London Plan debates may be starting

Today 26 June 2023 I went to the first London Plan event at City Hall which has been open to organisations and people who say they want to come. Here are some jottings while they are fresh in my mind. My take-away was that it felt like a milking parlour with us as the cows.

Preamble

Just getting there for a 0900 start was a challenge. I put that on Mastodon:

Happily various people spoke about the urgency of improving suburban public transport, especially orbital/transverse, and especially buses (speed, cheapness, frequency and reliability).

I thus arrived late and was placed in a holding formation at table 10 awaiting the next round of managed small-group discussions. The room was in cabaret layout with each table holding 2 or 3 GLA staff, a facilitator from 2CV, not a small French car but some sort of consultancy. (Much though I dislike this sort of outsourcing, the individuals I met were rather good at their job.) Each table had 6-8 Members of the Public. Actually we were ‘Stakeholders’ I think and everyone I encountered was ‘representing’ some organisation or other – though in a few cases they sounded like campaigns with just one member. (sentence deleted as perhaps off-putting to some potential participants)

Context

The context is that the last London Plan was a bad plan and is now very old. Drafted in 2016, it would have been adopted in 2020 (though it was pushed into 2021 by some rather infantile nit-picking from the Secretary of State) and has in many ways become even more irrelevant to London’s real needs as a result of the pandemic, the crazy slither into fresh austerity and now a recession wished on us all by the ‘government’.

The City Hall planners could and should have got down to some urgent work to get a new plan under way but the Mayor apparently decided that no start should be made until after the next mayoral election in May 2024. So what were they to do? Tricky for the planning team, most of whom were anyway new recruits, following a wave of retirements.

Just think what they could have done! They could have fostered and facilitated the lively public discussions which take place among London’s many publics, professional and research networks. London and every one of its 33 boroughs has loads of networks of people studying, campaigning, watching and lobbying on housing, greenspace, transport, conservation and other issues and arching over all that the impending catastrophes of climate and ecological breakdown. A lot of politicians and planners, including some in City Hall, treat all this with disdain or contempt, dismissing us all as ‘usual suspects’, unrepresentative, NIMBY middle class owner-occupiers defending our private and class interests. Insofar as there is any truth in this the constructive response would be to support and foster the widening of participation to bring in more of the ‘hard to reach’ groups whose absence enables us to be dismissed as unrepresentative. A bit of this took place in 2000-2008 but none since then when Boris Johnson took over. The Assembly did listen recently to some more diverse experiences, but not the GLA planning teams.

Despite calls from our Just Space network, and from others, there has been no GLA engagement with citizens in London until now, beyond an open call to submit documents over a year ago (did anything arrive?) and some meetings in autumn 2022 which were invitation-only so that the GLA could ensure ‘representativeness’. The whole process is now described online on the GLA’s web site and some more detail has been prized out through an FOI by Prof Ian Gordon of LSE [ download PDF ].

They certainly weren’t catching up with the long-overdue process of monitoring the successes and failings of earlier London Plans. Peter Eversden of the London Forum has been tenacious in pointing out that we have only just had the Annual Monitoring Review 17, two years late, and there is no sign of numbers 18 and 19 which would bring us up to date and begin to tell us what has become of the policies in the ‘new’ 2021 plan.

They also weren’t (visibly) exploring the widening range of of possible futures opening up before us, notably the accelerating climatic and ecological catastrophes, the further stoking of income and wealth inequalities by governments in Britain and elsewhere. They could also have been exploring some of the policy options which London might adopt or be enabled to adopt: a degrowth strategy, a rapid curtailment of air travel, a switch from maximising total housing output to a focus on maximising the social housing stock, a moratorium on the felling of trees, rent controls for housing, no more Crossrails to boost central London property values and suck in workers from ever further afield. So much needs exploring.

Today’s discussions: In the five hours 0900-1400 they had programmed four cycles of discussions at 10 tables. Each table had assigned topics so the hosts could harvest four sets of comments/debates and there were multiple members of the planning team there to do that, plus some audio recording. There was no recap or summing up or reporting to plenary so none of us knows what happened except in the tables we were at. Some of the discussions I was at were fruitful and could have extended and developed into really useful deliberations but that was not to be. It was not so much harvesting as like a milking parlour with us as the cows. And we never got lists of participants (even lists without emails) so participants can’t pursue what in many cases could have been fruitful new alliances.

The distilled topics for each of the ten discussions clearly represented a great deal of work by the planners and perhaps by the consultants. It was all embodied in a slide show which ran on automatic all day. Many of the slides had a lot of important text but it was impossible to read because they each had about 3 seconds of exposure. I have asked to be sent a copy of the slide show and hope they will publish it.

[Five hours of concentrated discussion really call for a meal break. We had unlimited tea and coffee plus chilled croissants and fresh fruit midstream, but I was weak with hunger and left with stomach ache. I can’t have been alone.] [Later: those booking for the whole day on 13 July will get, not just a lunch break, but an actual lunch: good news.]

Substance

Building standards for decarbonisation. As with all the chosen topics, staff had distilled a number of questions to pose to the table. On this topic we discussed whether all new building should be required to match passivhaus standards (no dissent here and some acceptance that higher build costs would end up depressing land values, not inflating house prices) and then the much thornier issues of retrofitting the inherited stock. There were calls for a big urgent programme (no mention of ‘mission’ but it easily could have been) but others emphasised the complexities of customising retrofit works to the particularities of each building and each occupier: condensation and mould can flourish if draughts are reduced and a household can’t afford to maintain enough heating and ventilation. That linked to some discussion of heating networks charging systems and the contradictions of pricing as a means to reduce energy use. [I asked if GLA were in touch with the London Tenants Federation on this because they have been gathering experiences on estates. Answer: no. ] The table included 2 passionate campaigners from Ealing, both carrying printed flyers, one calling for a ban on tall buildings & citing research by Prof Phil Steadman and colleagues at UCL, the other protesting the impermeable paving of front gardens, now being given a boost by the cost and difficulty of charging electric cars while they are on the highway.

Reducing car use. This became a rather general transport discussion and suffered from the absence of any petrol-heads: there was nobody to champion the “freedom” to drive and only weak representation of that criticism of LTNs, ULEZ etc on the grounds that many poor / working class people need their cars and vans for work and can’t afford to replace their old vehicles. There was strong expression of the need for major improvements in suburban public transport, especially orbital, and thus especially buses. This came strongly and well from various quarters – perhaps reinforced by the struggles many of us had in getting to the new City Hall. Interestingly we had a person from various central London freight/deliveries campaigns being mounted by BIDs, landowners and traders. He was very informative about the problems arising from poor management of kerbside space: so much of that space now diverted to bus and bike lanes, alfresco dining and micro-parks that deliveries become impossible and/or more costly. Some of these problems can be got round (as in some continental cities) by confining deliveries to an early morning period when pedestrianisation is suspended but it’s complicated and deals only with a few of the conflicts… Silos and blinkers operate here with the division between National Highways, TfL roads and borough roads, leading to problems in – for example – having a green-for-all-pedestrians phase at more lights. [An aside: doesn’t anyone study red routes, now many years old, where traders needing kerbside deliveries or customer pickup of heavy goods have now mostly closed or moved, to be replaced by services (nails, betting, cafes) except where there are frequent side turnings where brief parking is possible. Holloway Road and Green Lanes are my local main roads where a modus vivendi seems to be established.] Not my subject, all this stuff.

Mixed uses and mixed places was the third topic in which I found myself. There was some quite good discussion on the positive value of 15/20 minute-city campaigns (though impatience with fussing about the actual number, given the diversity of densities in London). I pointed out the regrettable loss both of “lifetime neighbourhoods” and “reducing the need to travel” between the 2016 and 2021 London Plans. GLA efforts to combine uses within individual buildings got rather little attention. The link with pandemic experience was well made.
I think it was in this session that we told the story of how the supermarket chains made such a big push to get themselves an exemption from normal rules in the 2021 London Plan as they roll out their metros, locals and minis: freedom to use big delivery trucks without building off-street loading bays. This naturally generates a lot of fury among citizens – but it must help to reduce the need to travel.

What else happened? My notes are poor.

The event failed to grapple with the huge reduction of planning influence over uses (from PDR and changes to the Use Classes Order). It also failed to mention the main London Plan innovation of 2021: the Agent of Change Principle. This tries to prevent new (normally residential) users moving into an area and later suppressing pre-existing uses on grounds of noise or other nuisance. Those complaints had caused the closure of music venues, pubs, some industries. The policy puts the onus on the developer of a new use to design and pay for whatever measures are necessary to prevent the new users from being annoyed. Does it work? Is there any monitoring?

Comment

The second (and last?) of these open events is on July 13th and you can apply to go from the Planning for London hub page where they also promise to post results and findings. The topics next time are the economy and housing. Shall we be able to debate degrowth, alternatives to the Global City, versions of ‘levelling-up’ which take the pressure off London and its wider region? Later: I have booked a seat and the booking page includes this list of topics (ignore my ticks):

Or is it going to be left to citizens’ own organisations and to universities to host these events in the coming year? Watch this space for personal comments and also the web sites of
Just Space
The London Forum of Civic and Amenity Societies

Another aside: the new City Hall is a pretty grim place, quite apart from its location. It has none of the elegant simplicity of the best Foster architecture (e.g. Stansted as it was) but feels like an arbitrary envelope with the structure bodged to hold it up. I suppose it should get some credit for being a new use for a useless abandoned marketing ploy by Siemens. The main chamber is more paranoid than the previous one with high armoured glass screens separating the Members and active guests from the threatening general public and no porosity between the two. While the former public gallery had one power outlet for the public, the new one appears to have none. It’s not welcoming. The security arrangements are even worse than they were at Potters Fields and the queue for a major event would have no shelter from the elements. The surroundings are mown grass of the most boring kind. Some biodiversity net gain would be very easy to secure. How about allotments?An orchard? Pergolas for shade as the climate heats?

A personal comment. It was good to meet some old friends who once were our students at UCL, notably Kate Gordon, once of FoE London and now working in the London Plan team, and Ilinca Diaconescu now head of policy at London Gypsies and Travellers. Carmen Campeanu is now in GLA planning working in development management on stage 1 and stage 2 reports on the applications referred to the mayor. And to prove that I can’t be accused of turning all my students against capitalism, Liz Mason (née Harris) is now head of planning for Canary Wharf Limited. That morning we had heard that HSBC was to leave its tower at CW and return to the City and Liz agreed it was a big gap to fill. She seems to relish the challenge of finding new uses for Canary Wharf

digression: clearing my disc, I found this biographical fragment from 2005 with lots of Italy in it. https://michaeledwards.org.uk/2005-a-biog-fragment. NB the London Social Forum, referred to there, does not exist any more.