Beyond our Ken?

Creating the ‘sustainable city’ is a never-ending journey, but has Ken Livingstone made a creditable start as London’s first elected mayor? We’ve been talking to him – and his rivals.

We’ve been taking soundings on what he should, could and could not achieve. And we’ve been asking what should be top of the voters’ wish list for the next four years. When Londoners were given the chance to elect their own mayor in the millennium year, they plumped for Ken Livingstone, the ex-Labour independent, defrocked for defying the party that said he couldn’t be their man. There’s little doubt that this maverick status played to the advantage of the street-savvy charmer, ‘our Ken’ with his mixture of bright ideas and bravado.

All of which he would need, to take on the challenge of infusing a creaking megacity with some kind of blend of sustainable solutions and survivable compromises. Now, four years down the line, election time rolls round again in June. Seeking a second term, Livingstone has been restored from party exile to the Labour fold, which he says “can only help”.

It’s a reference to his effectiveness in the job alongside a Labour government, rather than to his chance of winning, which was looking like a racing certainty even without the party ticket. New Labour just cottoned on to that most pragmatic of principles, ‘if you can’t beat him, join him’. He must have done something right. He has – and it’s called the congestion charge.

When we asked the opinions of urban policy buffs, NGOs and campaign groups concerned with London and its future, it stood out as his signal success. When we asked his rival mayoral candidates, they clearly judged it to be a case for credit where credit’s due. When we asked Ken himself, he called it “totally ground-breaking and a huge success”.

Indeed, outside of the league of perpetually disgruntled shopkeepers and the campaign for the untrammelled rights of cars, the received opinion is that it’s a vote-winner.

“I will be happy to be judged on making London (a) a truly sustainable city, tackling air quality, energy efficiency and recycling; (b) more affordable, in particular on childcare and housing; and (c) again regarded as the most exciting city in the world in which to live and visit.” – Ken Livingstone

It’s worth remembering how controversial it was – and how widespread and vocal the prophets of doom. “You might have thought I was suggesting the end of the world as we know it,” Livingstone told us. And there’s still a good political row to be had, and solutions to be found, on making the payment system smoother, less draconian towards the unwitting defaulter. Which is no mere sideshow – it’s about insisting that government, at any level, aspires to efficient and humane people-friendly delivery.

Nor is the wider issue of road pricing by any means done and dusted. In London transport policy terms the Next Big Thing looks like being Congestion Charge II. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the car, as it were.

A first extension would include the rest of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea. However far Livingstone wants to take it, the radical view of congestion charging espoused by Green mayoral candidate Darren Johnson would surely take more than one more mayoral term. He’d like to see it cover all of London within the M25 – in three concentric rings, with prices ascending towards the centre.

“There’s a huge advantage in a mandate that comes from 7.5 million Londoners. But good intentions have not always produced good practice or good outcomes.” – Steve Norris

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Conservative candidate Steve Norris. He does concede some merit in the central zone scheme, but he is fiercely critical of the charging arrangements and has even offered an amnesty for non-payers if he’s elected. Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes’s mantra is “work with the boroughs”, trusting in more local knowledge of problem areas and apparently confident that the technology could be used to target schemes on specific streets, at particular times of the day or week as appropriate.

And perhaps the most thoughtful – if least clear cut – offering is this from Ram Gidoomal of the Christian Peoples Alliance: “We would tackle congestion by looking at its root causes, for example bringing people’s home and work environments closer together, thus supporting vibrant mixed use, local communities.”

Breath of air

The emphasis, with the congestion charge, has been on traffic management and ‘getting London moving’. Beating the jams and freeing up the gridlock does make inner London more liveable, certainly – for motorists who pay the entry price, as well as for cabbies, cyclists, pedestrians and above all the users of buses within the zone. But – notwithstanding the exemptions for some low-emission vehicles – the congestion charge didn’t have overt targets in terms of either cutting carbon or making air in the city centre more breathable (as Stockholm’s will).

It’s striking, then, that Livingstone should be giving such high priority to air quality in his thinking about a second mayoral term. Putting pollution top of his list, he told us that “being able to breathe properly again” was the thing he looked forward to which would give him most pleasure. “The quality of air in London is a disgrace,” he said, “but now the congestion charge has proved so successful, it will be much easier to pursue low emission policies in London – which have been around for years, but which no previous government has had the confidence to introduce.”

So why has so little happened as yet on Low Emission Zones (LEZs), which could bar entry to high polluting lorries, coaches, buses and taxis? All Livingstone can really point to is a joint study last year by the mayor’s office, the government and the boroughs, which proposed that London could be designated as an LEZ by early 2007. If that’s on the cards, so too is wider roll-out of zero-emission (and, incidentally, almost zero-noise) hydrogen fuel cell buses, if the two currently being trialled [GF45] prove successful – but there’s obviously lots more ground that a determined mayor might cover.

Bus pass

Promises on buses loom large in the mayoral election campaign. Norris comes on like a positive evangelist for the benefits of swift smart buses swooping down bus lanes at all hours of the day and night. He’d go well beyond what Livingstone calls the ‘transformation’ of London’s bus network so far, which has clocked up “1,000 new accessible buses, the highest customer satisfaction ratings since records began and an increase in passenger numbers from 4.2 million to 6 million per day”. And what about free fares for kids? When the Labour group in the Assembly wanted to extend this to anyone under 18, they only got the mayor to go part of the way, with freedom just for children up to 11, half fares for the rest.

Mean streets to clean streets

If buses are big, so are nuisance, crime and policing – or, to put it more positively, cleaner safer neighbourhoods and fewer frightened residents. Despite Norris’s charge of softness on this front – his campaign website talks of zero-tolerance, although he himself says he’s keen to avoid being caught up in such sloganeering – the policing of London is something that Livingstone counts among the successes of his first term. “We have recruited an additional 4,500 police officers.

Crime – and the fear of crime – has fallen and we are now in a position to start to put the police where the public wants to see them.” More bobbies on the streets in local neighbourhoods is “undoubtedly the most effective way to make people feel safer in their city”, he says. And cleaning up the streets?

London Assembly deputy chair Samantha Heath laments the failure of seven London boroughs to sign up to the four-year London-wide Capital Standard programme, which is waging war on litter, graffiti, abandoned cars and vandalism. But it’s only those controlled by the Tories who aren’t on board, and Livingstone says he wants “to carry on making progress next term”. The programme’s benefits include more enforcement officers – over 300 have been trained so far.

And from September every household in London will at last have access to kerbside recycling collections – although, as Livingstone says, the boroughs have a long way to go to meet government targets on recycling generally. “We started from a very poor position, barely 6% across London. We’ve doubled that.”

“Think in terms of the villages of London, a set of small communities in a jigsaw. The mayor’s role is bringing them together and empowering them.” – Simon Hughes

Democratise, decentralise

Liberal Democrat London Assembly member Mike Tuffrey, who chairs the Economic and Social Development Committee, thinks the last four years “amount to a huge lost opportunity to capitalise on the honeymoon start-up phase of the first modern mayor of London”. “Individual strategies”, says Tuffrey, “of which there have been many – economic development, air quality, energy, noise, culture, children etc. etc., plus the spatial development strategy (London Plan) – do not represent joined up thinking nor an agenda which all stakeholders can sign up to. The outgoing mayor has focused on a limited number of mainly transport-related projects and has failed to make an impact on the big picture.

One key test is whether the government has loosened its centralising tight grip of control, as a result of London having got its act together over the four years, and the answer is no.” It’s the judgment of a political opponent, and hardly a generous one. But even Tuffrey concedes that the direct powers of the London mayor are limited – and there’s little doubt that Livingstone would like them beefed up, in “obvious areas where a strategic lead is needed”.

Like a London waste authority, more mayoral control over housing decisions (a role currently held by the Government Office for London) and London-wide arts funding. Another of his hobbyhorses is the parlous state of overground rail, as overseen by the Strategic Rail Authority; he’s adamant that a London Regional Rail Authority could better integrate the service with a mayor-controlled underground, the Docklands Light Railway, bus services and roads. Or take renewable energy.

The mayor – and indeed the boroughs – have considerable influence, particularly where “new developments give us the chance to set a completely new standard”, but this stops well short of being able to make solar panels mandatory on new buildings in the capital, for instance, as some enthusiasts seem to think Livingstone should have done. He has put them on his own home, however, and publicly expressed the view that every home should have them, and he has put the weight of his support behind the London Energy Partnership – leading by example, using his office as a ‘bully pulpit’, promoting good practice, publishing guides to action, profile-raising for promising initiatives

But it’s not his best claim to sustainable fame. Nor is further devolution – not just from central government to the mayor, but further down the line, to give London’s boroughs more autonomy, for instance, or decentralise decision-making at the community level. This is something the Liberal Democrats have long been keen on, and an issue on which Hughes can be positively lyrical.

But not Livingstone. He hasn’t exactly been noted for taking the lower tiers of local government into partnership in all his initiatives, and his language can be revealing – as when he describes it as “fortunate” that the mayor “does not have to bow to the parochial concerns of some boroughs” on widening the congestion charging zone.

Growth fetish?

There’s an argument that London has reached the limits of sustainable growth – and a corollary, on the job front, that the priority should be economic policies that create work for local people, rather than business expansion and attracting people with the skills to fuel it. Author and sustainable cities guru Herbie Girardet thinks it’s still “an open question, whether Ken can resolve the issue about London being a global or a sustainable city”. Livingstone has critics on both sides. Some focus on redistribution, and dispute his contention that “economic growth is required to tackle poverty, both internationally and in Britain”.

Both Johnson and Gidoomal reject his emphasis on growth in the London Plan – whereas Norris charges that he has done too little to make London competitive with other capitals in the corporate investment stakes.

Green and pleasant place

Livingstone sees population growth in the capital as inexorable, at least in the medium term – partly because of inward migration, but mainly because London has more young people than the UK average, and the young have more children. But he’s at pains to promise not to let developers devour the green belt to accommodate the extra people. “This rapid build-up of London’s population clearly leads to radical environmental threats....

My policy – as set out in my London Plan – is to keep the city within its present boundaries, both maintaining the green belt and its internal green spaces. Developments must use brownfield sites within the existing urban area, and be served primarily by public transport. Allowing the city to expand into the green belt, where public transport is sparser, would mean a transport solution based primarily on the private car.”

Trafalgar Square’s widely welcomed part-pedestrianisation has transformed it “from a traffic island into one of the most beautiful squares in Europe”. – Ken Livingstone

But many environmentalists remain critical of the lack of priority given to protecting biodiversity. Threats to Erith Marshes, or to ancient woodland sites, are potent rallying calls. Although the London Plan and the mayor’s Biodiversity Strategy both make a commitment to protect London’s designated wildlife sites, Livingstone’s record does seem stronger on recreational space for humans than reproductive habitat for other species.

Except, of course, that the two really go hand in hand. English Nature has recognised the force of his argument, in the Biodiversity Strategy, that its delivery will depend partly on people’s ability to enjoy and appreciate nature locally. In that spirit, too, English Nature chair Martin Doughty and London Development Agency chair Honor Chapman, speaking at the recent launch of the Design for Biodiversity Guide for property developers, joined Livingstone in linking the preservation of green space and wildlife habitat explicitly with London’s international competitiveness. Attractive, open green spaces help cities attract successful businesses and skilled workers.

New developments such as the Thames Gateway and Kings Cross could set a positive example, said Livingstone, “by protecting biodiversity, incorporating wildlife features into landscaping and buildings and providing a higher quality of life for everyone living and working in London”. The transformation of the Lower Lea Valley in east London, with or without the Olympic Games that London is bidding to host in 2012, will create one of the biggest urban parks in Europe. So much is tagged with the aspiration to “world class” these days that there’s a danger of the phrase having no meaning, though in the case of an Olympics bid you can see why it might come up.

Less obvious is its use by Livingstone for his Walking Plan for London, at whose recent launch he had his footprint set in concrete and his effort described as “a triumph” by the charity Living Streets. But didn’t Living Streets get the running order wrong, when they said that making streets clean, safe and full of life would be “good for business, good for tourists, and good for residents”?

WHY DID KEN DO THAT?

8 June 2004

Hannah Bullock and Roger East