Don't leave London - just make it work

A minister has said Londoners should move elsewhere to ease pressure on a crowded city. But there are other solutions

Published in the Evening Standard

For a while, London's tourists were blissfully unaware that this city has a problem with water. Since they didn't have lawns to water or cars to clean, they had no idea that the capital is running short and not so much as an inkling of Thames Water's hosepipe ban.

They know about it now, though, since Ken Livingstone has covered Tube stations and bus stops with posters featuring a toilet bowl and the not-quite-memorable slogan: Don't Rush to Flush If It's Just a Pee. Some visitors may even have heard the mayor himself spout forth, if you'll pardon the expression, on this subject, testifying that he has not flushed at home after a mere number one for well over a year.

Now, however, one of the mayor's Labour colleagues has come up with an even more ingenious solution to London's water woes. Environment minister Lord Rooker said the answer was for Londoners to move to wetter parts of the country. Or as the Standard headline captured it: "Want water? Move to Wales."

Perhaps Rooker might want to set a lead and head off to Abergavenny himself. Oh no, he would say, I couldn't possibly: my work is in London. Well, join the club.

More useful would be a determination to solve the problem rather than run away from it. In the case of water, that doesn't mean praying for rain in the south east, but tackling one of the key sources of the London shortage: leaks. At the last count, Thames Water was losing just shy of 900m litres a day through leaks. This summer the company missed its leak reduction target for the third year in a row. Now the German parent firm, RWE, has sold Thames off, leaving themselves half a billion pounds richer. The rest of us, meanwhile, are still saddled with a fifth-rate service. New owners Macquarie must now to continue, if not expand, the #3.1bn investment programme they have inherited, doing their best to upgrade the pipes and stop those leaks. Either that or they persuade us all to move to Wales.

And this logic does not just apply to the woeful case of London's water. In every aspect of city life, it would be tempting to follow Rooker's lead, throw our hands up and declare that London’s just too big and that people should live somewhere else. After all, there’s a kind of madness in a nation in which more and more people huddle in a cramped southeastern corner, while the rest of the country remains spaciously open. The latest government statistics project an increase in London's population by 20% by 2026, far outstripping low single-digit growth elsewhere in the UK, while the numbers in some places, Scotland among them, are actually shrinking.

In an ideal, logical world, those Londoners who are tonight crammed into heaving Tube trains or stuck in M25 traffic jams would instead be spread about, so that they could walk to work across the heathered hills of the Highlands or cycle along the roomy banks of the river Tyne. (Although the reality is they would all be getting in their cars and doing more damage to the environment).

But we don't live in an ideal, logical world. Instead we live in a UK whose engine and hub is London, responsible for 18 per cent of the economic activity of the entire country (even with just 12% of the population). Some may wish that were different, but that's the way it is. And it’s the task of government to face up to that - and make it work.

Labour, to its credit, seemed to recognise that. That's why it ended the absurdity of London being the only great city in the world without its own strategic authority. It put that right, creating the mayoralty. But its responsibility cannot end there. It has to ensure that London is equipped to do the job the rest of the country relies on it to perform.

That starts with infrastructure. Leaky old water pipes are part of it but so, centrally, is transport. It is absurd that Londoners are left waiting for nods and winks from the Chancellor as to whether or not Crossrail - the east-west link this city has been crying out for for decades - will be funded. The latest signals are good, with a hint from Gordon Brown yesterday that there could be movement on the #12bn needed, maybe even getting the project moving by next summer. But there shouldn’t be a wait at all: linking the financial district around Liverpool Street to its counterpart in Canary Wharf is essential if London is to retain its pre-eminence as a financial centre, and linking both to Heathrow, as Crossrail would, is a must.

Next comes housing. Right now, we assume London is as dense as it could be. Wrong. If London were as dense as Paris, there would be 35m people living here. But with population growing, we are going to have to get denser. Which means, horror of horrors, that we will have to become more like Paris.

That will mean building upward, with more vertical apartment blocks or at least more compact, terraced housing. We’ve already doing that in some areas: Bayswater and Earls Court are some of the densest areas of London. ‘Are they so horrible?’ asks the LSE’s Tony Travers. New York, with its tall roomy apartment buildings, shows it can be done. Says Travers: “We need to be more Park Avenue, less Brick Lane.” And the place to do it need not be greenfield sites, but could be the vast swathes of brown field east of Canary Wharf.

That will require a change in the planning system, overcoming some of the traditional resistance to building upward, and a whole lot of investment. It will also require a cultural change by some Londoners, as we move towards higher-density living. What we can’t do is hope everyone is just going to go away, as Rooker imagines. This is one wave we cannot turn back; instead we just have to learn to ride it.

Posted on October 19, 2006 12:21 PM

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