Make somewhere else the capital
First, some simple maths to show how current thinking is failing to solve London's
housing shortage. There are 350,000 people on social housing
waiting lists in London. London Mayoral candidates promise to build
hundreds-of-thousands of new homes, but experience shows us they are unlikely to do this
and certainly not fast enough – over the past eight years, in Ken Livingstone's and Boris Johnson's
respective tenures at City Hall,
barely 110,000 affordable homes were built. At that sluggish rate of construction it would take 25 years to house those on today's waiting lists, and that does not take into account anyone else joining those lists over that period.
Now here's a statistic that represents part of the
solution. There are 122,000 civil servants working in London, 27 per
cent of the national total. If we move most or all of them out of the
city, then their homes and offices become available for occupation to
the rest of us. This is not as mad as it sounds. The BBC is moving
most of its activities to Manchester, and many government agencies
and departments have moved out in the past, such
as Companies House to Cardiff and tax offices to Bradford.
Moving the remainder of
government out of London, including MPs and peers, will provide much
needed space for the city's burgeoning population and hard-pressed private
sector, both of which are being priced-out by spiralling rents,
sales prices and occupancy costs. Whitehall could become a new
business district, or, if the buildings are not suitable for modern
office use, transformed into a highly desirable residential area. This
makes more sense than moving the city's vulnerable to social housing
estates in Stoke-on-Trent which is what Newham council wants to do.
An added benefit – it
would give an economic boost to whichever city became the new capital
of the United Kingdom. All those politicians, lobbyists and civil
servants spending money in shops and restaurants – what city wouldn't
want that? Moving the capital out of London to a new geographical
location could have political benefits too. I would suggest Liverpool
– it is in the middle of the island of Britain, closer to Scotland,
around the corner from Wales, across the water from Northern Ireland
and immediately in touch with struggling industrial towns in the
English North and Midlands.
During this Age of
Austerity it makes financial sense for government to move north. It
can sell or lease-out government-owned property for high prices in
expensive London, while buying and leasing its new premises beyond
the city for a fraction of that cost. Civil servants will be amazed
by how much further their salaries will stretch outside London, even
with London-weighting taken off – another saving to the taxpayer.
As Germany, China and
the United States have shown a country's political and commercial
centres do not need to be in the same city.
As analysis
consistently shows, such as The Wealth Report by Citi and
Knight Frank, London is the world's top city, but it needs room to
expand, to provide more homes and work places. Redeveloping the
Docklands into a new financial services sector, with space for new,
affordable and suitable offices, has helped London beat off
commercial competition from Frankfurt and New York since the late
1980s, but now it needs to adapt again. Yes, building more homes and
filling empty properties will partly solve London's housing problems.
But more must be done. If London is to remain capital of the world,
then it may need to stop being capital of the United Kingdom. As the
increasingly cosmopolitan make-up of London's populations shows, it
has outgrown that role.
