Tag Archives: London

Nov 28 2012
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Two false hopes that won’t solve London’s housing crisis

Darren Johnson has issued a report arguing that building new homes can’t solve London’s housing crisis alone. He suggests the Mayor should consider other solutions including smart regulations for the private rented sector, taxing land values and setting up land auctions.

But there are two policies you won’t see in his list. Two policies that Greens often bring up in discussions about housing. I wanted to take some time this evening to explain why I think we should talk about them a little less, and in a very different light.

Before I launch in, I would heartily recommend this blog entry by Liz Emerson as an overview of the sources of our housing crisis, to give an idea of why we need to act. The Green Party’s policy platform is chock-full of good ideas to rectify this, but when it comes to building new homes I think Greens sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of the argument, and sometimes put forward two ideas that frankly aren’t good enough.

I have to make clear – while I worked with Darren on his report I am writing this blog entry in a personal capacity, and this should in no way be taken as reflecting Darren’s views, those of my employer the GLA or of the Green Party.

I also have to make clear that this blog is about London. The national picture is bound to be quite different, but I think many of the basic points still hold.

We should use empty homes before building new ones

The claim runs as follows: there are lots of empty homes in London, we should be making better use of them before building new homes.

Thr problem: It’s true that there are lots of empty homes in London, and that it would be good if we could make use of them. But there aren’t nearly enough to make new housebuilding unnecessary. Not even close.

The latest figures from Empty Homes show that there were 74,811 empty homes in November 2011. But of those, only 29,540 were empty for more than six months. A home empty for a shorter period of time could well be in the middle of renovation or waiting for tenants. So fewer than 1% of homes in London are empty for long periods of time – not very many, is it?

Empty homes are also often quite hard to bring into use. They can be in a bad way, on housing estates awaiting demolition, or owned by some grumpy absentee landlord. Councils, the Mayor and the Government all try to solve these problems, and they could definitely try harder. Our 2012 manifesto pledged to:

Set up a clearing house to offer all publicly owned derelict land to Community Land Trusts and to make all suitable publicly-owned empty homes available to self-help co-operatives to bring them back into short-life or permanent use.

But it would be a tall order to bring every last empty home into use, and to stop any more becoming empty for more than six months.

What’s more, the experts who advised the Government and the Mayor on housing need recommended that we need between 33,100 and 44,700 homes every year for twenty years just to deal with overcrowding and stabilise house prices. So those 29,540 long-term empty homes would deliver at most one year’s supply, leaving at least another 630,000 homes to build over the following nineteen years.

We should re-balance the UK away from London

The policy claim: there are another 250,000 long-term empty homes elsewhere in the UK, and if prices in London are so overcooked because it’s where all the jobs are, then we should give other regions a big economic boost to re-balance the nation.  This way lots of people would move away to Plymouth, Preston and Perth, the market would settle down in London and the south east and we could make better use of the housing stock elsewhere.

The first problem with this argument is that there is already quite a large net flow of people out of London. This diagram from the GLA’s strategic housing market assessment neatly illustrates the point:

The need for housing isn’t coming from job-hungry Yorkshiremen, but from Londoners having lots of babies at a faster rate than people are dying, and from a large net migration from outside the UK. This has changed slightly during the recession for various interesting reasons, but the basic direction of movement remains. A lot of those people leaving are retired, or moving out to commuter towns to raise families. So in fact we would need to persuade even more people to leave London to seek work elsewhere, persuade Londoners not to have so many children, and persuade far more international migrants to settle elsewhere.

The second problem is that these very big changes are far beyond the wit of the Mayor of London and local councils. We can certainly talk about these big trends and our ideas for the national Government. But when the Conservative or Labour government continues to fail to grapple with these trends, we have to be ready to say what we would do if elected in Camden, Lewisham and Bromley. It’s not good enough to throw up our hands and complain about the Government’s economic strategy.

Sticking to the facts

We can definitely say we should do more to bring empty homes back into use, and to re-balance the UK’s economy to boost the north, west, Wales and Scotland. I don’t agree with those who tend to write these ideas off because they are so fixed on new housing supply being the silver bullet. There is no silver bullet, Darren’s work shows that in no uncertain terms. We need every good idea we can get.

But we cannot pretend that they would be sufficient to meet London’s chronic housing need and that they are therefore a reason not to build new homes. Doing so makes us as guilty as those who pretend we can solve climate change and carry on flying more and more if we just build some nuclear power stations and insulate our lofts. We know that the facts don’t support the waffly half-hearted policies of other parties on climate change, so we should be sure that the facts support our policies on housing.

There are often issues with new housing developments. They can be on unsuitable land that should be protected for farming (or they can be on useless pony fields for little princesses); they can be low density car-dependent suburbs (or smart extensions with good transport links); they can feature too little affordable housing (or at least get some built in areas that desperately need it). But we must build housing in parts of the country where the need for housing is greater than the stock available. The social and economic costs are so severe that it should be one of our highest priorities to ensure this happens.

We needn’t be slaves to the market – we can advocate building council and co-operative housing for example – but we also cannot be the party of wealthy elderly councillors blocking housing needed by younger constituents as the Integenerational Foundation has warned.

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Oct 26 2012
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London’s natural geography

I’ve been playing around with open data from OpenStreetMap and Natural England to make a pretty map of “green and blue infrastructure” in London. Here’s the result:

You can download a PDF version suitable for printing here: natural_london.

I’m pretty happy with the result, my first real attempt to produce something useful with QGIS. The data I used was:

There’s no reason the Natural England data couldn’t be manually added to OpenStreetMap, giving us a complete dataset of natural features. I just chose to get on and do it this way rather than wait, or try to add all the data across areas of the city I don’t know well and am not going to visit any time soon. I also didn’t really need to use the Ordnance Survey data for boundaries, but it’s slightly more accurate and complete than OpenStreetMap data.

The map is probably missing lots of smaller patches of green space, including grass verges, green roofs and biodiverse brownfield sites. The biggest omission is the humble private garden. They cover 24% of London’s land!

But the map at least shows the more obvious, visible, public green spaces, and is a nice example of what a geek with no GIS training (but years of playing with OpenStreetMap) can do with free software and free data these days.

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May 15 2012
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Routing around pollution – any help?

While we’re benefiting from all this rain in London, which keeps air pollution at bay, I’ve been wondering about including pollution data in OpenStreetMap-based routing engines. The trouble is that I lack the technical skills to implement this, so I’m writing this post in the hope that somebody might be inspired to give it a go.

Another hazy air pollution episode in London

Air pollution is the second biggest cause of premature deaths in the UK after smoking. Here’s a little league table of nasties taken from Department of Health data:

Smoking – 87,000 premature deaths per year
Air pollution – 29,000
Alcohol – 22,000
Obesity – 9,000

The main pollutants in cities are particulates (PM10, PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and nitrogen oxide (NO). Unlike the pea souper fogs of years gone by, these are invisible to the human eye but very deadly. They’re most concentrated on busy congested roads and around airports – so unsurprisingly in central London, around Heathrow and City airports, and in congestion hot spots dotted around the rest of London. We have some of the worst air pollution in Europe.

Long term exposure to these critters is obviously a bad thing, so it would be nice if we could find routes to walk or cycle without being affected. To some extent it’s just a matter of avoiding main roads, but some are much worse than others and in central London there are plenty of non-A roads that should be avoided as well.

WalkIt has a neat little feature that lets you choose a “low pollution” route. This basically tries to avoid roads with high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide. But it doesn’t cover the whole of the city, it doesn’t take account of nitrogen oxide or particulates, and it’s only for pedestrians.

So… who fancies taking the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory maps, delivered in 20m grid shapefiles, and plugging them into one of the various OpenStreetMap routing engines to provide a walking & cycling “avoid polluted roads” option for London?

Bonus points could go to anyone who uses live data from the London Air Quality Network and Defra’s air quality monitoring web site (with its latest readings from a few monitoring stations) to give more or less priority depending on conditions.

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Feb 14 2012
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Trip Stylist review: stroll around the City

A mere eighteen months after it had been given to us, Rachel and I went on our Trip Stylist day out around the City of London, “exploring hidden corners and treasures“.

We started out with brunch in a very nice little café tucked so well away that it made me wonder how anyone could find it without a tip. It was a very chilly morning, so a warm start was just what we needed. Rachel had mushrooms and a poached egg on soda toast, I tucked into a savoury pancake mountain.

Our brunch, just the ticket to start the day

We set off on full stomachs along narrow streets and past a few recommended parks in nooks and plaques in crannies to the Museum of London. I’ve cycled and walked past it innumerable times, that odd bunker in the middle of a roundabout, but never entered before. The exhibition design isn’t all that easy to follow, but it took us from the days of the hippopotamus wandering around the unpopulated Thames valley, through our hunting the aurochs to extinction, past Saxon and Viking and Roman and Norman invasions… well you get the idea.

A good mix of social history and Great Figures, including a fascinating collection of newspapers, pamphlets and placards from the turbulent early 20th century. I’d never heard of the Green Shirts, a left wing movement who wanted to end wage slavery and free man from the machine so we could enjoy more leisure time!

We then walked via a few other hidden treasures to the Guildhall Art Gallery, an altogether more establishment view of the world. The collection featured the usual heroic battles and religious scenes telling the ruling class version of English history, along with Victorian representations of classical scenes such as a large striking portrait of Klytaemnestra shortly after she committed her gory deed.

Our late afternoon stroll took us to the ruined church of St Dunstan-in-the-East, a lovely little haven and a reminder of the City’s deep and convoluted roots. Built in about 1100, it sheltered black death sufferers, was damaged in the Great Fire of London but saved from destruction by local schoolboys, expanded with designs by Christopher Wren, rebuilt again in the early 19th century, bombed out during the Blitz, and finally turned into a garden in the 1960s.

St Dunstan-in-the-East church in the City of London

From here we were advised to take the bus over to Whitechapel for our evening meal and drinks, but having time to spare we kept walking. It was surprisingly enjoyable strolling around an area I’m normally scurrying or pedaling through. The curry, at Tayyabs, was of course delicious, rounding off a fun day out.

The only thing I missed was a street map of the wider area. We occasionally hit temporary road closures, or got slightly confused, or needed the loo, or wanted a cup of tea. Knowing where to nip off to would have been a great help. A tool that could print off a map taking data from OpenStreetMap with just this useful info would be the perfect complement to the guide.

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Feb 07 2012
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Green doesn’t need to mean gentrification

Jim Gleeson has an interesting blog entry about the consequences of making a city more liveable. In short, there is a danger that making an area more liveable can price out lower income people. By reducing air pollution and generally improving the local environment in more deprived areas,  richer people will start to move in displacing the people who should have benefitted.

His prescription is more housing supply to accompany environmental improvements. But we need to think a bit more carefully about this to get the medicine right for places like London.

As he points out, the economic benefits of making an area more desirable will largely go to existing home owners and landlords as the value of the land, and therefore the rent they can charge, increases. Lower income people will be forced to move, presumably (according to Jim’s argument) to less liveable areas. Council and housing association tenants who are secure in their homes gain a nicer environment, but they have no direct stake in the increased value of the land their homes sit on.

Building more homes as Jim suggests could help to keep prices down, meaning less of a windfall gain for land owners and possibly more stable rents. But in practice, due to London’s policy of “mixed and balanced communities”, deprived areas tend to see council housing demolished and replaced overwhelmingly with housing for sale in order to “balance out” the social “mix” of people in the area. There’s no way anyone with an average income and average wealth would be able to buy a new flat in most areas of London on the open market.

The flats will be bought by wealthier-than-average people, and probably many then let on the private market, with a good number of those subsidised by housing benefit. So while more supply might dampen the economic consequences of making an area more liveable, and while it might spread the wealth a little more widely, the economic benefits will still mostly go to wealthier people.

You would need to increase house building across London to 50% higher than Boris Johnson’s aspirational target just to stabilise prices. It would be interesting to know whether there is enough spare land and available development finance to raise supply levels high enough in order to gradually reduce prices so that the benefits of new homes would be principally accrued by ordinary Londoners.

But there are other ways in which we can reduce unequal access to nice local environments while maintaining or reducing levels of economic inequality. Housing supply is undoubtedly part of the picture, but policies need to be a bit more sophisticated to achieve this aim.

One simple policy would be to try to build lots more council housing in wealthier areas that already enjoy high environmental quality. That would require a government to reinstate an adequate housing capital budget; the new budget for London in 2011-15 is two-thirds lower than than the budget for 2008-11!

Another would be to ensure all the new housing is put into the control of a Community Land Trust, which owns the land and so can keep homes permanently affordable. Members of the Trust, usually a co-operative, use any rise in land values to benefit the local community and not private individuals. To date, there is only one example of this in London – Coin Street. Despite valiant efforts and credible plans from various other communities, the HCA, GLA and government have done little to make this concept happen.

A third more radical solution – radical as in dealing with the root of the problem (from radix, Latin for ‘root’) – would be to bring back taxation on land. Winston Churchill and Lloyd George both tried, and failed, to do this at the turn of the 20th century. They were blocked by wealthy landowners in the Lords, whose ancestors got rid of them as the power of the Crown diminished.

We have a tax system that raises income off hard work and consumer goods, and that leaves people to rake in huge gains from increases in land values and capital gains with comparatively little or no tax. If we brought back “schedule A” taxes, land values wouldn’t rise so much, the benefits could be clawed back for investment in affordable housing, all local residents could therefore benefit including council tenants, and people might be encouraged to invest their savings in productive stocks and shares rather than dead bricks and mortar.

These solutions have all been applied in the not-too-distant past. But as with the debate over the National Planning Policy Framework, they seem to get overlooked in simplistic debates over false choices like “housing supply vs. conservation”.

Jim’s post is much more sophisticated, looking at the relationship between environmental improvements and the housing market. But his prescription – more supply – needs to be equally sophisticated to ensure that we deliver environmental and social justice side by side.

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Dec 07 2011
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Never mind Wonga, use a credit union

Payday loans have been in the news today, with industry figureheads trying to persuade the public that they’re offering the punters a good service. Well, if you’re seriously stuck for cash you need or have loans you’re struggling to service, a much better place to start would be a credit union.

London Mutual Credit Union, for example, is a not for profit organisation that provides ethical financial services to Southwark and Lambeth boroughs. These services include savings accounts, current accounts and loans to people who find themselves financially excluded from high street banks. They have no shareholders, and all their profits are returned to members.

Unlike Wonga & co they are genuinely providing useful services without looking to make a very sizeable profit off the backs of the idiots and the vulnerable.

Anyone struggling financially would also be best off seeking help from the Citizen’s Advice Bureau and checking out the many handy tips on web sites like Money Saving Expert (a personal favourite).

Thankfully we won’t have Wonga sponsoring our public transport network this New Year’s eve. Apparently Boris has gone for a booze company instead, who promise to promote responsible drinking. Cheers!

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Oct 17 2011
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Southern Fried London hits the spot

Here’s to Jenny Newham’s Southern Fried London, a collection of our finest grease merchants and heart attack hucksters. Thanks also to the weird and wonderful world of the South London Press, one of two locals in my neck of the woods, for bringing the blog to my attention.

I embarked on my own obsessive photo-documentary project with a friend in an otherwise ordinary market town many years ago, snapping photos of ugly gardens in Bedford. For a year or so I couldn’t walk along a street without noting ugly gardens and trying to remember their location. Perhaps a precursor to my mapping hobby?

The project was intended as a loving tribute to the dull places in which most of us live, and a comment on the influence of the endless gardening TV programmes at the time rather than a criticism of the owners. I doff my hat to anyone who makes an effort to do more with their garden than store old washing machines and weeds.

Like Jenny we ended up arousing the interest of the local media, which in turn led to a full page spread in the Daily Mail. We turned down subsequent invitations to debate garden design with TV personality gardeners on BBC Breakfast and Richard and Judy because they obviously missed the point and wanted us to attack the celebs or the garden owners.

It’s nice that Jenny clearly likes the chicken shop fronts, and isn’t just sneering.

My personal favourites aren’t all chicken takeaways, but you can find them on Denmark Hill. It starts with a Pizza Hut, which has been bested by a Tasty Hut just two doors over, followed a little further south by a Tasty House. Who will raise them a Tasty Mansion?

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Jul 19 2011
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Getting speed limits into OpenStreetMap

I’ve started trying to add speed limits data to roads in my patch of Southwark. Two things made me start looking at them…

First, I go everywhere by bicycle, which means speed limits and London congestion are of very little relevance to my journey times. But I noticed that journey planners like CloudMade’s offer wildly optimistic journey times for cars. Even ignoring congestion, I thought, they can’t be taking account of speed limits, which across London are lower than the national assumptions. For example, most main roads have a 30 mph speed limit and a growing number of roads, residential and main, have a safer 20 mph limit.

The second reason is that speed limits have been a big issue for cyclists recently, featuring in campaigns around issues like Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark’s Transport Strategy.

So here’s a snapshot of our data around Peckham and East Dulwich after a few sessions on my evening commute, using ITO’s excellent tool:

Orange roads are 30 mph, green are 20 mph or lower, grey are main roads without any data; all the minor roads without speed limit data just show through from the background. Getting more roads down to 20 mph will make them much calmer, more pleasant and safer for people on foot and bike.

Not a bad start, but we have a long way to go! I could probably get data out of TfL and Southwark Council. But I’m interested in seeing what I can actually find on the ground, both because the two sometimes don’t match up and because it made me aware of just how varied the signposting is.

With some roads it’s very obvious – it’s a short residential road with a signpost and a huge “20 mph” painted onto the road. On other roads you could easily miss it. Walworth Road has a 20 mph limit, but if you missed the single signpost going either north or south past endless distracting shops, signposts and shoppers, and buses that often block your view, you could be forgiven for assuming it’s 30 mph like most other roads.

Back to OpenStreetMap, it would be good to get better coverage of speed limits. I notice that some parts of the country like Norwich are very well mapped, while London – with the exception of my experiment, Islington and a little bit of Tower Hamlets – barely has any.

One for a winter mapping party, Harry? Or maybe another good reason to get cycling and pedestrian groups interested? I’ll talk to the Southwark campaigners…

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May 22 2011
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Open scrutiny in the age of open data

This is the first of perhaps two or three short essays inspired by Emer Coleman‘s masters dissertation on open data, written in a personal capacity and not as part of my job. In this post I want to look at what her proposed model of “iterative and adaptive open government” would mean for scrutiny of the Mayor of London. Her dissertation considers the difference between the New Public Management approach, characterised by public managers setting the goals and other public managers auditing their performance, and an emerging “Open Governance” approach using open data.

Continue reading →

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Apr 19 2011
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Maps, open data and activism on the Heygate estate

Andy Allan’s excellent post on cycle campaigning reminded me to blog about some mapping help I’ve given a campaign group called the Elephant Amenity Network. One of their long-running issues has been the clearance and demolition of the unfairly maligned Heygate Estate, over 1000 council homes that should have been refurbished for council tenants instead of being knocked down for aspiring home owners to move into the area.

A photo of the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle, London

One of the best features of the Heygate Estate is the urban forest that has grown there in the past thirty or forty years. But the few remaining residents and local campaigners fear the “regeneration” will see many or even most of them cut down.

Through a friend who is involved with the campaign, I came along to help them map the trees that are there now. Knowing what you have seems like a good first step to saving it.

So I helped them enter the trees into OpenStreetMap using the OpenEcoMaps install of the Potlatch 2 editor, set-up a simple map that shows them as clickable objects on a map, and provided them with a spreadsheet of all the data at the end of the process.

Some other clever bods in the campaign then used a system called CAVAT (Capital Asset Value for Amenity Trees) that puts a financial value on the trees. They estimate the value to be well in excess of £7.6m! Here is the CAVAT valuation laid on top of OpenStreetMap:

I’m glad to say this has become a case study in a recent London Assembly report into the state of street trees in London, which makes recommendations about the need for open street tree data and uses this Heygate mapping to show both the demand for this data and how useful it can be.

Since mapping the trees ourselves, I’ve received a file with all the trees in Southwark from the council with permission to use and share it, which is brilliant. I did a test import in East Dulwich/Peckham Rye, but stopped short because of rendering issues. It would be great to be able to import the lot and see if citizens can keep the data more up to date than the council, or perhaps even collaborate with the council and Trees for Cities?

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