LDN Weekly – Issue 167 – 31 March 2021
BONKERS FOR BALLOTS
There’s a lot to be excited about this week, not least because we can all enjoy the company of friends and family (in small, socially-distanced groups and all outdoors of course).
| No images? Click here  BONKERS FOR BALLOTSThere’s a lot to be excited about this week, not least because we can all enjoy the company of friends and family (in small, socially-distanced groups and all outdoors of course). There are also plenty of signs of the still-tumultuous times too, from councils being pushed into resuming in-person public meetings, to the uncertainty facing the office and retail sectors (though we like the positive spin the cultural sector has put on a summer without foreign tourists), and council tax rising nearly everywhere. But there is still success to be celebrated. In Our Week, we cover the impressive result of a residents’ ballot we managed on the Barnsbury Estate in Islington, for Newlon and Mount Anvil. We were also pleased to see a lovely personal piece by our Director Sam Emery, about our work for Tonic Housing, published by the On London website and are also excited to see the organisers of ‘The Stars are Bright: Zimbabwe through the eyes of its young painters (1940-1947)’ launching a kickstarter campaign to fund a book memorializing the exhibition that we proudly supported last summer. Perhaps most of all though, we are relieved, given the delay of a year, to have reached a major milestone in advance of the election for Mayor of London on 6 May – on which point, a few words from our Chairman:
LCA Chairman Robert Gordon Clark And one more thing: you will not receive an LDN issue next week, but do not fear! We’re just taking a much-needed Easter Break and will return on Wednesday 14 April. Until then, enjoy the sunshine (or snow, as the case may be) and stay safe!  ELECTIONS LATEST
AWFULLY SORRY, BUT...Most of LDN’s readers will continue to have the option of working from home for many months – and understandably so. But it seems many of our colleagues in local government will not. As per a letter from Local Government Minister Luke Hall to England’s council leaders late last week, emergency regulations allowing local government committee meetings to take place remotely will be allowed to expire on 7 May. Extending these ‘would require primary legislation’ and the Government ‘has concluded that it is not possible to bring forward emergency legislation on this issue at this time.’ The Local Government Association has called the decision ‘extremely disappointing,’ especially considering MPs will retain the right to participate remotely in Parliamentary proceedings ‘until at least 21 June.’ The Chair of London Councils Cllr Georgia Gould (Lab) is also not convinced as to ‘why should community, staff and councillors be forced to put themselves at risk?’ The Association of Democratic Services Officers (ADSO), Lawyers in Local Government (LLG) and Hertfordshire County Council had meanwhile begun lobbying the Government on this issue weeks ago and are now taking legal action. Ending remote meetings so soon is not only questionable from a public health perspective – it’s also bad for business. Planning lawyers, from Simon Ricketts to Zack Simons, are warning that a premature return to in-person committee meetings poses real risks to the development pipeline. COUNCIL TAX TALLIEDAll of London’s 33 local authorities have now confirmed their council tax rates for 2021/22. According to our tally, 26 are increasing total council tax bills (including core council tax and adult social care precept rises) by the full 4.99% allowed before triggering a local referendum. All 33 are increasing the adult social care precept component of council tax bills by the maximum 3%. However, some have opted not to increase their core council tax component by the full 1.99% allowed - namely the City of London Corporation and Wandsworth (both of which have frozen it) as well as Havering (1.5%), Hillingdon (1.8%), Richmond (0.6%), Sutton (1.5%), and Westminster (0.5%). For comparison, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy (CIPFA) estimates that when taking into account the 9.5% increase in the Mayor’s precept also, inner London boroughs will see the highest increases of any region at about 5.5% and certainly higher than the England-wide average of 4.3%. Some will argue that this is the ‘choice’ of London’s Labour Mayor and of the city’s mostly Labour boroughs. Others will say this is yet another symptom of a decade of austerity and the Government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda, forcing London’s boroughs to increase council tax by a greater proportion than other regions. But surely, the biggest culprit must be the pandemic, which has forced already stretched boroughs to stretch themselves even thinner to support the most vulnerable in their communities, while income – from parking tickets, leisure services, business rates, council tax and more – has taken a major hit. LONDON PLANNING ROUNDUP
PEOPLE NEWS
 NATIONAL PLANNING LATESTCommunities Secretary Robert Jenrick has today announced new measures to ‘revitalise England’s cherished high streets and town centres’. From August, new permitted development rights (PDR) will enable the conversion of shops, restaurants and offices into homes without a full planning application. The proposals, first unveiled in December last year, have been met with concern not only from Jenrick’s political opponents, but from property and business groups, who worry that extending PDR as proposed could erode town centres and the availability of commercial space more generally. Other measures included in the package announced this week are a new ‘fast track’ for extensions to existing public buildings such as schools and hospitals, as well as changes to PDR for ports. The Sunday Times has meanwhile reported comments by Jenrick, in which he suggested that homes may need to be built on greenfield and Green Belt land if the Government is to meet its housing targets. While Jenrick insisted that brownfield sites must still be prioritised, and offered assurances that wherever green spaces are used for housing they must also ‘enhanc[e] the natural environment with biodiversity net gain,’ the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and others have (naturally) cried foul. Amidst what feel like rather fragmentary efforts to deregulate planning, the sector still awaits news on the Government’s intentions with regards to wider reforms to the planning system. FLIGHT FROM THE CENTRE?The past week has seen yet more scare stories of flight from London office and retail centres, but it’s not all that bad. Yes, major organisations’ from BT and Santander to publisher Reach and housing association L&Q are scaling back their office footprint in London and other cities. But we are certainly not witnessing the ‘death of the office’. For example in Westminster, British American Tobacco’s former offices at 7 Millbank are set to be refurbished for use by, reportedly, 1,500 civil servants working for parliament and MI5. Further afield in Kingston, there are plans for Unilever’s new HQ, which have been recommended for approval by the borough’s planners (and go to committee this evening). And do not underestimate office developers’ adaptability, as shown by Canary Wharf Group’s plans to pivot their consented 1 Park Place office project in the Royal Docks to a 700-home Build to Rent scheme. Meanwhile, weak commercial returns for offices and still-shuttered ‘non-essential’ retail are naturally causing jitters, as is the fact that major London shopping destinations, from Westfield London to the West End, have tumbled down Retail Week’s ranking of ‘retail’s most vibrant shopping locations.’ But the latter also showed that smaller high streets (from Wimbledon Village to Muswell Hill) are making a comeback. Additionally, retail footfall is already beginning to rise in advance of shops reopening on 12 April, with Government hoping that relaxed rules for opening hours, al fresco dining, and (as above) planning, will help resuscitate high streets. WAR OF THE LTNs LATESTThe war over London’s Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) continues. In a bid to encourage walking and cycling during the pandemic, the Government had incentivised the rapid rollout of LTNs across England using what – in some cases at least – amounted to a “deploy first, consult later” approach. This produced approximately 100 in London by the end of 2020 and many more in other cities including Manchester and Birmingham. As reported in The Telegraph, Conservative Mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey has this week pledged to scrap those LTNs that have been ‘imposed’ on communities, promising to ensure that consultations are held on the installation of any others. Bailey has suggested, like many other opponents of LTNs, that they lead to problems with congestion, have an adverse effect on air quality and impede access for the emergency services, even though recent data has shown that London Fire Brigade response times have not been impacted. We’ve also seen evidence of continued strife over such schemes locally, such as in Chiswick over concerns about the impact of Cycleway 9 on local elderly and disabled residents and in nearby Ealing, where LTNs have become a truly divisive issue, with local Labour MPs Rupa Huq and Virendra Sharma both wading into the debate. REPORTS ROUNDUP
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