Heathrow and the house where I was born - why boundaries matter

Let's start by looking at the importance of boundaries. This is where I was born:



The little arrow marks 174 and 176 Beckenham Road, Beckenham, Kent. This address is located in the London Borough of Bromley. The Bromley Adult Education Centre used to be Cater Park School (alumni including Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West and my mum - although back in mum's time it was Beckenham Grammar School for Girls). The school is in London SE20 not Beckenham, Kent with the boundary between Kent and the London post code following the line of Royston Road and Kent House Road.

Back in 1961 all of this was in the County of Kent meaning that I was born a Kentish Man rather than a Londoner. The London Government Act of 1963 changed all this by creating the 32 London boroughs including the incorporation of Beckenham and Penge Urban Districts into the new borough of Bromley. By the stroke of a pen, my birthplace had shifted from Kent to London (although by the borough's creation we'd moved to Shirley, Surrey another bit of the new London).

All this came to mind from a little video posted on the Londonist website that showed the different boundaries of London - political, transport and postal geography are not, as the saying goes, co-terminous. The idea of London is pretty fuzzy - the futher you get from the original London (the Square Mile of the City itself) the more other place associations become important to people. Not just the distinction of North or South of the river or whether you're on the tube but identity with old towns or villages as well as the old county geography of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex and Kent.

So where I was born is variously in London, Kent, Beckenham, Bromley and, at a pinch since it's the nearest town, Penge (we lived later at 186 Beckenham Road where we knew we were in Beckenham because there was a sign outside the house saying so). Any or all of these answers would be correct for a particular question but equally that answer would be open to question. If I say "I'm from Kent" someone might retort with; "nonsense, you're from South London". And the same goes for all the answers - I'm pretty clear about my identity (it's all of these things) but defining it to someone who doesn't fully understand the relevent history and geography can get a little long-winded and confusing.

And I can hear you muttering "oh, shut up Simon, it doesn't matter". Except it does - Heathrow Airport tells us it does. Or rather the decision about airport capacity "for London" tells us why this argument about places, boundaries and history is important. Here's the current Mayor of London:

Mr Khan said the government's announcement was "the wrong decision for London and the whole of Britain".

He said ministers were "running roughshod over Londoners' views", and that the new runway would be "devastating for air quality across London".

There's more but this is enough for my point. As is remembering that both of Khan's predecessors opposed expanding Heathrow as did the man he beat to become Mayor of London. Now there are many arguments for and against different options but these are not the things determining the position of the Mayor of London. It's the bit about Londoners' views - Sadiq Khan, like Boris Johnson before him, is elected by those Londoners and they want more airport capacity but not actually in London.

Khan's argument in support of expanding Gatwick is about politics. The people affected by its expansion don't live in London so don't enter into the Mayor's calculations - there are a lot of votes to lose in supporting Heathrow but few, if any, votes lost by backing Gatwick. Yet had past spatial decisions beeen different - say a London limited to the old London County Council area or a different location (Croydon, maybe) for the airport - the Mayor might has been gung ho for supporting the third runway at Heathrow (or Croydon).

It seems that the bitterly contested (there were huge petitions from Bromley and Croydon opposing the changes) London Government Act of 1963 is largely responsible for the problem with deciding about an airport for London. That Act created the current boundaries making the new authority (as fans of Horace Cutler and Ken Livingstone can explain) politically marginal - those votes in West and South-West London really matter - and it placed Heathrow Airport within the boundary. So long as the outcome of London's mayoral election was contested, making a decision in support of Heathrow was fudged. The same thing that made me unsure about whether I'm a Londoner or a Kentish Man has also meant three decades of dither over the development of airport capacity that's right for the World's greatest city.

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Friday Fungus: council estate mushrooms

The Lismore Circus Estate at Gospel Oak in Camden isn't the most obvious location for a new horticultural enterprise. This - described as "(l)ong sleek apartment blocks (Ludham and Waxham) designed by the firm of Frederick McManus and Partners as part of the Lismore Circus estate" - is the location:



In the basement of this block developers are, however, proposing just such a horticultural enterprise - a mushroom farm:

London could become home to a new mushroom farm capable of growing three quarters of a ton every month using waste materials such as coffee grounds.

Eco start-up Article No. 25 wants to set up the farm in the basement of a block of Seventies council flats in Gospel Oak, and Camden council is considering a planning application.

The mushrooms would grow on a form of compost made from waste materials including coffee grounds and newspapers mixed with straw.

Two important points to make here - firstly this is a great use of essentially redundant space (the unused garages in the image) and secondly it opens up new uses for food waste.

Plus, of course, mushrooms are nutricious and flavoursome!

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Megacities and the Dick Whittington Principle - agglomeration versus central place

The world's most powerful drivers of change - economic, social, cultural and political - are large cities. We don't have to like all this change - Mike Bloomberg's fussbucketry being a case in point - to appreciate that this dynamic is very real. I'm not saying that everything is invented and every innovation takes place in developed world megacities but the evidence does suggest that disproportionately this is the nature of modern development.

I noted this a short while ago in observing that the 'London Problem' isn't really a problem just of London - it started with this Peter Thiel quote:

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

The same, of course, goes for London - let's call it the Dick Whittington Principle where ambitious, clever people go to where there are lots of other ambitious and clever people because they're more likely to succeed. This Dick Whittington Principle is at the heart of the idea in economic geography of 'agglomeration' where a critical mass of people (or resource availability) drive innovation and through this economic growth. The result is the idea that we need to use attractors for those people - given that, these days, most growth is driven by people not by the availability of other resources. These attractors include universities and research institutes, high technology businesses and cultural industries.

Now this approach produces problems - it runs counter to the idea that growth needs to be inclusive and results in some places being, as it were, left behind. It is this concern that sits behind the RSA's 'inclusive growth' work and the alternative economic models promoted by advocates of new localist approaches such as this from New Start Magazine:

But this agglomeration model – the dominant local economic model for UK cities – creates as many losers as winners and is an outdated approach to city economies that are currently experiencing huge social, technological and environmental change. This dominant model favours city centre economies, skilled workers and high-end jobs. It starts with the physical – buildings and infrastructure – rather than the needs of people. It encourages people to move or commute to areas of opportunity rather than creating jobs close to the neighbourhoods in which they live.

The result, so these people argue, is illustrated by a place such as Greater Manchester where a successful centre in Manchester and Salford contrasts with slightly tatty and declining mill or mining towns like Oldham, Rochdale and Wigan. The success of the city centre simply isn't delivering growth on the periphery of the Greater Manchester urban agglomeration. This same pattern will be seen in West Yorkshire, in Birmingham and on Tyneside.

This displacement - a sort of negative hysteresis - doesn't just create problems for economies but also underlies social disconnection. Although the debate about the 'left behind' and populist politics is a little overblown, the spatial distribution of support for such campaigns is hard to dispute.

The issue, however, is that whether we adopt the leftist approach of New Start or the sort of populist approach of Trump, Farage or Le Pen, the solutions on offer result - assuming we accept agglomeration theory - in a sub-optimal outcome. We get lower rates of growth because we want to equalise that growth across every community - preventing (if we can) Dick Whittington from going to London doesn't just mean Dick has less opportunity but, by not bringing together others like Dick, society as a whole is poorer.

Here is what the populists are sadly getting wrong: While cities and rural areas are — and have long been — politically competitive, they are in fact economically complementary.

This thesis - that rural areas (and suburbs for that matter) need cities and vice versa - draws on another central idea of economic geography: central place theory. Here's the basics:

The German geographer Walter Christaller introduced central-place theory in his book entitled Central Places in Southern Germany (1933). The primary purpose of a settlement or market town, according to central-place theory, is the provision of goods and services for the surrounding market area. Such towns are centrally located and may be called central places.

Now leaving aside that Christaller was quite an enthusiastic Nazi, we can see that the central ideas of his work remain perhaps the dominant thesis in modern spatial planning. Anyone close to the UK's local plan process will be familiar with concepts like 'settlement hierarchy' and 'rural service centre' that draw directly from European location theories. It is perhaps time, in economies dominated by services, to start questioning the use of central place theories based on economies dominated by trade in goods. And rather than trying to shoehorn agglomeration theory into the same box as central place theory, we should be seeing them as competing views of modern regional development.

The presumptions that underpin the European single market (and other customs unions) are that central place ideas are correct. By granting the megacities (and Europe really has only one - London) a place on the top of a classic hierarchy of settlements with each dependent on the settlements below, we acknowledge that removing barriers to trade in (primarily) goods results in more economic growth.

If, however, agglomeration theory is correct then this requirement carries less weight. The megacity - London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo - is divorced from its hinterland. It may be convenient to trade with that hinterland but it is neither necessary or contributing to the success of the megacity. In this model, London's success isn't connected at all to its position at the top of a settlement hierarchy but rather to its capture of the modern world's most important resource - ambitious, clever people. As a global city, Europe needs London but London doesn't need Europe.

It's probably more nuanced than this and the question of what happens in the rest of England remains but, from the perspective of economic geography, the answer to agglomeration or central place gives you the answer to that other question: will Brexit work? And partly this is about the theories in question and their relevance but it's also about policy choices. Regardless of trade deals the UK government has to work out how to capture as much of the modern economy's key resource - human innovation - so as to ensure we get the greatest benefit from agglomeration.

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Why London dominates (or how the London problem isn't really a London problem)

Aaron Renn picks up on how tech superstar, Peter Thiel sort of accidently exposed the truth about Chicago (in Chicago):

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

The problem for Thiel was that he said this while speaking at an event in Chicago. No surprise, it didn’t go over well. An enquiring questioner wanted to know, “Who comes to Chicago if first-rate people go to New York or Silicon Valley?”

Now leaving aside the responses from miffed Chicago fans (the city that is not the band) Renn raises and explores an interesting point about the USA. Here he borrows from Charles Murray to make his point:

[I]t is difficult to hold a nationally influential job in politics, public policy, finance, business, academia, information technology, or the media and not live in the areas surrounding New York, Washington, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. In a few cases, it can be done by living in Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, or Houston—and Bentonville, Arkansas—but not many other places.

For those not up on US billionaires, Bentonville in the HQ of Walmart.

Transfer this observation out of the USA and we have the elements of a thesis about why London dominates the UK - indeed, why London is so dominant in Europe. It seems likely that, just as Peter Thiel says, smart people head to one or two places - Renn reports that a quarter of HPY (Harvard, Princeton, Yale) graduates live in or around New York. I've no data for the UK but does anyone want to bet against Oxbridge graduates overwhelmingly living in and around London? We know it's true of tertiary education in general:

Given that most persons aged 30–34 will have completed their tertiary education prior to the age of 30, this indicator may be used to assess the attractiveness (or ‘pull effects’) of regions with respect to the employment opportunities they offer graduates. Map 5 shows tertiary educational attainment by NUTS level 2 region for 2015: the darkest shade of orange highlights those regions where at least half of the population aged 30–34 had attained a tertiary level of education. By far the highest share was recorded in one of the two capital city regions of the United Kingdom — Inner London - West — where more than four fifths (80.8 %) of the population aged 30–34 possessed a tertiary level of educational attainment. The second, third and fourth highest shares were also recorded in the United Kingdom, namely in: Outer London - South (69.3 %), the other capital city region of Inner London - East (68.2 %), and North Eastern Scotland (66.1 %); note that all four regions in Scotland recorded shares above 50%.

The three regions in Europe with the highest concentrations of graduates are all in London which seems to repeat what we've seen from the USA where New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco dominate. And it means that the UK, by defining its regional achievement through comparison with London, has created an economic development problem. The city's success creates a virtuous circle - the clever, ambitious people are in London doing clever ambitious things meaning that clever ambitious people from elsewhere in the UK - perhaps even in Europe - head to London because that's where clever, ambitious people go to be clever and ambitious. With the obvious result that, the occasional Bentonville or Omaha proving the rule, places elsewhere have to make do with less clever, less ambitious people and as a consequence slower economic growth.

The European data on tertiary education tells us that this supercharged agglomeration effect is pretty consistent - everywhere capital cities and places with a lot of research infrastructure suck up the graduates leaving other places with less of the talent needed to achieve that aim of 'closing the gap' between successful places and less successful places. The problem with London, New York and San Francisco (and, no doubt, were we to look: Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai) is that their agglomeration effect sucks the brightest and most able from places that, of themselves, are seen as relatively successful. Clever and ambitious Parisians head to London, just as the brightest in Chicago switch to San Francisco, Washington or New York.

For London - regardless of Brexit - this process is likely to continue and, in doing so, for the problems of London (expensive housing, the occasional late train, crime, air pollution and so forth) inevitably become the problems of the UK. Planning policies are adapted to fit London's housing crisis, health policies to reflect the worries of a thirty- and forty-something population, and transport policies designed for the needs of big city commuters. The dominance of London - The London Problem - doesn't just skew the UK's economy but it also profoundly influences the complete range of national government policies. That London Problem isn't really a London problem but results in a national policy programme suited to the clever and ambitious who have - because that's where the opportunities are - headed to London.

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How Jaywick and West Texas tell us the Intergenerational Foundation's research doesn't say what they think it says

The Intergenerational Foundation has done some research - it's pretty good and you can read the full report (pdf) here. The IF look at 'intergenerational segregation' - the extent to which people of different ages tend to concentrate in the same areas. And both the IF and also the media has focused on how the increasing geographical segregation of young and old in England is a consequence of housing problems such as lack of choice and affordability.

Here's the BBC's 'OMG this is terrible' report on the research:

Young families are being "ghettoised" in inner city areas by the housing crisis while older homeowners become isolated in the suburbs, a report says.

The Intergenerational Foundation study says the number of areas dominated by over-50s has risen sevenfold since 1991 as young people move into the cities.

Even within urban areas, older people, children and young adults are living increasingly separate lives, it adds.

I'm sure this pattern will be repeated across other media and will be reflected in reports on similar research in the USA and continental Europe. And the argument that it's all about housing costs will be repeated again and again without question or criticism. Put simply we are more age segregated as a result of older people being unable to move to more 'age appropriate' accommodation because there isn't enough of that housing so young people aren't able to cycle out from the cities into the suburbs. And young people are renting in the city because they can't afford to buy the limited number of houses that come available in those desirable suburbs.

The problem here is that this really doesn't match what the IF's research is saying. Here's a chunk of those findings:

...places with the highest median ages are predominantly in rural parts of the country, particularly around coastal areas, while urban MSOAs stand out for being more youthful.There is also evidence of a north-south divide, as the broader south east surrounding London contains a number of lighter MSOAs – which represent comparatively youthful smaller towns and cities in the region such as Watford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge – whereas the MSOAs which are outside the large northern cities appear to be shaded darker. This pattern supports the finding from previous studies that there is a substantial net inflow of internal migrants who are in their 20s from northern towns and cities to London, while the out-flow of former London residents in their 20s and 30s tends to be to other towns in the south east.

I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem with housing supply (in general or specific to particular needs or demands) but rather that the IF research doesn't really provide an argument supporting the typical description of that housing crisis - young people unable to afford to buy property and, therefore, trapped in rented accommodation. Nor does the work really tell us that these affordability and supply issues are the reasons for England's 'age segregation'.

To understand this, we should note that the highest median ages are 'around coastal areas'. Other than for parts of the South Coast like Brighton and Bournemouth, England's coastal towns are pretty affordable and characterised by high levels of multiple deprivation:

An Essex seaside village is the most deprived neighbourhood in England, according to official statistics.

The community east of Jaywick near Clacton-on-Sea has again topped a list that measured deprivation in 32,844 areas across the country, the government report found.

But all of the local authorities with the highest proportion of deprived neighbourhoods are in the north - Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Hull, Liverpool and Manchester.

And of the top 10 neighbourhoods, Blackpool, the ‘Vegas of the North’, has five in the list, and eight in the top 20.

We see this pattern repeated in other seaside towns - Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Bridlington, Minehead - where an ageing population doesn't have the sort of characteristics popularised by those who want to blame all our problems on 'Baby Boomers'.

John Byford, 48, councillor for Skegness South, said: “Opportunities around here are few and far between. There’s no industry. People like it that we don’t have the fast motorways, but that’s also a problem because it means we don’t get the industry.”

The recently released movie 'Hell and High Water' features two brothers robbing banks so they can pay off the debts on their late mother's ranch. Based in West Texas the film is a contemporary Western nodding to the themes and storylines we're so familiar with from the traditional genre. One thing that strikes you watching is the utter, abject poverty of West Texas with shacks and shuttered shops frequented by tired, old people. These are dying communities without young people and kept going only by the fortune of oil and gas, at least until that runs out too.

So where have those young Texans gone? To the cities:

Texas’s spectacular growth is largely a story of its cities—especially of Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. These Big Four metropolitan areas, arranged in a layout known as the “Texas Triangle,” contain two-thirds of the state’s population and an even higher share of its jobs. Nationally, the four metros, which combined make up less than 6 percent of the American population, posted job growth equivalent to 30 percent of the United States’ total since the financial crash in 2007. Within Texas, they’ve accounted for almost 80 percent of the state’s population growth since 2000 and over 75 percent of its job growth. Meantime, a third of Texas counties, mostly rural, have actually been losing population.

Why would you stay in a dusty, isolated West Texas town like Post or Brownfield when there's no work and no prospect of work? Same goes - perhaps a little less starkly - for England. Young people are leaving what might be called secondary communities in the North - places like Oldham and Burnley as well as those coastal towns we've already mentioned. And if you've made up your mind to head elsewhere for work you're going to go where those prospects are best which in England means you head to London. It's this pattern of migration that the IF are picking up in their research not merely the consequences of England's failing planning and housing policies.

And the problem is that, while we can do something to make London less age segregated by housing policies, we'll struggle to respond to the desire of older people to live somewhere slower, quieter and more communal than a great big city. Or for that matter the wish of single, fun-loving young folk to live in big cities with great nightlife and loads of other young people. The problems IF identify are as much a consequence of wealth and choice as they are of sclerotic housing policies.

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Diversity and the metropolitan diaspora

OK we have to accept a more-or-less economic definition of successful here (which I'm guessing will be fine for most folk) but the evidence tells us that more diverse places - that is places with lots of people who weren't born there - are more successful:

One of the most important ways for cities to get connected is through migration. Jim Russell and his collaborator Richey Piiparinen at Cleveland State University’s Center for Population Dynamics have been documenting how Cleveland has been getting more connected to the global world through this process. This includes foreign immigration but isn’t limited to that. A key part of it is the influx into places like Cleveland of people who have lived in major global cities like New York, then cycled out.

Now diversity isn't an absolute guarantor of success but within this work lies the germ of an economic development strategy that might rebalance England (bearing in mind that my country is, compared to most places, a pretty small place). This isn't about attracting skilled migrants from the other side of the world - or even from Paris - but rather to look at how you provide the opportunities for people to 'cycle out' from an increasingly expensive and intolerable London.

We've seen some of this 'cycling out' with the success of Brighton, Reading and now Bristol - all places close enough to London to allow for folk to scuttle back and forth. Other places may well begin to fit this pattern - Whitstable, Canterbury and even Margate. As London overheats the result is that innovators and creators relocate, taking the risk of a smaller pool against the certainty of greater affordability. In the USA this is now noticed - here's an article about chefs in New York:

Bret Thorn, senior editor at the trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News, agrees. “We are experiencing a serious brain drain from New York City,” he says. “Chefs leaving to move home to Cleveland (Dante Boccuzzi) and Minneapolis (Gavin Kaysen). You don’t have to put up with the exorbitant rents or deal with the general cost of doing business or the difficult community boards. You can go to Oklahoma City and have customers who are interested and will marvel at what New Yorkers might be bored with.”

We've yet to hit this point yet in England but it gets closer with each rent hike and each new regulation. Intemperate actions like the shutting down of Fabric don't help and neither does the understandable preference of local authorities for order and the interests of residents. London's fantastic - yes seriously Londoners, fantastic - public transport has helped the city keep these innovators as it's possible to move further from the expensive centre without losing connectivity.

The question for us to ask is what drives the success of these out-of-London places - why Margate and not Hastings, how come Bristol but not Leicester. Some of this is about access - good road and rail links - but this isn't the only factor. And looking at the evidence from the USA it's tracking the pioneers who go back home - the creator who decides to sell the overpriced two-bed flat in Greenwich and head back with the proceeds to Birmingham (or wherever) or the new entrepreneur who thinks success is more likely in their lower rent home town than in London.

Places like Bradford need to invest some time on their diaspora, in the connections that already exist. We moan and mither about the brain drain but simply ignore those brains once they've left. Perhaps part of the strategy is to talk to these exiles - most will have a soft spot for home (if only because of friends and family) and can be relied on to put in a good word. But maybe the big benefit comes when those people decide to take their well-gotten gains and head somewhere cheaper - if they've been loved by the home town even though they left, surely the chances of them returning are greater.

Of course, for me, the home town is London. And I can't afford it.

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Building more houses...(probably not)

Hardly a day passes without some politician, activist, think tank or journalist announcing that we have to build more houses. Mostly our response is "like duh" as we all know that, for about twenty-five or thirty years, we've failed - every year - to build enough houses to meet the demand for them. There are lots of reasons for this most of which have the words "planning system" somewhere within them.

"But we used to built this number of houses, you know back in the 1950s."

We did and, in the 1950s and 1960s we also built a lot of council houses. In the main these were either built on land cleared as a result of damage caused during WWII bombing or else as a result of slum clearances. In my more-or-less home patch of Penge, the roads around where my grandparents lived (in a house thankfully untouched by the bombs) are filled with blocks of flats built on the land cleared by the Luftwaffe in its failed attempts to destroy the rail infrastructure at Norwood Junction.

In Bradford, where I am now, you'll see a similar load of mostly 1960s housing where decrepit, poor quality terraced housing once stood. Typical of the 1960s this council housing features tower blocks (there are over 30 in Bradford), what are called 'walk up blocks' being lower rise flats and maisonettes in blocks without a lift, and the familiar family three-bed semis often with good gardens.

Which brings us to the latest promises:

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged that a Labour Government led by him would build one million homes in its first five years, including 500,000 council houses.

The Labour leader has said that he would “reverse a generation of underinvestment in housing” that has led to a crisis in the sector. “Decent housing is a basic human need” that successive governments have failed to provide.

Exciting stuff - a dynamic government meeting real social need (and all that guffle beloved of left wing politicians). Except for one small problem, one spotted by planner and blogger, Andrew Lainton:

Whilst welcoming expansion of social housing and council house building what evidence is there that councils and housing associations have a landbank of ‘shovel ready’ sites with planning permission to hit this?

Councils have sold off most easily developable land and most projects by even the most progressive council involve intensification of existing land such as council estates – which take time. Faced with difficult financials and cuts in funding housing associations have run down their land banks.

The fact is such targets could only be hit through private land and there is a huge risk of a public spending induced land price bubble blown up by slow progress on local plans.

This policy is introducing a 1950s level of social housing spending to a teenies level of public sector landbanks, a recipe for disaster.

From a standing start this programme would need to identify land for building, secure public ownership of that land, draw up plans, obtain permissions, contract builders and complete the homes. There really is no way that this is going to happen in five years, especially given that there isn't anything close to the capability or capacity to deliver such a building programme within local authorities and housing associations - let alone national government. And this is assuming there are the workers around to dig the foundations, lay the bricks, dry line the walls, plumb the bathrooms and install the plugs and wires a modern home requires.

Just as with the promises being made by the new Mayor of London - ones he has backed rapidly away from - these promises of rapid increases in rates of house building are not tenable. We need a more open and flexible planning system before we even start talking about accelerating the building of houses. And we need to stop treating private developers as if they are denizens of Hell's lower planes - these are the experts who are going to deliver the housing we need.

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Creating a Yorkshire Powerhouse - it's down to us not the government in London

My eponymous great-grandfather was born in East London. Tragically he died young - in his thirties - leaving a widow and young children. He died in Wakefield.

This isn't some terrible story of loss or tragedy and nor was my great-grandfather one of those victims of industrial capitalism. He was a wine merchant. Not only is this a noble calling but it explains why he ended up in Wakefield. Put in simple terms there was better business to be had (and perhaps less competition) in Yorkshire than there was in London. As my boss, Judith Donovan, said to me when I arrived in Bradford on 27 July 1987 - "A hundred years ago, Bradford was the richest city in the richest county in the richest country in the world."

How things have changed. Now, too often, Yorkshire paints itself as a victim, bashed and battered by the tides of globalisation, ignored or patronised by the powers down in London. It is a theme we hear again and again from 'leaders' in Yorkshire - that somehow the economic gap between England's greatest county and those southern nancies is down to the perfidy of national government. London is rich because, as if by a dark magic, all the good stuff in England is sucked away from places like Yorkshire for the folk living in that huge city to spend on fancy bus tickets, overpriced coffee and criminally-priced one-bed apartments in Stockwell.

Here's the Yorkshire Post:

Yet the frustration is that Yorkshire has so much more to offer and that this region’s limitless potential will not be maximised until the Government invests sufficient sums in this county’s human capital – school standards have lagged behind the rest of the country for an unacceptable number of years and are having a detrimental impact on job prospects – as well as the area’s transport and business infrastructure so more world-leading companies can be persuaded to invest here.

Today is Yorkshire Day and it is worth giving the Yorkshire Post its due for setting out an agenda for the county that genuinely reflects much of the debate going on up here. But it's a shame that the habit of holding out the cap and fluttering those Yorkshire eye-lashes still remains. No-one's denying that Yorkshire - and the North for that matter - needs investment but when all they hear is the regional politics version of "got some spare change for a coffee" is it really a surprise that government doesn't rush to help out?

Take education. The Yorkshire Post rightly highlights how Yorkshire's levels of educational attainment lag behind those elsewhere in England and in many ways this is a scandal. But what's the bigger scandal - that politicians in London aren't throwing cash at the problem or that the leaders in Yorkshire haven't got any plan, policy or strategy to address the problem? Where's the education 'summit' bringing together political and business leaders from across the county? Why haven't local education authorities - along with schools - pooled their investment in educational development and improvement?

The same goes for transport. Again the Yorkshire Post reminds us that Leeds is the only big city in England without a tram system or metro. And that - quite rightly - the government pulled the plug on that city's latest wheeze, a new 'bus-on-a-string'. I recall sitting in a meeting - in some slightly tatty, anonymous office block in Leeds - and formally giving Bradford's support for what was dubbed 'supertram'. And I remember adding, at the end of the presentation, that it was a great shame said 'supertram' wasn't going to Bradford or, indeed, anywhere near Bradford. The single busiest inter-city commuter route - Leeds-Bradford and vice versa - didn't register.

So - again - where's Yorkshire's transport plan? Have the transport great and good gathered to set out how we'll respond to 21st century challenges in transport? Or have we just sat mithering about ticketing and real-time information as if they're the answer to the question? Why should - other than for reasons of political calculation (hence Cameron launching the 'Northern Powerhouse' in Shipley) - central government do anything for Yorkshire when Yorkshire's not doing much for itself?

Even on devolution, political calculations - both sub-regional and by the political parties - has meant deadlock. Yorkshire - after London itself - is the only English region with a genuine identity. Yorkshire Day really is a thing (my friend Keith Madeley and the Yorkshire Society deserve a lot of credit for this). We really did showcase the glories of the county through the Tour de France and its child, Tour de Yorkshire. And the county really does have everything - except, that is, the leadership to get on with devising responses to our challenges without waiting on someone in London first giving us the thumbs up.

I learnt a couple of important lessons recently. The first was during a meeting with Lord Adonis following the National Infrastructure Commission publishing reports on Crossrail 2 and Transport in the North. The lesson was that London had prepared, done the legwork, written a plan and set out how that city would fund half the cost in the time Northern leaders had drawn up a scope for a possible plan the content of which wasn't set. London will get the money because London knows what it wants. Here in Yorkshire we just ask for more transport investment - we have no plan.

The second lesson is that London's planning is far deeper - more granular as the trendies put it - than any spatial or urban planning anywhere else in England. In part this just reflects the fact that London is a city and has a coherence (and obvious centre) that Yorkshire doesn't have but it also demonstrates that our fragmented systems of government, business leadership and administration won't allow for that level of planning. Here's what I wrote in June about New London Architecture's exhibition:

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

The Yorkshire Post is right to make the case for the county and to present it to the Prime Minister. But we also need to make the case for bringing the county together, for a new agreement - with or without devolution deals - to work together on planning for Yorkshire's future. If - in some few years - we can take people to an exhibition put together by a private organisation demonstrating how Yorkshire's people, businesses, charities and landowners share a clear, radical and creative plan that is being put in place then we will be changing the county for the better.

I fear that, after a brief flurry of excitement and a modicum of political grandstanding, the Yorkshire Post's welcome initiative will be lost. Not because folk in Yorkshire don't want their county to be better but because we've not made our own plans for making the county once again, the richest place in the richest country. So long as we wait for handouts from London this won't happen.

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If London is a truly world city then Brexit shouldn't matter...

So goes the cry from London's mayor - what's happening is bad news for London, for the jobs of Londoners and the prospects for the city. And all this, as urbanist Aaron Renn points out, rather questions the idea of a world city:

Yet most of the London establishment – and 60% of Londoners themselves in the vote – strongly supported the Remain option. They warned of disaster for London if it lost access to the EU single market.

This more or less demolishes the arguments for the city-state. If London, the world’s ultimate global city, can’t thrive without access to a continental scale de facto state in the EU, there’s little prospect anyone else can either.

It’s telling that so many city leaders hate their state or national governments, but love supra-national governments like the EU. The shows that their real desire isn’t to go it alone in the marketplace, but to create replacement governance structures that are more amenable to their way of thinking, that constitutionally enshrine their preferences, and are insulated from democratic accountability.

For all the talk of London being the 'world's capital city' and so forth, what we see here is a great fear that maybe, just maybe, this isn't true. Renn goes on:

...if London can’t recover from the inevitable turbulence around Brexit, this would show that not only do cities need to be part of states, they need to be part of very large and powerful ones.

We don't know the answer to this question - at least not yet. London is without question a great city, perhaps the greatest city in the world, but does that status - in finance, in law, in the arts, in advertising - require that privileged market access or is the truth that the big hinterland needs London a darn sight more than London needs that single market.

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A Northern Powerhouse needs collaboration, vision and planning more than it needs cash.

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

While enjoying the scale, scope and ambition of this NLA exhibition, a profound depression fell on me. We ask about the North-South divide and tend to couch our understanding of this gap in historical terms as being about what was not what will be. Yet this model and exhibition, tucked away in a corner of central London, gives the lie to this convenient belief. The North-South divide - or rather the contrast between the dynamism of London and the sluggishness of Northern cities - isn't about some past event but is about the here and now, about what London is doing today. Worse still, what an hour with the NLA model told me, the divide is fast becoming a unbridgeable chasm - what London is planning far outstrips anywhere else in the UK.

London is sprinting away from the North. Not, as too many want to believe, because the city has been favoured by successive government or because the current occupants of Downing Street are stripping the North of 'resources'. The NLA films, the projects described, the masterplans - none of these even mentioned central government funding or support. Yet, as we saw recently in the IPPR North and Centre for Cities reports on the Northern Powerhouse, the starting point for the debate about growth in the North is to argue for more central government resources. But why, other than sympathy, should government simply hand over cash to one or other Northern city? Having Andy Burnham shout about a mythical "One Billion Pound Black Hole" is great campaigning - plays to the sense of abandonment felt in some places 'up north' but it's just the politics of the begging bowl, of holding out the flat cap while intoning the old mantra, "got a bit of spare change mate?"

Back in 2005 architect and urbanist Will Alsop was commissioned to look at the development of the M62 Corridor, that strip of England from Liverpool to Hull. Although the result was a typically Alsop mish-mash of ideas (and giant teddy bears) the premise was a good one - we could have a linear city 80 miles long from coast to coast. Let's remember it's 50 miles from Heathrow to Tilbury and the government has commissioned a Thames Estuary study to look at bringing North Kent and South Essex - from Canterbury and Southend - into London's planning purview. A connected 'city' from the Wirral to Bridlington isn't all that far-fetched.

Yet the current position - Transport for the North aside - is that the government, through its devolution programmes, is simply creating the basis for future competition and resentment. I was sat at a meeting recently where person after person started what they said with smilingly snarky comments about Manchester and how the Northern Powerhouse was, in truth a Manchester Powerhouse. This chimes with Mick McCann's brilliant essay asking why the BBC hates Leeds - a reminder that those Northern divisions are as much of a barrier to our progress as core features of our cultures.

Next year Manchester and Sheffield (or rather Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire) will elect a mayor, a new shining leader who will drive forward the future development of those cities. Other places will be waiting a while longer (probably until the little devils are skating on the ice in the case of West and North Yorkshire) but the message is that we will have a set of competing places across the North - Liverpool. Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle. And those mayors will fill the early morning London trains with their cohorts - off to that London where they'll make the case for central government to spend more resources in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield or Newcastle. Not in The North - there won't be any sense of Northern Vision, no real Northern Powerhouse.

If we want a Northern Powerhouse, and I think we do, then it has to be pictured, planned, consulted on, organised and - so far as we can - funded from The North. And it's no good unless the whole resource - men and money - of England's North Country is brought to bear on that vision. We've seen this can be done for transport, we need to stretch that to the whole vision of a future economy.

A couple of days ago the Royal Institute of British Architects announced a new national centre for architecture in Liverpool. Great news for that city. Perhaps what we now need is a New Northern Architecture with the initiative and vision to build a model like the one I saw in Store Street yesterday - a model showing how private and public, local government, universities, manufacturers and housebuilders can share a detailed idea of how a future North of England will develop, will look and will work.

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This could be the London or the Home Counties

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The obsession of London's politicians with their 'green belt' really is a crying shame. But, as this quote from Joel Kotkin tells us, it's not a problem unique to the Home Counties:

To meet the needs of its increasingly diverse population, and particularly the next generation, California needs to reform its regulations to more fully reflect the needs and preferences of its citizens. Once the home of the peculiarly optimistic “California Dream”, our state is in danger of becoming a place good for the wealthy and well-established but offering little to the vast majority of its citizens who wish to live affordably and comfortably in this most blessed of states.

When you have to pay half a million pounds to buy an ex-council flat in Stockwell there is something wrong. Seriously wrong. And anyone who tells you the planning system - the means by which we decide which chunks of land can have houses built upon them - is not the main reason is simply deluded.

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A bad week for culture in Bradford (and The North)

It has been a lousy week for culture in Bradford. First we had the announcement that the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection of art in photography would be transplanted from Bradford to a new 'centre' somewhere in London. And then today we got a second bombshell as the National Media Museum pulled out of the Bradford International Film Festival.

My view of all this is that it underlines the utter and complete domination of arts and culture by a narrow, London-focused elite. The Trustees of the V&A are all based in London and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that many of them, while they've visited Paris, Venice and New York haven't visited Bradford, Gateshead or Wolverhampton. For this elite such places are for talking about - you know 'deprivation', 'poverty', 'the underclass', gritty Northern films on a left-wing theme - rather than visiting. For the London elite the best that can be said is that some of them consider the North somewhere to be patronised - not in a physical way but by appearing on late night arts shows and saying how important it for the North to be recognised culturally (just so long as we don't have to go there).

There's nothing new with this problem - it remains perhaps the biggest challenge facing England. We talk a lot about the imbalance between London and 'The North' - indeed the Arts Council spends most of it's briefing pages on funding trying to demonstrate that it really does care about 'The North' and that most of the money doesn't go to London. It remains the case that roughly twice as much money goes to London that to the whole of the North. And let's remember that The North's population is around double that of London. meaning that per capita Londoners get four times as much arts funding as Bradfordians.

More to the point, London is also much richer with more access to the private sector funding that being one of the world's great cities brings. And this means that the wider infrastructure of arts and culture - commercial theatre, art markets, music and so forth - is much stronger (or at least appears that way). So while the efforts of the Arts Council, Heritage Lottery Fund and others to redress the imbalance is welcome it doesn't get close to the heart of the problem.

This heart - the central challenge - is the assumption that major national institutions have to be based in London. This was the essential problem with the decision by the Science Museum to hand over the RPS collection to the V&A. Not that a new 'centre' for art in photography isn't a great idea but rather that the centre could only be created in London. It seems that the Trustees of the Science Museum Group, at their meetings in London, didn't even consider suggesting to their new partners at the V&A that locating the new centre in the North might be the right idea (we can't be sure because the minutes of this almost entirely publicly funded organisation are not public).

So the RPS collection goes to London, which is sad. But worse than this, there's nothing but a gap left behind. Bradford no longer has that inspiring collection and nothing will replace it (a new 'interactive gallery' at the National Media Museum doesn't work since it's not really new and isn't really culture). The decision is a narrow one driven by a combination of cost pressures on the Science Museum Group (mostly being resolved by cutting the budgets of its three Northern museums) and the in-built bias towards London.

The actual decision was taken - without engaging with stakeholders in Bradford so far as I can tell - back in July 2015 with the time since then presumably spent thrashing out the details with the V&A. I don't know when the second decision, sacking the Bradford International Film Festival, was taken but it's announcement in the same week at the RPS collection decision suggests either a similar timetable or else a desire to get all the bad news out in one week. And now the museum, from being to go-to place for the culture of photography, film and TV, has become a mere adjunct of the science museum proper, a place of buttons and levers dedicated solely to showing off science stuff rather than curating the artifacts and the content of these classic media.

What's missing - from the V&A as well as the Science Museum - is any sense of the damage these decisions are doing to Bradford as a city. London is awash with film festivals whereas Bradford had just three - all now gone or under threat. All killed off by the narrowing of the National Media Museum's focus and by the blind ignorance of that London elite running the museums. The closure of a gallery or reconfiguration of a museum in London may be agitating but it does little real damage to that city's arts and culture infrastructure. Here in Bradford - just as almost everywhere in the North - the decisions made by the Science Museum to withdraw from involvement in culture has left a raw, bloody gash in the UK's only UNESCO City of Film.

It's true that Bradford people will pick themselves up, will gather together and put what pressure they can on government, on the Arts Council on the museums. And maybe a few conciliatory crumbs will come our way as a result, doubtless loudly trumpeted by those London institutions as great news for poor old Bradford. Of a considered approach to that bloody gash in Bradford's cultural life there will be none. The big arts and culture institutions won't set up a group to work on mending the wound their decisions have made, instead they'll spin what little (and it is vanishingly tiny) they've done until such a time as the national media stop taking any notice.

Even more, without some sort of big stick from government there's no way for us 'stakeholders' in Bradford's culture to influence the decisions made by that rich London-based elite that makes the decisions about how England's arts and culture infrastructure should be developed. I'd like them to visit Bradford - let us ask some questions of them. Not just about why everything has to be in London but about how they can support those of us who want to create a cultural heart for the North of England, who want to see the arts infrastructure developed and who are fed up with being supplicants to grand men and women in London who have - as we've seen in Bradford - the power to thoughtlessly tear great chunks from the cultural life of Northern cities.

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We all know this of course....

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It's just that we keep trying to pretend that the problem is something else - the housing finance system, the evil housebuilders stockpiling land, immigration, selfish baby boomers, almost anything but the real culprit:

Both the center-Left and center-Right have come together in agreement on the depth of New Zealand's housing affordability and its principal cause, overly restrictive urban planning regulations. Labour Party housing spokesperson (shadow minister) Phil Twyford and Oliver Hartwich, executive director of the New Zealand Initiative, wrote in a co-authored New Zealand Herald commentary:“Our own research leaves no doubt that planning rules are a root cause of the housing crisis, particularly in Auckland…”

Auckland is one of the world's ten most unaffordable cities (as, of course, is London). And the reason for this is a restrictive planning regime. Why do we pretend that this isn't true for London?

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In which we're told £40,000 is poverty wages

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Really?

Take the new legislation in which any person in social housing earning over £40,000 in London and £30,000 outside of London will be made to pay the current market rent. To bring in such a law in London will be crippling to many families and assist the mass exodus of middle and working class families from the city – ethnic, social and class cleansing.

London's median household income in 2013 was £39,100 - I'm guessing it might have risen a little since then to say £40,000. So according to this writer half of London households are struggling in abject poverty. Now, I know London's got high rents but the economy of the city would be collapsing if this argument was at all accurate.

The answer isn't to subsidise rents, of course, but to build more homes.
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Why we're so agitated about 'gentrification' (and how London needs a 'Green Belt' review)

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As one of the self-important semi-rioters attacking the Cereal Killer cafe put it:

While I understand people’s annoyance at property damage please put it into the context of the violence of poverty, hunger and homelessness many thousands of Londoners are being subjected to. The cereal cafe was back open on Sunday morning while the destruction caused by gentrification continues - as will the fight back.

A veritable avalanche of concerned articles now tumble into the UK press - following in the footsteps of the same words about different places: Berlin, Sydney, Seattle and San Francisco. For some the criticism centres on the wealth of new arrivals or else on the mundane daily lives of those new residents - on the Google Bus.

But always and everywhere the thing that drives the attack on 'gentrification' is the cost of living in these cities and, in particular, the cost of housing. Even when people try to make it out to be more complicated by saying its "a complex, layered suite of intersecting measures" they end up talking about housing:

Given crippling student debt, rental costs that even those on “average salaries” can’t afford and the hyper-gentrification of previously affordable urban areas, even middle-class people have a right to be angry at an urban capitalism that is pricing them (and their children) out of the city.

So, given that it's housing that's the problem, perhaps we should ask why this is the case. Not my coming up with instant fixes like rent caps or rationing but by looking at the underlying reasons, which boils down to supply and demand. And especially supply:

By rationing land, urban containment policy drives up the price of housing and has been associated with an unprecedented loss of housing affordability in a number of metropolitan areas in the United States and elsewhere. Urban containment policy has also been associated with greater housing market volatility. This is a particular concern given the role of the 2000s US housing bubble and bust in precipitating the Great Financial Crisis that resulted in a reduction of international economic output.

And this exactly describes the situation in London. Elsewhere in England this doesn't apply - population densities for the London boroughs are, almost without exception, higher than anywhere else (even a place like Portsmouth that's constrained by its geography). For inner London these densities are three times greater than in Manchester or Bristol. There is little reason to change or review 'Green Belts' around Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds - other than the understandable preference for people to live in or near those 'Green Belts' - but for London, ending the policy of urban containment and densification is absolutely essential if problems with affordability and price volatility are to be avoided. Moreover, because London is so critical to the UK economy these decisions should not be left merely to the Mayor of London (or a collection of borough and district council leaders).

The consequence of failing to do something to address this problem isn't just more unpleasant rioters but a threat to the golden goose that is London's economy. Without a workforce able to access your jobs, the businesses will look elsewhere. We might hope this is Leeds, Manchester or Cardiff but it's just as likely to be Brussels, Frankfurt or Milan. Maybe even Cape Town, Djakarta or Lagos.

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Another reminder why we need to spend more money on our roads

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Even in London:

More than half of Londoners commute to work by car or other light vehicles (including car pools). Transit accounts for about a quarter of commuting, while about 10 percent of commuters walk to work. Approximately six percent usually labor mainly at or from home.

And there's a reason for this - despite the supposed dominance of commuting to central London most of the region's employment isn't in that central business district (defined as the four central boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Southwark and Lambeth plus the City of London - ought really to include Tower Hamlets and Kensington as well):

Despite its strong CBD, the London area is anything but monocentric. Approximately 85 percent of London area jobs are outside the central business district.

The commuting we hear about (very loudly on assorted social media most mornings) is primarily folk travelling in from outer London and the fringe of towns on the edge of London. Yes it's important but this transport system has taken the lion's share of UK transport investment for the past decade or so. It is tome to rebalance and start investing in the transport network everyone uses - roads.

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Quote of the day - on high rise living

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In corporate centres and in central neighbourhoods for the rich and (largely) childless some great places can have, can even be defined by a profusion of Brobdingnagian scale and monumentality. But outside corporate centres, away from the nodes of wealth and high social capital we would have less confidence than them about making this equation balance. Most people, in most societies, most of the time would prefer to live in more modestly sized buildings and nearer the ground.

The rest of the article is pretty brilliant too.

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The Adam Smith Institute should start with reading planning policy on Green Belt

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I have some sympathy for the view that London's Green Belt needs an extensive and comprehensive review. And I know this is difficult - politically and practically - given the range of differing interests and the multitude of interested public bodies (starting with over 50 local councils). Indeed the scale of the requirement is such that, however much Londoner might whimper about localism, conducting a review would have to be under the direction of national government.

Various organisations are chuntering about the need for change and the Adam Smith Institute is at the forefront. The problem is that the ASI appears not to have done the basic first job of reading the actual reasons for having a 'Green Belt' in the first place:

The research done by bodies such as the Adam Smith Institute and London First contradicts the popular image of the Green Belt as green and pleasant land. Far from the daisy-strewn meadows and woods teeming with wildlife that the term suggests, much Green Belt land is farmland, with monoculture fields by no means friendly to wildlife or accessible to people.

The first step in re-evaluation might be to classify Green Belt land into the different types that comprise it. There is genuinely green land, the fields and woods that everyone likes. There is damaged or brownfield land, partly made up of abandoned buildings, gravel pits and the like. And there is farmland, much of which is not environmentally friendly.

It is very good of these people to do this research telling every planner and most local councillors exactly what they already knew - that the 'Green Belt' is not either all green or entirely worthy of protection on environmental grounds. But what we also know - which the ASI seems to have missed - is that prettiness (for want of a better word) is not the reason for having a 'Green Belt'.  The policy gives five reasons:

To check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
To prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another;
To assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
To preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
To assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land 

None of these reasons relate to the use of land in the 'Green Belt'. The fact of needing to achieve those five policy objectives is met by controlling the uses to restrict those that do harm to the 'Green Belt'. And that 'harm' isn't some form of torture but rather anything that runs counter to the five reasons set out in policy. In simple terms the primary issue is 'openness' not the aesthetic of that openness.

We have a 'Green Belt' primarily in order to control the development of urban areas. This isn't about protecting special places in the countryside - we have other designations from 'Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty' through to 'Regionally Important Geological and Geomorphological Sites' that are intended to protect places we think are beautiful, ecologically-important, historically significant or otherwise somewhat unusual or unique.

London has a problem with housing supply - we all know that. And reviewing the 'Green Belt' would be a good idea in helping to meet that problem (although I wish those charged with review well and hope they have very thick skins). But the ASI's approach is completely misplaced - the 'Green Belt' isn't about protecting woodland and flower meadows but about making sure we concentrate development within existing settlements rather than allowing those settlements to extend to the point they lose their identity and become just a part of the London built-up area.

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Time to move parliament out of London

Bradford's Goitside - where better for a relocated Parliament Building!

I've said before that one way to rebalance the nation is to move the politicians (and their assorted hangers on) out of London. Ideally - and there is no bias here at all - to Bradford.

We now have that opportunity:

The historic Palace of Westminster is in such poor condition that MPs and peers may have to move out for five years while works are carried out.

The Parliament building is falling down. Time to make that radical choice and move MPs somewhere else - away from the expensive world of London. Instead of spending £3 billion tarting up an old building that doesn't meet modern needs, sell that building and use the cash to build a new one in the North of England.

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Why Boris Johnson should never lead the Conservative Party

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I'm a Conservative. I've been a member of the Party for nearly forty years - much longer than the current Mayor of London. And I am deeply worried that Boris Johnson may become the leader of what I see as my Party.

Let's be clear that this isn't about the Darius Guppy affair. It's not about Boris's inability to keep his trousers on and his serial infidelity. Nor is about his seeming shallowness, the jolly old Boris image all bluff and bluster, bonhomie and bounce. My concern is about what Boris Johnson has done, tried to do and proposes to do as Mayor of London. For me this is the absolute measure of the man and whether he should be allowed anywhere near the leadership of the Conservative Party.

I'm like lots of you. I love Boris, he is charismatic, exciting, different from the average politician. Boris is one of the people with the ability to make you smile, look up and listen - or at least think you're listening and not rather basking in the sunshine of the Mayor's personality. Only - dare I say it - Nigel Farage comes close to Boris Johnson in that sense of approachability. Boris is that rare sort of politician who'll get taxi drivers to peep their horns, and builders to yell his name out as he passes. And all this makes him the most dangerous sort of demogogue - someone who can persuade us to accept what we wouldn't accept from the regular sort of politician.

I also like the fact that Boris Johnson is Mayor of London and not Ken Livingstone. Boris is a much, much better Mayor of London than Ken. But then my cat would make a better Mayor of London than Ken. I like - or rather Londoners should like - the fact that Boris has managed to persuade the UK government to continue pouring nearly all of its limited infrastructure spending into London. This is pretty effective lobbying - with both Labour and Conservative led adminstrations in Westminster suckered into making London their investment priority.

The problem with Boris is simple. He likes government's bossiness all too much. This is the man who thinks it a good idea to buy some second hand water cannon to hose the unwashed and unwanted off the capital's streets. This is the politician whose first act was to impose a blanket drinking ban on the tube just to get a headline. And this is the leader who has supported bans on drinking outside pubs, curfews and the imposition of bouncers on suburban pubs.

Boris, when he got to be Mayor, looked around for a soulmate and found it in Michael Bloomberg, then the Mayor of New York. And Boris, capitivated either by Bloomberg's charm or his billions (hard to tell really), lapped up Mike's particular brand of municipal fascism, a world of bans and controls, greater police powers and the demonising of the homeless, the fatty and the smoker. This nannying fussbucketry has been embraced with enthusiasm by Boris - a man whose private behaviour belies his political desire to boss other people around about the way they live their lives.

Today the crysalis has cracked open and the complete Mayor Boris butterfly has emerged. What a splendid creature it is - a blonde, bouncy worrywart, a gaudy tousled version of Mike Bloomberg, a municipal fascist with a smiling jokey manner. Today Boris has announced proposals to ban smoking in parks and squares, minimum pricing for alcohol, controls and bans on fast food and a host of officious 'nutritional' information on restaurant menus. I'm sure that, given half a chance, Boris - channelling the Bloomberg model - will be taxing fizzy drinks, closing down street vendors and banning horse-drawn vehicles.

Once upon a time the Conservative Party was about choice, personal responsibility, tolerance and freedom. It seems this only applies - in the world of Boris Johnson - if you choose the approved lifestyles and directed behaviours of London's authorities. If you're a smoker, you're to be hounded even further to the margins of society - not for reasons of health but because Boris Johnson has decided - urged on by the health fascists - that you are not normal. And if you want to start a business selling kebabs or burgers, you'll be excluded from much of the capital's high streets by the planners.

This is not the Conservative Party I joined as a fifteen-year-old in 1976. But I am watching as privileged silver-spoon chewing men like Boris Johnson swallow the anti-choice, anti-freedom line of public health directors, chief constables, doctors and council chief executives. I am watching as the political party I have given so much to is destroyed by people who think there's something right in telling people they aren't normal because they smoke. People who want to give the police military hardware because they've lost the trust of big parts of the population.

There are still plenty of people in my party who still believe in choice, independence, freedom and personal responsibility. It's just that Boris Johnson isn't one of them. And if he - god forbid - ever leads my party, I shall have to think long and hard about whether to stay.

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