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| Interview: London First chief executive Jo Valentine on the capital's future | |
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| It’s worth recalling why London became something more than an Italian imperial fortress on a hill. The Thames was a watery corridor of commerce, its north bank was where traders, many from far-flung places, did their deals. Yes, the Romans eventually shipped out and, yes, there have been plagues and revolts and other pivotal events along the way. But little that’s happened since the earliest settlement can be explained without reference to the capital as a wellspring of business activity, largely of the international kind. Today, that spring gushes wealth and taxes - at least 22% of the UK’s GDP, 18.5% of its tax take. The challenge this presents is twofold; one, how best to maintain the torrent; two, how best to channel its flow. | It’s worth recalling why London became something more than an Italian imperial fortress on a hill. The Thames was a watery corridor of commerce, its north bank was where traders, many from far-flung places, did their deals. Yes, the Romans eventually shipped out and, yes, there have been plagues and revolts and other pivotal events along the way. But little that’s happened since the earliest settlement can be explained without reference to the capital as a wellspring of business activity, largely of the international kind. Today, that spring gushes wealth and taxes - at least 22% of the UK’s GDP, 18.5% of its tax take. The challenge this presents is twofold; one, how best to maintain the torrent; two, how best to channel its flow. |
| Jo Valentine is chief executive of London First, the membership organisation representing the capital’s biggest employers in financial services, property, transport, hospitality and retail, along with its universities. Its stated aim is “to make London the best city in the world in which to do business.” That means lobbying and campaigning at national and local levels and getting in the earhole of the mayor. Both Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone have listened. The next mayor would be daft not to do the same. The concerns of London First coincide with core areas of mayoral responsibility: housing, planning and transport as well as oiling the profit machine. Valentine - Baroness Valentine of Putney, if we’re being grand - has a case to make in all these areas. She has a big picture vision too: | |
| “London needs £50bn over the next 20 years or so to sustainably fund its infrastructure,” she says. “I’m talking about a mega city deal.” This would be “way, beyond anything that anybody else is talking about.” She’d like powers devolved to London on a complementary scale. The proposals in the well-received, Johnson-commissioned London Finance Commission report, which would give London government control over London’s property taxes, are modest by comparison. | “London needs £50bn over the next 20 years or so to sustainably fund its infrastructure,” she says. “I’m talking about a mega city deal.” This would be “way, beyond anything that anybody else is talking about.” She’d like powers devolved to London on a complementary scale. The proposals in the well-received, Johnson-commissioned London Finance Commission report, which would give London government control over London’s property taxes, are modest by comparison. |
| Of course, Valentine explains, you couldn’t land such a lump of cash on the city overnight: “We wouldn’t be competent to deal with it yet.” However: “While I’m not advocating this, just say you had a plan which said that by 2050 we want to be in a position where the mayor captures tax and reinvests it, and you can have sustainable investment in transport and housing. You need to be working to that sort of time frame.” | Of course, Valentine explains, you couldn’t land such a lump of cash on the city overnight: “We wouldn’t be competent to deal with it yet.” However: “While I’m not advocating this, just say you had a plan which said that by 2050 we want to be in a position where the mayor captures tax and reinvests it, and you can have sustainable investment in transport and housing. You need to be working to that sort of time frame.” |
| This is a model of big city self-determination much more like that of New York and a bit more for luck. It’s hard to imagine any UK national government handing down such hefty portions of money and power any time soon, and the volume of anti-London rhetoric would increase. Yet Valentine’s case for enhancing the capital’s fiscal and political autonomy, like those advanced by others, is not about increasing London’s dominance or hogging more of the nation’s resources. It’s about the city as an economic entity making better decisions and implementing them more speedily. | This is a model of big city self-determination much more like that of New York and a bit more for luck. It’s hard to imagine any UK national government handing down such hefty portions of money and power any time soon, and the volume of anti-London rhetoric would increase. Yet Valentine’s case for enhancing the capital’s fiscal and political autonomy, like those advanced by others, is not about increasing London’s dominance or hogging more of the nation’s resources. It’s about the city as an economic entity making better decisions and implementing them more speedily. |
| Valentine says the five-year investment settlements secured by Transport for London (TfL) have been a step in the right direction, but: “As Boris found with his Estuary Airport plan, in Britain the decision-making dynamics don’t work well for doing sort of Chinese-style, long-term thinking. What you end up doing in practice is the last thing that was on the drawing board about 50 years ago - Crossrail 1, airports, you name it.” | Valentine says the five-year investment settlements secured by Transport for London (TfL) have been a step in the right direction, but: “As Boris found with his Estuary Airport plan, in Britain the decision-making dynamics don’t work well for doing sort of Chinese-style, long-term thinking. What you end up doing in practice is the last thing that was on the drawing board about 50 years ago - Crossrail 1, airports, you name it.” |
| “If we’re going to invest in infrastructure, housing and transport and so on, to keep pace with population growth we’re looking at spending zillions of pounds. But you do get your money back. You either keep going with the begging bowl, saying ‘we want Crossrail 2, we want Crossrail 7’ or whatever and make your investment case and wait until the political stars are aligned, or you start moving towards a more devolved structure where it’s more in London’s power, presumably the mayor’s, to make investment and return add up.” | “If we’re going to invest in infrastructure, housing and transport and so on, to keep pace with population growth we’re looking at spending zillions of pounds. But you do get your money back. You either keep going with the begging bowl, saying ‘we want Crossrail 2, we want Crossrail 7’ or whatever and make your investment case and wait until the political stars are aligned, or you start moving towards a more devolved structure where it’s more in London’s power, presumably the mayor’s, to make investment and return add up.” |
| Much of Valentine’s thinking centres on decision-making structures and processes. London’s governance is a puzzle of democratic layers and semi-separate delivery bodies whose functions and responsibilities overlap or otherwise with mixed results. It can be hard to get stuff done and in the best way. A good example would be Crossrail 2, the proposed high capacity rail line whose core route could run from Southgate and Tottenham to Wimbledon by way of Victoria and link to Hertfordshire and Surrey at either end. New rail routes open up house-building potential, but how can this best be realised? | Much of Valentine’s thinking centres on decision-making structures and processes. London’s governance is a puzzle of democratic layers and semi-separate delivery bodies whose functions and responsibilities overlap or otherwise with mixed results. It can be hard to get stuff done and in the best way. A good example would be Crossrail 2, the proposed high capacity rail line whose core route could run from Southgate and Tottenham to Wimbledon by way of Victoria and link to Hertfordshire and Surrey at either end. New rail routes open up house-building potential, but how can this best be realised? |
| “The Greater London Authority [the GLA, whose political boss is the mayor] needs to own saying ‘I need this much housing done, therefore I need this sort of transport’ as opposed to the other way round, which is how it tends to work,” reasons Valentine. “TfL has, of course, done the sort of work it does forever. So TfL says ‘this is the answer’ and the GLA cross-questions it, but there isn’t much in the opposite direction. Where you want to get to is asking, ‘we need this much housing first so what sort of transport should we provide in order to get to that?’” | “The Greater London Authority [the GLA, whose political boss is the mayor] needs to own saying ‘I need this much housing done, therefore I need this sort of transport’ as opposed to the other way round, which is how it tends to work,” reasons Valentine. “TfL has, of course, done the sort of work it does forever. So TfL says ‘this is the answer’ and the GLA cross-questions it, but there isn’t much in the opposite direction. Where you want to get to is asking, ‘we need this much housing first so what sort of transport should we provide in order to get to that?’” |
| Valentine is complimentary about TfL as an organisation that makes its systems function well and “continually improving,” but says it must itself continue getting better at gathering the right information to inform major decisions. This may be especially so with regard to the management of London’s roads, notably in the centre where business activity is tightly packed. Mayor Johnson’s cycling policies have provided an instructive example. | Valentine is complimentary about TfL as an organisation that makes its systems function well and “continually improving,” but says it must itself continue getting better at gathering the right information to inform major decisions. This may be especially so with regard to the management of London’s roads, notably in the centre where business activity is tightly packed. Mayor Johnson’s cycling policies have provided an instructive example. |
| “We’ve found it very difficult to work out what the real consequences of the cycling superhighway are for congestion,” Valentine says. “It’s precisely what Ken did when he first put in the congestion charge in. He took a load of road space out for buses - which with hindsight turns out to have been a very good thing - and he took a load out with pedestrian schemes, and before you could blink you were back nearly to the same level of congestion as before the congestion charge began. We’re now going back to gridlock. I think it’s incumbent on the GLA and TfL to just be sure that they are taking everybody’s concerns properly into account. I’m not clear whether that’s being done.” | “We’ve found it very difficult to work out what the real consequences of the cycling superhighway are for congestion,” Valentine says. “It’s precisely what Ken did when he first put in the congestion charge in. He took a load of road space out for buses - which with hindsight turns out to have been a very good thing - and he took a load out with pedestrian schemes, and before you could blink you were back nearly to the same level of congestion as before the congestion charge began. We’re now going back to gridlock. I think it’s incumbent on the GLA and TfL to just be sure that they are taking everybody’s concerns properly into account. I’m not clear whether that’s being done.” |
| Valentine, who’s been a London cyclist since she was 14 years old, finds little to recommend about Johnson’s current cycle superhighways or the segregated ones he has been talked into introducing - against his own better judgement - as the headline element of his latest cycling vision. “I’m a tootling-across-Central-London cyclist as opposed to a superhighway sort of cyclist. I’m not interested in segregated lanes. You are being herded like cattle. I’m about the slowest cyclist in London and I always think the thing most likely to knock me off my bike is another cyclist going very fast right at my elbow. That would be more of a worry in a segregated lane. I suppose they are meant to prove you’re taking cyclists seriously.” | Valentine, who’s been a London cyclist since she was 14 years old, finds little to recommend about Johnson’s current cycle superhighways or the segregated ones he has been talked into introducing - against his own better judgement - as the headline element of his latest cycling vision. “I’m a tootling-across-Central-London cyclist as opposed to a superhighway sort of cyclist. I’m not interested in segregated lanes. You are being herded like cattle. I’m about the slowest cyclist in London and I always think the thing most likely to knock me off my bike is another cyclist going very fast right at my elbow. That would be more of a worry in a segregated lane. I suppose they are meant to prove you’re taking cyclists seriously.” |
| She dismisses as “rubbish” the claims of some cycling campaigners that London First and City misgivings about the coming superhighways stemmed from executives fearing slower limo trips and says she’d prefer more resources directed towards solving “small junction problems all round London.” She adds that “TfL ought to be better at listening to customers, cyclists and all people on the roads. I understand that’s very difficult for a large organisation doing big stuff, but I think they need to keep trying to do better. As a cyclist, you do get very angry about the way the traffic treats you, that cars cut you up and buses get in the cycle lane. Part of the reason cyclists have got so aggressive is that they’ve been so badly treated for a long time. When one of them gets killed on a junction where TfL has been told several times it’s unsafe, that’s not a good place to be. Quite a lot of your big picture answers to road problems actually come just from listening, talking and finding out what really does and doesn’t work.” | She dismisses as “rubbish” the claims of some cycling campaigners that London First and City misgivings about the coming superhighways stemmed from executives fearing slower limo trips and says she’d prefer more resources directed towards solving “small junction problems all round London.” She adds that “TfL ought to be better at listening to customers, cyclists and all people on the roads. I understand that’s very difficult for a large organisation doing big stuff, but I think they need to keep trying to do better. As a cyclist, you do get very angry about the way the traffic treats you, that cars cut you up and buses get in the cycle lane. Part of the reason cyclists have got so aggressive is that they’ve been so badly treated for a long time. When one of them gets killed on a junction where TfL has been told several times it’s unsafe, that’s not a good place to be. Quite a lot of your big picture answers to road problems actually come just from listening, talking and finding out what really does and doesn’t work.” |
| Another big, related, issue is Central London road deliveries. “We have one of the most successful business districts in the world, so obviously we need coffee, tea, paper, computers, West End theatre sets, whatever it is, to be got into central London. You need to go to the people doing those things first, but the system doesn’t work that way around. Likewise, it hardly works for taking children to school. I’d like to start with the punter and work backwards, whether that’s cyclists or parents people or picking their shopping up, or anyone else. If you did that, you could refine the transport offer. I would do stuff that wouldn’t suit everyone all the time, but which trades things off.” | Another big, related, issue is Central London road deliveries. “We have one of the most successful business districts in the world, so obviously we need coffee, tea, paper, computers, West End theatre sets, whatever it is, to be got into central London. You need to go to the people doing those things first, but the system doesn’t work that way around. Likewise, it hardly works for taking children to school. I’d like to start with the punter and work backwards, whether that’s cyclists or parents people or picking their shopping up, or anyone else. If you did that, you could refine the transport offer. I would do stuff that wouldn’t suit everyone all the time, but which trades things off.” |
| Some sort of mechanism for achieving that in the centre would be desirable, she thinks. From London First’s point of view, she’d like to have “business champions” involved with sorting out stubborn problems where there are tensions between several interest groups. She cites Howard Bernstein’s West End Commission as a way to go. Something must be done to improve Oxford street: “It’s nonsense to have so many buses going down it at three miles an hour with 13 people on board, quite apart from the air quality problems they cause.” | Some sort of mechanism for achieving that in the centre would be desirable, she thinks. From London First’s point of view, she’d like to have “business champions” involved with sorting out stubborn problems where there are tensions between several interest groups. She cites Howard Bernstein’s West End Commission as a way to go. Something must be done to improve Oxford street: “It’s nonsense to have so many buses going down it at three miles an hour with 13 people on board, quite apart from the air quality problems they cause.” |
| Valentine is radical on road space management in a way no mayoral contender for 2016 is likely to dare to be, except perhaps whoever runs for the Greens. “You need pan-London road pricing,” she says. “Probably not right out to the M25, but to the north and south circular. The population’s growing, the roads are never going to keep up with the natural growth in demand, so you’ve got to ration it in some way. I would do more sophisticated road pricing than we have at present more widely. You’ll get a version of it with the new river crossings, if those are ever built.” Again, she thinks the sums would soon add up: “If you relieve congestion in London, that produces economic benefits and the Treasury benefits too.” What about putting roads in underground tunnels, as Johnson has proposed? “It wouldn’t solve everything, but perhaps we could make it happen in a few places. The Hammersmith flyover becoming a flyunder would just be a way of sorting out that flyover. I’d like an intelligent approach.” | Valentine is radical on road space management in a way no mayoral contender for 2016 is likely to dare to be, except perhaps whoever runs for the Greens. “You need pan-London road pricing,” she says. “Probably not right out to the M25, but to the north and south circular. The population’s growing, the roads are never going to keep up with the natural growth in demand, so you’ve got to ration it in some way. I would do more sophisticated road pricing than we have at present more widely. You’ll get a version of it with the new river crossings, if those are ever built.” Again, she thinks the sums would soon add up: “If you relieve congestion in London, that produces economic benefits and the Treasury benefits too.” What about putting roads in underground tunnels, as Johnson has proposed? “It wouldn’t solve everything, but perhaps we could make it happen in a few places. The Hammersmith flyover becoming a flyunder would just be a way of sorting out that flyover. I’d like an intelligent approach.” |
| On housing, she wants London to follow the example of Kate Barker, who wrote an influential report for Gordon Brown eleven years ago. “We need to take a sensible step back and look at the numbers and how the system works.” There’s no easy solution. More public investment could be part of it, allowing councils more freedom to build could be another. A new London First report called Carrots and Sticks suggests incentives and penalties to get boroughs delivering more homes. Valentine thinks we should look again at green belt designations too: “Green belt isn’t all green space. What we ought to do is re-pitch the London Plan to say that everyone should have easy access to some nice safe green space, which is very important for children, and you sort out the green belt behind that. Chunks of it are just grotty or under-utilised.” | On housing, she wants London to follow the example of Kate Barker, who wrote an influential report for Gordon Brown eleven years ago. “We need to take a sensible step back and look at the numbers and how the system works.” There’s no easy solution. More public investment could be part of it, allowing councils more freedom to build could be another. A new London First report called Carrots and Sticks suggests incentives and penalties to get boroughs delivering more homes. Valentine thinks we should look again at green belt designations too: “Green belt isn’t all green space. What we ought to do is re-pitch the London Plan to say that everyone should have easy access to some nice safe green space, which is very important for children, and you sort out the green belt behind that. Chunks of it are just grotty or under-utilised.” |
| She has a little wish list for London’s next mayor. One item is for house building to have increased to the required rate by the end of their term in City Hall. Another is for him or her to adopt London First’s London 2036 jobs and growth agenda, compiled in partnership with the mayor’s London Enterprise Panel and covering everything from “global positioning” to skills, to energy provision, to the Thames Tideway super-sewer, to how London can work better in the UK interest with everywhere from Manchester to Wales. The mayor’s powers are untidy and limited in several ways, but there still needs to be a grand plan. Most of the mayoral hopefuls, from whichever party, would be comfortable with much of what’s proposed. | She has a little wish list for London’s next mayor. One item is for house building to have increased to the required rate by the end of their term in City Hall. Another is for him or her to adopt London First’s London 2036 jobs and growth agenda, compiled in partnership with the mayor’s London Enterprise Panel and covering everything from “global positioning” to skills, to energy provision, to the Thames Tideway super-sewer, to how London can work better in the UK interest with everywhere from Manchester to Wales. The mayor’s powers are untidy and limited in several ways, but there still needs to be a grand plan. Most of the mayoral hopefuls, from whichever party, would be comfortable with much of what’s proposed. |
| “We did a visioning exercise about two years ago with some young people,” Valentine recalls. “They had some very interesting ideas. You know how we talk in planning terms about London’s villages? Well, their vision of villages was to put commerce in as well, so we think of them as somewhere you can live, shop easily and where the children go to school, but you bring more commercial activity in too. I guess it’s the Tech City sort of entity. The Olympic Park, perhaps, has that sort of potential. You live, work and play in your village and you go exploring in the rest of London. We don’t think in that sort of way enough.” | “We did a visioning exercise about two years ago with some young people,” Valentine recalls. “They had some very interesting ideas. You know how we talk in planning terms about London’s villages? Well, their vision of villages was to put commerce in as well, so we think of them as somewhere you can live, shop easily and where the children go to school, but you bring more commercial activity in too. I guess it’s the Tech City sort of entity. The Olympic Park, perhaps, has that sort of potential. You live, work and play in your village and you go exploring in the rest of London. We don’t think in that sort of way enough.” |