2024 is a massive year for elections in the UK, not least because on May 2 London – the most important city in Europe – goes to the polls. Our capital city has been electing a City Mayor and an assembly since 2000. In the past the political agenda for London hasn’t changed greatly between one election and the next. Despite the fact that the last election happened only three years ago (thanks to a pandemic-related delay), 2024 feels really different from the last one with several new talking points. Let me take you through them . . .
London’s blue light services
I don’t think anyone pretends that being a Police Officer in London is an easy job, however people who are willing to be critical of public services have long recognised that problems with the Met Police stretch further than a few bad apples. In 1992 there was a question on an LSE politics exam I took (presumably recycled for many years) ‘Are the police institutionally sexist, racist and homophobic?’ – in 32 years what’s changed?
That academics were willing to ask such a question, rather than a drug dealer on a sink estate should worry everyone who wants high quality law enforcement. I’ve known people in London who’ve been victims of crime subjected to insensitive lines of questioning playing on stereotypes just because they were a student. Heaven knows how bad it is if you’re not a white British middle-class male.
Has long-running dissatisfaction with the Police gone from fringe to mainstream? Look at America – from time to time there’s an outrage surrounding a Police Brutality incident – Rodney King or George Floyd – that precipitates a riot, the police back off for a bit, then things regress to a dysfunctional norm. Mainstream US politicians aren’t prepared to challenge the police strongly enough and for long enough to effect significant change.
Could the UK be any different? Rob Blackie, the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor is making history by being the first ever mainstream politician to run for major office on a ticket of Police reform, his most prominent slogan is ‘fix the Met’.
I must stress that as Liberals the Lib Dems aren’t an anti-Police party, one of our former London Mayor candidates Brian Paddick was a deputy assistant commissioner in the Met. We are willing to admit that institutions aren’t perfect and that the culture and quality of recruits in forces could be a lot better, however.
Which brings me to the Fire Brigade. When I first visited City Hall in October 2022 I got wind of a report being drafted about London Fire Brigade by Nazir Afzal. Afzal is former chief Crown Prosecutor for North West England, whenever he appears on broadcast media I think ‘that guy has a brain the size of a planet’, to my mind he’s one of the most impressive figures in British public life. A very authoritative voice, therefore.
The report he helmed is ‘Independent Culture Review’, this was produced in response to the suicide of trainee fireman Jaden Francois-Esprit in August 2020. At the time Afzal’s report was damning, The Guardian commented thus, “The independent report into the London Fire Brigade includes the anonymous accounts of more than 2,000 staff members detailing abuse by co-workers, including from a black firefighter who had a noose placed above his locker and a Muslim colleague who had bacon and sausages stuffed in his pockets. Female firefighters reported being groped, beaten and having their helmets filled with urine.”
In the two years since the report came out we’ve heard platitudes from senior management at London Fire Brigade, but not a great deal of response from the Mayor about precisely how to tackle the alpha male wannabe culture within the organisation. Is Sadiq Khan the right person to take on a hitherto respected and trusted institution like the Fire Brigade? He has the mandate to get tough with any institution under his wing, but does he have the appetite and nous to bring about any culture change? We haven’t seen the change we need yet . . .
The Lib Dems vision for London, Rob Blackie Lib Dems mayor candidate, all four major candidates at a Jewish Community hustings
London’s night time economy
We’ve had declarations of emergencies in the last few years – climate and cost-of-living – now I’m calling it – we have a night time economy emergency. Pubs, restaurants, night clubs, all forms of night time entertainment – comedy, cinema, theatre, are in crisis. This isn’t an overnight sensation though recent events such as Brexit and the spike in energy costs have made things a lot worse. This is a long term structural problem, in between 2010 and 2017 London lost half of all its night clubs, as documented by Vice magazine. The night club sector is particularly dynamic, but what happened is that a load of clubs shuttered after the global financial crisis and nothing came along to take their place when the economy started to recover.
Brexit has hit the restaurant sector hard – it has pushed up the price of many foodstuffs sourced from the EU and many Europeans that were working front and back of house have gone home since 2016.
All restaurants serving European style cuisine have had to jack up their prices and many have had to shorten their opening hours due to staff shortages. It’s not clear how these problems are resolved without the UK joining the Single Market/Customs Union or full Rejoin. As that’s not on the table for now, the UK government and Mayor need to look at other measures, most obviously support for energy costs and perhaps business rate relief or tax breaks on alcohol sold in restaurants. Without serious intervention pubs, clubs, nightclubs, cinemas, all entertainment venues will continue to wither and perish in London.
What of the Mayor’s record on hospitality and culture? I like to give credit where credit is due and the Mayor set up a new body called the Creative Land Trust in 2019. Its mission is to establish more studio space for artists – this is an important intervention because usually such space is less profitable than mainstream commercial, retail or residential space so it has been declining and crowded out over time.
I’d like to see the CLT given a bigger budget and its remit widened to provide rehearsal space for musicians and performance arts space for dance and drama.
By contrast, one of the Mayor’s most high-profile employees is the Night Czar Amy Lamé. After several years it’s extremely difficult to know what the Night Czar does and what her achievements are – she’s had a hand in stopping the closure of one high profile night club, that’s about it. This is a role that needs to be given meaningful powers or abolished.
What other pro-entertainment policies are out there? The Lib Dems have adopted the Music Venues Trust policy of a levy on large venue revenues to be redistributed to smaller venues. For context the stadium concert end of the market is booming – Wembley stadium has a record 12 gigs this summer, beating the previous record in 1988 when Michael Jackson did eight gigs as part of his Bad tour. If only a couple of % of that revenue could be trickled down to the 50 – 200 capacity venues throughout the capital, what a shot in the arm that would be (a 3.5% levy exists in France).
London transport – in recovery mode
The last time I campaigned in London was for the 2022 borough council elections and it was clear that immediately post-covid that London transport was in poor shape, even in relatively central areas. People told me unprompted in Blackheath that they were suffering from both bus cuts and train cuts. Since then Crossrail has opened, its passenger numbers are stellar and in general tube, rail and bus user numbers are crawling back to their pre-pandemic levels. This has made several right-wing newspapers that take a lot of advertising from Big Auto who predicted the end of public transport look rather stupid.
On the one hand we can now be optimistic about a sustained post-pandemic recovery in London’s public transport, on the other there are no substantial capital projects being built or signed off for the foreseeable future. The West London Orbital, Bakerloo Line Extension, DLR Extension to Abbey Wood, Tramlink extension to Sutton, splitting the Northern Line in two – we have no clear idea as to if or when any of these would happen.
Transport policy discussions have evolved to address the damage that the pandemic has done to London transport, there are calls to reverse the bus and train cuts, and to address the growing maintenance backlog that is starting to affect services such as the Central Line.
In a world of lowered horizons the Lib Dems have quite rightly called for more of the smaller scale projects to be advanced – TfL has a long-term programme to make all tube stations step-free, for instance. This has advanced at glacial pace for some time. After Silvertown tunnel is completed next year, where will the capital projects budget go? At the very least we could speed up the step-free programme, it’s a poor lookout that we are a long way from completing this in 2024.
When it comes to transport, to a large extent London is hamstrung by a hostile Tory government that is trying its best to hang the capital out to dry. That does not mean that the Mayor has no discretion with the resources at his disposal however. If I’m going to be critical, I believe the Mayor has forsaken a lot of revenue via a multi-year fares freeze, and that the Friday fare cut exacerbates that. Along with the £2.2Bn spent on the Silvertown tunnel, there’s a number of executive decisions made that one could take issue with.
For what it’s worth, I’m in favour of more river crossings East of Tower Bridge in principle. When you look at Silvertown in detail however – it’s only a few hundred metres down river of the Blackwall Tunnel, there’s no separate provision for cycling/pedestrians, it extends tolling for crossings East of central London (users of the Dartford crossings were lied to about them going toll free, they have to retain a charge because there will be a toll on the future Gravesend – Tilbury Lower Thames Crossing) – it makes less and less sense.
While it can’t be rowed back on now, it’s a huge shame that directly after completing Crossrail we didn’t maintain that momentum and crack on with other smaller and easier rail and tube projects around the capital instead of TfL’s budget being blown on Silvertown. Somehow the next Mayor needs to come up with a funding model for new lines, because we now know there is an appetite for them.
Housing – staying safe and avoiding rip offs
Traditionally the debate around housing in London was a bit of a pantomime, a Mayor would set an ambitious housing target of 50,000 a year and achieve 20 – 25,000 instead. Rinse and repeat. Now we have a regularly updated London Plan bursting with ‘opportunity areas’ which should in the long term lead to a much more permissive planning environment. Whether that will make much difference to numbers overall in the long run we’ll just have to wait and see.
Unfortunately for London the debate on housing has moved onto much darker areas. London’s social housing and high-rise sector is still reeling from the Grenfell Tower disaster. This flagged up fire safety issues as a result of construction industry short cuts that were going to haunt us at one time or another. It’s also in turn shone a light on the iniquities of leasehold, and the folly of shared ownership. This is something flagged up by George Orwell as effectively a scam as far back as the 1930s, but because our political culture supports major landowners so much nothing has been done about it.
Thousands of leasehold flat-owners and renters across London are now being gouged by service charge hikes. These are due to a number of reasons – post-Grenfell safety remediation measures, rises in energy costs, passing on mortgage rate costs etc.
Even council house rents have gone up far above the rate of inflation, sometimes with virtually no notice. One way or another Londoners are being ripped off by property costs in unprecedented ways, a major headache when the average rent in London is £1200 a month, that’s £200 above the national average.
How would the Lib Dems accelerate house building activity? The 2021 manifesto floated the idea of a London Housing Development Corporation. At the time this was to enable more conversions to residential schemes, many of which have been developer-led and of poor quality. Lots of opportunity and room for improvement there.
The London-wide developer is an idea that’s been carried forward to this year’s manifesto but with a greater emphasis on taking closer control of brownfield sites that could be developed, in partnership with public bodies such as TfL or the borough councils.
London is a part of the country where private developers wanting to build mid-market or luxury housing need no encouragement so I’m pleased to see the Lib Dems housing policy concentrates on social housing, and establishing a legal fighting fund so that tenants can take on ALMOs, Housing Associations, and Peter Rachman style landlords that are mismanaging properties. Low quality social housing and bottom-of-the-market private housing has always existed, it’s just a question of how much the political class acknowledges it and tackles the problem.
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