A good city has industry: email from Mark Brearley to a man called Vincent, on Twitter

P Wilkinson Containers / William Say & Co, Verney Road, Bermondsey. Producing metal and plastic containers in London since 1930. They are now threatened by Southwark Council and the GLA’s plans for big scale housing development in the area.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the road a residential tower is already rising, part of a development that makes no attempt to accommodate the again burgeoning industrial economy clustered around the Old Kent Road.

Hello Vincent.

Your Twitter comment about the Old Kent Road plans, to replace an extensive mixed economy with housing dominated development, have been pointed out to me. You wrote that people need homes not the industry that is there. You launched you views in the open, and so I have taken the liberty of widely sharing my observations in response.

I am upset by your comments and I do not understand the inference that this has to be an either / or choice. Why can’t we have both? London would be a sad place if it could no longer welcome a diverse economic and civic life. Surely we don’t want our city beyond the centre to become a vast housing estate, a steroided suburb, to be unable to house the full range of activity that its people make happen, to suffocate vitality. Yes, London needs much more housing, but it also must address a wider accommodation crisis. Glib assertions that swathes of commercial activity are not needed do not help.

My business, Kaymet, has been producing anodised aluminium trays and trolleys in the area since 1947. We are proud to be a growing company that exports to 30 countries, and to be one of the hundreds of thriving industrial businesses in the area. We do not want to be pushed aside, we have no interest in leaving our city.

I do not believe it is right, or necessary, to expel all those vehicle repair businesses, the rich diversity of builders merchants, courier facilities, hirers, storers, shippers, printers and caterers. In fact people do need the aluminium and plastic container makers, the shim producers, the metal polishers and finishers, the hydraulic equipment refurbishers, the waste handlers, the powder-coaters, art restorers and steel fabricators, the set and prop, festive decoration and ceremonial hat manufacturers, the stone carvers, terrazzo producers, bakers, potters, painters and sculptors, the leatherworkers, jewellers, garment and furniture producers, the operators of ice cream vans, and more. All this is there, around the Old Kent Road, productive, dynamic, providing thousands of jobs. All this is what you claim people do not need. You are wrong.

I am sure you would not be happy if, following a process that you had no opportunity to influence, without there having been any coherent public discussion, without any options having been made visible, plans were laid out for your nice bakery to be brushed aside, to be replaced by residential focused developments. You would not like it if a councillor talked casually of expropriation, and even those running other businesses not far away started applauding, saying that you are not needed. If people started to point out that perfectly good baked items can be produced in efficient factories elsewhere, outside London, and that small scale bakers' claims to be valid are as nothing compared to the need for housing, that you and your workers can all find jobs in offices or similar, you would not be pleased, you would perhaps feel insulted. Well, you should be able to understand why we are unhappy, and why your comment is so hurtful.

Please Vincent, think again, join us in shouting out that a good city has industry, as part of its rich mix. Help us to argue that we can shape the Old Kent Road area to embrace a fully diverse economy, that this can be compatible with large scale development of housing, that bold change could seize the widest range of opportunities, could be done nimbly, inventively, inclusively. We do not need to expel, to throw away what we have, that would be foolish.

Mark

Kaymet

It will be interesting to see what variant of steroided suburb Berkeley are cooking up. I’ll bet it makes no place for industry, nor for most of the rest of the vibrant (and fast growing) existing economic and civic life of Peckham.

Berkeley's proposals for the Old Kent Road area. The exhibitions took place on Wednesday 20 April from 2pm to 8pm at the Unwin and Friary Estate Tenants’ and Residents’ Hall, Frensham Street, Off Peckham Park Road SE15 and Thursday 21 April from 2pm to 8pm at the Links Community Centre, 353 Rotherhithe New Road, SE16 3HF.

Some words from Mark Brearley, owner of Kaymet (tray factory) and Professor of Spatial Planning and Urban Design at London Metropolitan University:

My business, and the neighbouring businesses, just meters away from Berkeley’s land, have not received emails nor leaflets, even though I get the impression that Southwark Council have shared contacts with Berkeley. I guess they don’t count the economy as community.

Regardless of what Berkeley are cooking up, their approach makes a mockery of the planning system, shows their contempt for it, their un-interest in democratic process and civil rights. They are openly sharing their ideas for a residential led development on protected industrial land, running way ahead of the local planning authority’s process to decide on what type of land-use / development scenario will be appropriate for the area in future. That process has so far not even managed to set out issues and options, nor to consult on and engage in a dialogue about them. There have been no opportunities to make comments nor lodge representations about possible changes to planning policy that are likely to have brutal consequences for businesses in the area. Yet we hear rumours that Berkeley want to put in a planning application before Christmas. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Meanwhile the local planning authority are conspicuously failing to embrace an understanding of the economic dynamic of their area. They seem to have no intention of meeting the requirement placed on them by government to ensure that the accommodation needs of the economy in their area are properly planned for. Development rights were expropriated by central government in 1947 (the same year my business started in this part of London) and then they were handed over to local authorities. Southwark Council seems to have forgotten that when expropriated assets were handed to them they came with a responsibility to manage them fairly and without prejudice, indeed that was the very reason why they were expropriated. Now they seem content to disregard the interests of business communities who have little voice and do not get to vote, who are taxed but not represented. The Council seem to think it's fine also to parade the possibility of property expropriation as a way to push through the suburb building plans that they clearly are already wedded to. Businesses have not been kept informed about the process that is ongoing, indeed most (such as mine) have so far received no communication on the matter. Yet the Council state that they will tell us all what their preferred option for the future of the Old Kent Road is in just a few days time! They too should be ashamed of themselves, and their friends in City Hall.

None of this is good.

I urge you all to speak up for a more diverse and accommodating Old Kent Road.

Mark

Kaymet

The Godiva chocolate factory, loading on the street alongside Simonis metro station, Koekelberg, in the city of miracle mix, Brussels.

What the hell is a Local Enterprise Partnership?

On Wednesday morning I found myself in the Caledodian Club at 8.30am, eating posh biscuits and feeling decidedly out of place in a sea of suits. I was at a seminar, organised by the Westminster Social Policy Forum thrillingly entitled Regeneration and local economic growth in England - innovation, investment and the future for LEPs.

I went to this because I'd wangled a free ticket, and someone on the Just Space Economy and Planning (JSEP) mailing list mentioned it may be interesting, but I had no idea what LEPs (Local Enterprise Partnerships) were. So, in case you are as ignorant as I, LEPs are partnerships between Local Authorities in England and business bodies, which exist for the purpose of promoting economic development. There are 39 of them, and a bit more information can be found here.

LEPs were set up when the Regional Development Agencies were 'burned to the ground' (in the words of one of the speakers) by the Tories in 2012. If you don't know what they were either, they were then non-departmental public bodies set up by Labour from 1998 to promote development - you can find out more here. Significant for me is the London Development Agency, which came into being in 2000 when the Greater London Authority was set up (and we elected Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London) which has now been replaced by the pan-London LEP, nattily entitled the London Enterprise Panel (acronym also LEP).

With a couple of small peeps of dissension, the speakers at the seminar mostly agreed that LEPs are a good idea, and that the private sector is a source of bounty for economic development. Several key themes emerged over the course of the morning:

1. Flexibility – LEPs are not well defined, so they have the potential to be anything
2. Purpose – what are LEPs for?
3. Accountability – what are LEPs up to? In whose interests?
4. Resources – who pays for it and how is this significant?

Resources

In 2012 LEPs were set up on a wholly voluntary basis, with no resources and the expectation that activities would be self-funded by local business and local authorities (LAs). The problems with this are obvious. First, LAs have suffered massive budget cuts, to the extent that because there is no statutory requirement for them to have departments responsible for economic development, many have disbanded them (and consequently lost their expertise) altogether. Second, the types local business which would have money and time available to contribute would only be the bigger ones, who are already more powerful and don't necessarily represent the interests of small local business, and certainly don't me necessarily represent the interests of local non-business people.

Recently, EU money (from the European Structural Investment Fund and the European Social Fund) has became available for LEPs to apply for, with present project funding of between €95 and €250 million per LEP. They have the freedom to pool money from different funds, but significantly it must be 50% match funded from the private sector. This requirement is reflected in the disinterest in the money available from the European Social Fund in for building social housing or retrofitting existing social housing as low-carbon. The returns are low, so because the private sector must be closely involved it is unlikely to happen through the mechanism of LEPs, even though money is available for it.

European law dictates what can and can't be done and the European Social Fund is particularly interested in employment, education and skills. LEPs get the money, they draw up strategies for spending it (although several speakers said that actually spending it is more complicated than it sounds) and ensure that the proposed outcomes happen. The EU prizes delivery and performance above all else, but the majority of LEPs have a permanent staff of under 10 people, so how this actually happens was the focus of much debate.

Keith Burgess from the Federation of small businesses summed it up nicely. Although there are resources from the EU, do the skills and capacity exist to manage these? The LEPs are composed of private interests and local authorities,, with few which include local communities in the development. The UK Government is keen on locally-led growth... but growth for its own sake seems pointless, for whose benefit?

Flexibility

Professor John Shutt suggested the engagement of LEPs, it is hugely advantageous for universities and FE to be key partners, because every LEP is different, all over the UK. Economic restructuring of the city, developing new institutional structures to deliver economic growth at a city-regional scale, which is not an easy task.

Alex Pratt: For the first time in living memory we are sitting down locally to consider local economic imperatives. It’s the first time we’ve got buy-in from local businesses. 50% of the LEPs are Local Authorities. All LEPS are different, but in general there is much more business engagement than there was with the Regional Development Agencies.

Alex Pratt: Delivery is the focus of LEPs, the LEP network was devised in order that 39 separate solutions don’t emerge to solve the same problem. It will not go away soon, LEPs are set in stone (although how soon is soon?). Competition should be between between the UK and the rest of the world, not within the UK.

Purpose

Baroness Valentine, Chief exec of London First, explained that the Pan-London LEP works closely with London First on the long term economic development of London, focussing on things like HS1 and HS2, the Northern Line Extension. Other cities can learn a lot from the way these have been developed. London needs to invest in transport and housing in order to maintain growth, we have a projected population of 10 million by 2036.

John Shutt echoed this: Place matters, powerful city-regions are important in the global context, cities need to federate with one another in order to be globally competitive. The LEPs need to understand local institutions and economic situation. Place-based issues include leadership and governance locally, institutional restructuring of the LEPs, analysis of assets networks and places with development potential (to do this at a fine enough grain to appreciate the nuances of particular streets requires huge resources – local authorities certainly don’t know this level of detail).

There are problems with overlapping boundaries and places which lie on boundaries in terms of delivery, there needs to be policy in place to drive co-operation between LEPs rather than competition between the regions. London is particularly good at this, elsewhere is less so. Some places are combined authorities, others are not and it is a complex, evolving and contradictory process. Margaret Hodge in her report on the LEPs argued that not much of the money was actually reaching businesses.

Carol Sweetnam gave a run-down of I was particularly interested in Community led local developments, although I had great difficulty finding out about his on the internet afterwards – mentioned an orchard which apparently had regenerated an area, created jobs, community cohesion and all sorts of other things. THANK GOD FOR ORCHARDS.

Alex Pratt was an excellent speaker, very engaging and spoke without slides which was a nice change. In the UK in the length of a lifetime we have gone from being the richest and most powerful country on the planet to on which is £1.5 trillion in debt, with a series of crises on our hands – housing, obesity… what’s happened to us? Part of the problem is centralised economic decision making, and when things are centralised you get sub-optimal outcomes. There has been no strategic influence on the factors which influence production locally. We seem to have all agree that the private sector is the source of all things good. The problem is that the balance is wrong between the short term political priorities and the medium to long term economic priorities. The LEPs will possibly be a step along the way towards solving this, some by choice, some co-erced. We run a nationalised system, eg. skills are nationalised, the national system is ‘dug-in’, and the LEPs have less support than we might like to see ideally. Councillors sometimes see LEPs as a ‘slap in the face’

Accountability

Professor John Shutt established a core theme when he argued that they organisation around governance, resources and funding has not yet been established. John Shutt raised the question of governance, and noted that resources are required for LEPs to be accountable to everyone else in what they do, and as yet we do not know where the money for this comes from.

Keith Burgess from the Institute of Economic Development said The RDA valuation reports were going to be scrapped, and the Institute of Economic Development has saved them for the LEPs to use. LEPs are intended to be bottom-up. LEPs, what are they going to do and why?

Paul Watson from the FSB: Between 2008-11 95% of people who found a job found a job within a small business or set up a small business. Jobs in small business are jobs, and are also important for social inclusion, they often employ those who find it difficult o find jobs elsewhere. Local Authorities need to be empowered, and small businesses lack trust for Local Authorities. They suspect that LEP money will be used as an easy means of plugging deficits, and they have a poor record when it comes to ameliorating town centre decline. They see consultation as ‘tickbox’, and that LAs don’t take the time to engage in genuine consultation (I have observed exactly this in Haringey). LEPs need transparency, accounts, minutes, members’ interests – otherwise people don’t know what’s going on. FSB could find only 50% with published information. Governance of LEPs should be accountable to SMEs, which are a blind spot for a lot of LEPs. They need to ensure against ‘mission drift’ in which they drift towards becoming mini RDAs. LEPs should be about business support, ensuring local procurement for LAa. Business rstes reforms incentives (Enterprise Areas) are not working.

Comments

The problem here seems to be between the scale of the LEP, and the scale of a large proportion of the economic life in an area, which is SMEs. I wondered if there is any mechanism in place to help very small businesses, and those which belong to non-native speakers or those with a lower level of formal education. All in all, it seems there are 39 bodies throughout England who have the potential to bridge the gap between vast institutions which may be a source of money, and the individual business person who lives and works in Tottenham. But there are 59 million people in England. Divided into 39 LEPs that's 1.5 million people each. That's a lot of people for a small, voluntary, business-led organisation to be of much use. Which is probably why I've never heard of LEPs before.

London for All: Opening up Debate on London’s Economy

For more details about this event see this link:

http://justspace.org.uk/2014/07/21/debating-londons-economy-can-the-global-city-be-a-city-for-all/

Yesterday afternoon I attended London for all: opening up debate on London's Economy, hosted by the Bromley-by-Bow Centre and organised by Myfanwy Taylor from UCL Department of Geography, collaborating with Just Space - a London-wide network of voluntary and community groups working together to influence planning policy. If you want to look up the Tweets made from the event, search #londonforall and #justspace.

Divided into three quick fire sessions, with speakers talking for a maximum of ten minutes, yesterday afternoon was a thrilling discussion about the many facets of London’s economy: its present, future, and how should we measure the value of what it contains. A main theme emerged: the dysfunctional relationship between The Economy (a global-scale phenomenon in which constant growth is desirable, and is measured in money) and the human-scale building blocks of that economy - the small and medium businesses that fill every nook and cranny of London’s industrial estates and high street hinterlands.

James Meadway, New Economics Foundation

It was generally agreed that the London Plan places too much emphasis on housing growth, at the expense of industrial land. The NEF's James Meadway described the huge inequalities of wealth in London, with simple but powerful graphs. The phenomenal house prices (a house costs 10 x average earnings) leads to a ‘wealth effect’, job creation and pressure on the housing stock, in a self-reinforcing system of unsustainable growth. Roy Tindle from LTGF also criticised the conflict between industry and housing, in which housing tends to win. London relies on its industrial estates for almost every system of distribution and it is this infrastructure that underpins our massive and hugely successful service sector.

Michael Bach from the London Forum astutely pointed out that impact assessments are lacking in the drive to increase housing density in London. The economies of most boroughs are based on small businesses, which require spaces that are both appropriate and affordable. While technically the London Plan is accountable (it is consulted on), Opportunity Areas are not accountable, resulting in the construction of something in the region of 250 new residential towers in the coming years. Although planning policy often stipulates mixed use at ground floor, residents do not want noisy or smelly work taking place at their front door. Similarly, as Sue Terpilowski from the Federation of Small Businesses pointed out, business cannot be forced to locate in inappropriate locations or premises, as exemplified by the doomed schemes where the ground floor remains resolutely unoccupied. This is no problem for the developer, who has already reaped their profit from the lucrative enterprise of house-building, but disastrous for place and the local economy.

The London Plan also ignores other key issues. Dianne Perrons of the LSE argued that supporting reproduction and gender equality through child- and elder-care produces growth comparable to construction of new roads, which is also contained within particular geographic area (and local commitment is a prerequisite for ethical city-making). The Women’s Budget Group highlights the issues nationally, but Perrons argued for a specific focus on London. The Chair of the London Assembly Economy Committee, Jenny Jones, pointed out that for Lloyds of London and Price Waterhouse Cooper’s, climate change will be the biggest factor impacting the future of London. It is a systemic issue, which will affect everything (from food, to land, to production), yet it is notably absent from the London Plan. She pointed out that we need measure of adaptation, not mitigation, to cope with the spectre of climate change, but that nothing is happening because “Boris doesn’t believe in it”.

An unusual mix of academics, business owners and other interested parties attended – and its rare to see these people in the same place. It was great to hear from the owners of small businesses in the second session, who have an embedded and embodied experience of what it means to run a business in London under growing pressure from increased rents – and whose voice is often absent from the debate. Truman Brewery is due to lose its Hackney premises in 5 years as the landlord plans to develop the site as housing. Patria Roman-Velazquez from Latin Elephant made the excellent point that much ‘regeneration’ (developer-led house and flat-building) is taking place in areas where migrants have settled (Hackney, Harringay etc. – this is particularly true of Tottenham). Migrant entrepreneurs contribute approximately £30 billion to the UK economy, and nationally migrants start 1 in 7 new businesses (in London this figure is much higher, I’ve met few UK born traders in the survey of small businesses on Tottenham High Road). Yet migrants also lack power and a voice, and their businesses and the places they have collectively crafted are undervalued by local authorities, in the face of the tempting potential for gentrification.

‘Where do we go from here?’ focussed on potential solutions. Jones suggested that land should be set aside for informal, community-led industries and economies, particularly those with low carbon impact. Ben Rogers from the Centre for London argued that London is THE global city, and that we should seek to maintain this position, as it is it hugely beneficial to all. To facilitate this, he suggested more autonomy for the London government, such as the ability to set property taxes appropriately (and gave the shocking fact that the penthouses at 1 Hyde Park pay about £1600 annual council tax). Terpilowski pointed out that accelerated growth is actually bad for small businesses, it is better to grow slowly and sustainable, and ‘scruffy is good’ ie. it’s what’s behind the façade (the human lives and their commitment to their work) that matters. It’s easy to confuse the symptom of economic and ethical success (tidy, nicely painted shop fronts) with its cause (positive, fruitful and sustained interrelationships between people and place).

Considering the London Plan is about spatial planning, space and place were not discussed concretely, although their presence underpinned the majority of the presentations. The small businesses who spoke clearly had a grasp of spatial issues, and how they are embedded in a particular place. According to an individual from the GLA, planners do not understand these issues, as they are reluctant to leave the office. As Tindle suggested, you need to visit your local industrial estate to truly understand what is at stake. From my own experience, you need to speak to business owners to comprehend the rich metabolism of which they are part, because disparate scales of economic understanding are brought together through the physical place and the topography of the city.

This was most well understood by Rachel Laurence from the NEF, who is undertaking a research project exploring new economics in practice. The problems we face are integrated, but the solutions we are devising are ‘chopped up’ between many different agencies. She presented a series of succinct and powerful diagrams, showing the ‘pizza’ of the economy, with concentric rings representing places, society, institutions and the myriad of other bits, connecting between the micro and the macro scales. She argued that in order to devise systemic solutions you have to beg

Rachel Laurence, New Economics Foundation

in by asking: what do we want the economy of London to achieve?

Planning is reactive, rather than proactive, allowing destruction of the delicate balance of the micro-economies of London and replacing them with mono-thematic developments. As a contrast to this, the ‘traditional’ high street is almost endlessly adaptable, with typologies and depth of block that can accommodate almost any enterprise. A 2 bedroom high rise flat can only ever be a 2 bedroom high rise flat – it can never be a solicitor’s office or an off license.

It is deceptive to look at flows of goods and wealth and consider economic growth as a good measure of the value of a city. The economy is not just about flows and movements of commodities, but of human lives, families, relationships and commitment to place. Well-being should be the focus and measure of the success of economic planning, rather than growth. Ultimately, the problem is that planners and government – both local and national – do not have the resources to build the city, and rely on private interests to do it instead. We need to find ways to moderate and control this process to the advantage of all.