LDN Weekly – Issue 186 – 1 September 2021
WE'RE BACK
Following a refreshing summer break, the LDN team is back on the job and ready for the autumn’s usual hustle.
| No images? Click here  WE'RE BACKFollowing a refreshing summer break, the LDN team is back on the job and ready for the autumn’s usual hustle. Looking ahead, we’re eagerly awaiting Party Conference season, a possible Cabinet reshuffle, a brace of key net zero policies’ publication in the leadup to November’s COP26 conference, a Planning Bill sometime in the same period, not to mention some kind of financial statement by Treasury this autumn (perhaps a full Budget, perhaps not). Meanwhile, London’s political machinery is beginning to gear up for May 2022’s borough elections, preceded of course by the City of London Corporation’s elections in March, Croydon’s governance referendum in October and a scattering of by-elections. Politics aside, we’re looking forward to the return of many an annual fixture in our key sectors, in London and further afield, including MIPIM and LREF later this month, Centre for London’s London Conference in November and the Totally Thames 2021 festival, which is already underway! We’re also working on an event or two of our own – more on which anon. But today’s edition, our first since 11 August, is more about the past few weeks. It seems the city has – if you can believe it – just carried on without us! We cover the latest movements from City Hall, a host of planning and development stories, a shock by-election result in Tower Hamlets, a laundry list of people news, the state of London’s commercial property market, the path to net zero, public transport, industrial action and a big win at planning committee for our clients Urbanest. As ever we hope you enjoy this edition and if you don't already, follow us on Twitter and Instagram and feel free to visit our website for more information on LCA’s team, services, and clients. Oh and a technical note: If you like hearing from us, make sure to add ldn@londoncommunications.co.uk to your contacts or ‘safe sender’ list – this will help ensure our news bulletin lands in your inbox.  CITY (HALL) IN THE SUMMERWhile City Hall’s press office dialled down the frequency of its announcements over the course of August, the Mayor’s comms machine has not been idling. For starters, Sadiq Khan has been banging the drum for the Let’s Do London domestic tourism campaign, to help lure Brits back into the city – with the campaign’s most recent initiatives including free film screenings in Trafalgar Square. The Mayor himself has been out and about and was spied at East London’s All Points East festival over the weekend, though he’s taken aim at a major arms fair, telling its organisers they’re not welcome in London. He’s also been doing a bit of diplomacy beyond the M25, having visited Bristol to share the limelight with fellow Labour Mayor Marvin Rees. And in response to the Afghan crisis, the Mayor has also offered moral and subsequently more substantial support to the wider national effort to accommodate refugees escaping Taliban rule. He was notably less supportive on the subject of the latest Extinction Rebellion protests. As cited in the press, the Mayor ‘share[s] the passion’ of activists, but doesn’t appreciate the disruption their actions have brought, which aside from having the ‘potential to divert police resources at a vital time’, could also ‘hamper our city’s green recovery and, ultimately, risk turning public opinion against a vitally important campaign’ (read on for more on the protests). AFFORDABLE HOUSING PROGRAMME LATESTCloser to LDN’s usual territory, the Mayor only yesterday welcomed an agreement with the Government on the specifics of London’s initial allocation from the national Affordable Homes Programme – coinciding with a relevant announcement from Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick. We’d covered earlier stages of the process in previous editions of LDN (see here and here), explaining how the new Mayoral Affordable Housing Programme for 2021-2026 is smaller in total cash terms than the current one (£4bn against £4.8bn), with which it will overlap until 2023. It will also deliver fewer homes overall – possibly as few as a third of the total, though with a significantly larger proportion of social homes and more stringent design and quality standards, all of which do, to be fair, require a higher subsidy. In any event, this latest announcement specifically relates to the allocation of the lion’s share of this £4bn funding pot to housing associations and boroughs across London – £3.46bn to be precise, with a target of helping them start 29,456 new affordable homes (of which 16,739 social homes) by 2026. LONDON ESTATE BALLOTS LATESTSeveral residents’ ballots on estate regeneration plans – another key aspect of the Mayor’s approach to delivering new social housing – have also been in the news of late. Two more ballots have resulted in positive votes for regeneration plans entailing the demolition of existing homes, on Riverside’s Calverley Close estate in Bromley and One Housing’s Tiller Road site in Tower Hamlets. By our count, at least 20 such ballots have now been held as a prerequisite for Mayoral funding, under rules introduced in July 2018, all of which (bar one) have, to date, resulted in a positive vote. Other ballots are in the works across London, including one for Haringey’s Love Lane estate, which began on 13 August and concludes next Monday. However, at least one planned ballot has been abandoned over the summer. In a letter to residents, Brent Council Leader Cllr Muhammed Butt has said that they will no longer be asked to vote on the future of St Raphael's Estate, as existing regeneration plans have been deemed ‘unaffordable’ – and that only an ‘infill plan’ can go ahead, meaning no homes will be demolished. LONDON vs PDRMeanwhile, London’s boroughs are lining up to oppose the latest incarnation of Permitted Development Rights (PDR). We covered the wider context of this emerging trend – and a few early cases – in our 4 August edition, but a more recent Property Week investigation has now confirmed that more than half of London’s local planning authorities have either introduced, or have declared an intention to introduce, an ‘Article 4 direction’ that would restrict commercial-to-residential conversions under these new PDR. These authorities, which include boroughs of all political stripes and in both Inner and Outer London, are: Brent, Camden, Croydon, Hammersmith & Fulham, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington & Chelsea, Lambeth, Merton, Redbridge, Richmond, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth, Westminster, plus the Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) and the City of London Corporation. Islington Council specifically has gone a step further, launching a legal challenge against the new PDR in the High Court. While the Government continues to believe that PDR are a valuable means of quickly converting underused commercial space into much-needed housing, local planning authorities tend to be of the view that their use erodes equally-needed employment space and does not necessarily produce good quality and affordable housing. LONDON PLANNING LATESTThe usual August lull means fewer planning decisions to report, but there’s still much to cover!
LONDON MPs vs DEVELOPMENTWe’ve noticed an uptick in the number of London MPs getting involved in local built environment issues over the summer. Was it recess, giving them more time to spend on constituency issues? Or maybe it’s part of the May 2022 local election campaign’s opening salvos? Who knows? To cite three examples, from August alone:
THE RETURN OF RAHMAN?On 12 August, a by-election to fill a vacant seat in Tower Hamlets' Weavers ward produced a shock result for the borough’s Labour leadership. The seat, previously held by Labour, was won by Kabir Ahmed of Aspire, a party set up by associates of former Mayor of Tower Hamlets Lutfur Rahman. Kabir joins Shadwell ward’s Harun Miah as the party’s second elected councillor and his win will certainly be a boost for Rahman, who is widely expected to attempt a comeback at the May 2022 elections. Rahman was removed from office in 2015 and banned from standing in an election until 2021, after being found guilty of electoral fraud. The by-election result has clearly caused worries in the Labour camp and it is probably fair to say that it is not entirely unconnected to a subsequent announcement by current Labour Mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs, heralding a Cabinet reshuffle (including the appointment of Cllr Asma Islam as Cabinet Member for Planning and Environment) and a review of its Liveable Streets programme. Elements of the latter appear to have been very unpopular in Weavers ward and the decision to review these controversial road closures has been explicitly linked to the by-election’s result in a statement posted on Twitter by Lutfur Rahman and in reporting by The Telegraph – though as election analyst Lewis Baston explains, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The Telegraph has separately reported that the Electoral Commission prevented Constitution and Devolution Minister Chloe Smith from observing the polling station for the by-election due to her ‘political affiliation’. PEOPLE MOVES
 LONDON BOUNCING BACK?Property prices rise and fall like a particularly fickle tide, but we’re starting to see more substantial signs that the London property market is indeed ‘bouncing back’. Notwithstanding continuing soul-searching over the future of the office and ambivalent market trends, the FT has reported that the shares of London’s largest listed commercial developers ‘have risen between 15 and 30% in the past six months and are approaching pre-pandemic levels’. Equally importantly, major market players in the capital are not just crossing their fingers for a return to business-as-usual. Canary Wharf Group has unveiled plans to enter the Build to Rent game with schemes at Wood Wharf, while British Land is investing in a ‘logistics hub for online retailers’ beneath Finsbury Square. Even hard-hit brick-and-mortar retailers are starting to see a bit of an improvement in their fortunes, with major landlord Shaftesbury and the New West End Company upbeat in their expectations for recovery. London – and the UK as a whole – is not out of the woods quite yet, but the hustle is on and no city hustles quite like London. TURNING UP THE HEATFollowing the publication of the IPCC’s climate change report earlier this month and as we approach November’s COP26 conference, politicians are under increasing pressure to take meaningful action. In relevant news from London:
LONDON TRANSPORT LATEST
STRIKE ON, STRIKE OFFThe recently-concluded Unite leadership elections and upcoming RMT elections appear to have coincided with an increased appetite for industrial action in London.
LEVELLING UP CHALLENGE(S)Regular LDN readers will be well aware of our reservations about the Government’s Levelling Up agenda – and recent developments suggest those concerns are not unjustified. The Good Law Project has been granted a two-day hearing by the High Court, to make the case for a Judicial Review of the way in which the £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund has been allocated. The organisation argues that funding has been unlawfully directed towards Conservative constituencies in a show of ‘naked pork barrel politics’. Meanwhile, a study by the Salvation Army has found that 45 deprived communities, predominantly in England’s coastal and rural areas, have been denied access to funding. And separately, analysis by Centre for Cities has found that closing the north-south divide will require an investment roughly equivalent to what was spent on the reunification Germany. The think tank has described the Government’s various Levelling Up schemes as a ‘drop in the ocean’. Whichever way you look at it, the Government faces an uphill battle in fulfilling its promises. 
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