This post is my personal observations as I get to grips with the long-delayed GLA document Towards a New London Plan, published eventually on 9 May 2025 and open to consultation until 22 June. The text may change quite often as I fiddle with it.
I’m pasting comments I get from other people on a separate page. Do join in here or there with comments or links.
We had an excellent Just Space meeting yesterday 20 May about this, built around a great summary presented by Michael Ball. Details and downloads over there. And later we have added the GLA’s own slide show and other stuff there.
Scope
This is absolutely not the high-level strategic document which LSE London group were calling for last autumn [add link if there is one] which would have posed the main choices facing London, spanning land use, transport, economy, housing and so on.
Nor is it the kind of radical response to the crises of inequality, climate and ecological breakdown which many of us have been pressing for. No special urgency is evident and the Plan — clearly already well-advanced — amounts to a complacent affirmation of events since 2016 and the promise of more of the same, intensified to pursue even higher housing output targets.
On the other hand the document is quite good in presenting housing and transport issues as integral parts of London’s planning, seeking feedback on lots of detailed questions. Most of this could have been tabled a year ago without any need to await the re-election of the mayor, and allowing time for Londoners and their organisations, universities and their research groups, to respond. But consultations close very emphatically on 22 June so only quick responses are likely.
We have thought for over a year that the new London Plan team (and perhaps the Mayor and Deputy Mayor behind them) are trying to keep the public at arm’s length and keep the whole process under their strict control. Thus the whole of 2023 and 2024 which they could have spent on co-production with communities and interested parties and on evaluating the consequences of the last (2021) Plan, they spent instead on a process called Planning for London which was a one-way harvesting of opinions, needs, demands and so forth. They thus built up a vast stash of records from events and documents which people submitted but avoided any interaction with us all. This is all at https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/planning/planning-london-programme
One example of the narrowing of scope for public participation is that the Steering Committee for the SHLAA and SHMA has been abolished. This comprised an officer from each borough plus a representative each from Just Space, London Tenants Federation, the London Forum and the House Builders Federation (HBF). This enabled us to have at least some purchase on the crucial issues of council estate demolition which is now widely regarded as one of the worst features of London development, causing net losses of council housing in most cases, very damaging displacements of people and enterprises and putting upward pressure on rents and prices in surrounding areas. All gone. The replacement online mechanism Land4LDN is open for boroughs, developers and citizens to nominate sites for development but – so far as we can tell – we can’t search the database to see which sites have been accepted. I have written to query this. The Committee also gave us some influence on the assessment of demands and needs of distinct income groups in the housing needs/market assessment SHMA.
It’s also very bad news that the promised (and legally required) consultation on the scope of the Integrated Impact Assessment (IIA) which was expected to start now has been further postponed. This IIA includes the Equalities Impact Assessment which was so extremely badly handled last time. One of the major failings of the IIA last time was that it was done after the plan was drafted whereas it should have started from the beginning. This was one of our major criticisms when it came to the Examination in Public (hearings) and which led to the Panel of Inspectors requiring the GLA to do a lot more work. It still was awful. But we would at least have expected that this time they woud take care to get it right. (The story is all on JustSpace.org.uk Put equality and equalities in the search box.)
I learned today (27 May) that focus groups of people with protected characteristics have been meeting about the distinct housing needs of their groups. So that’s a good sign.
continues in next post 22 June
michael edwards 