SHMA process, but now you tell us that the SHLAA has become ‘Land4Ldn’, an online interaction with boroughs or ‘a digital SHLAA’. Land4Ldn’s videos suggest that a simplified density matrix is alive and well in calculating housing units per site. A party will input their preferred number of units and height for a site and subject to some constraints it will immediately appear on the SHLAA. It seems a lot of decisions have already been smuggled through in this process and we are shocked not to have been included in any of the thinking behind the system. We can see no way of engaging in it or advising our member organisations. How can the public participate in this new housing site selection by boroughs? The start date for the Land4Ldn call for sites is in fact today, September 16th.  

    Equally for the SHMA. We are relieved by your statement to Pat Turnbull “irrespective of what the headline need figure is, a SHMA is necessary to understand the breakdown of that housing need.” But your statement needs to be fleshed out in scoping the study so that the central issues of affordability relative to the income distribution and family/dwelling size issues are adequately dealt with. London’s failure to produce the dwelling stock its people need is the biggest failure of London Plans to date. The exclusion of us all from these deliberations is another outrage.

    We are equally concerned about the scoping and execution of the IIA and the performance of the Public Sector Equality Duty in particular. The draft Plan can run into difficulties during examination if these processes are inadequate: your predecessors had to go back and re-work the Equality Impact reporting in two successive rounds after community groups persuaded the 2019 Panel that the original work was inadequate. It is really important that the GLA gets it right this time.

    Our concerns in all this are grave and we shall share them widely in the hope that you will agree to rethink your approach. Should we have a meeting?

    Yours sincerely,…

    Copied to: Assembly Planning Committee, All Party Parliamentary Group London, London Forum of Civic and Amenity Societies, London Tenants Federation, London Housing Panel, Deputy Mayors for Housing and Planning. Please copy it widely and to your members.

    Download a copy of this letter

  • Manifesto launched

    Manifesto launched

    Today, 13 April, Just Space launched its Manifesto 2024 at a crowded event in central London.
    Find supporting documents, slides, here
    Downloads here

    Just Space 2024 Manifesto FinalDownload

    This version has a minor correction to one organisation’s name and supersedes the version posted a few hours earlier.

    London is booming. London is bursting. London is breaking.

    Things are not OK. We’re not building the things Londoners need. London’s development is driven by financial interests and hot money. London is a carbon factory.

    2024 sees elections for the London Mayor, the London Assembly and national government. But much of what is promised is more of the same. This is our chance for change.

    The Just Space Manifesto will be a key tool in spreading grassroots knowledge – learnt the hard way – about how to plan for a better, fairer, caring city.

    This manifesto has been prepared by many Just Space groups in working parties since our March conference. Supporting documents from that conference and today’s event are here,

    checked M E 26 July 2025

  • London’s Industrial Land: Cause for concern

    London’s Industrial Land: Cause for concern

    Cedar Way Ind Estate

    Members of Just Space Economy and Planning (JSEP), Jessica Ferm and Edward Jones (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL), have recently completed a working paper, London’s Industrial Land: Cause for Concern, which will be presented at the JSEP seminar on 15 January 2015 at The Cass, Aldgate [Later: the paper can now be downloaded here Ferm Jones London’s Industrial Land – working paper final ]

    The starting point of the paper is a concern with the on-going loss of industrial land in London, over and above targets for ‘managed release’ set in various iterations of the London Plan, and the potential impacts of the recent Further Alterations to the London Plan, which facilitate further release of industrial land in new designated Opportunity Areas and around transport nodes, in order to accommodate London’s future housing needs. The paper provides a wide-ranging review of research – including academic studies, think-tank and consultants’ reports, employment land reviews and business surveys – and draws on further evidence and examples across London, to argue that:

    • The nature of manufacturing is changing, but is still thriving and important for London’s future growth – the loss of manufacturing in London in recent years has primarily been due to real estate speculation rather than deindustrialisation.
    • Aside from manufacturing and core industrial uses, a range of other activities and businesses occupy premises on industrial land, benefiting from its relative affordability and lack of proximity to housing.  
    • Together these activities provide vital support to London’s economy and residents, and contribute to London’s diversity, vibrancy and overall status as a World City – as London continues to grow, it will need more (not less) of these goods and services.  
    • Businesses occupying premises on industrial land are locally dependent and part of a delicate local industrial ecology, where suppliers, customers and employees rely on a network of interdependent relationships.  Disrupting this can have far reaching consequences.
    • The move away from separating industrial land towards mixed use in London’s built environment – both on ideological grounds and in response to housing need – will have negative consequences, both for the well-being of Londoners, and for London’s sustainability.

    The on-going loss of London’s industrial land is therefore a cause for concern: London’s broader economy and population will suffer if the current policy trajectory is not revised. There is urgency to this. The UK Government has proposed to further deregulate the planning system to facilitate conversion of industrial land to housing without the need for planning permission.  Concern is particularly acute in London where land value differentials between industrial and residential use are likely to drive redevelopment if Permitted Development Rights are extended.

    During the course of preparing this paper, JSEP has convened seminars and conferences on London’s economy, where it has become evident that the issue of London’s industrial land is of real concern to members.   These events, the email forum for the group, as well as some of the written evidence compiled by members in response to the Further Alterations to the London Plan (GLA, 2014a), have helped to frame the research questions, contribute to the evidence base and provide leads to other studies and data. The contributions of the group have been invaluable to the production of the paper, but equally it is envisaged that the paper will provide a springboard for further research activity in the group.

    For further queries, ideas or comments, please contact Jessica Ferm at j.ferm@ucl.ac.uk. 

  • 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