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.
