The General Election means pledges abound for the country. But has either party been focusing sufficiently on the capital? At City A.M., London’s premier business newspaper, we don’t think so.
Luckily we’ve cobbled together a Manifesto of our own.
Address London’s lack of bins
The average Londoner loses three to four minutes per day desperately poking around the streets in search of a place to put their refuse. Okay, we made that stat up. But it may as well be true.
London has a shocking dearth of bins, and it’s all down to the Provisional IRA. In the 1990s the balaclava-clad terrorists threw a bomb in a bin and so concerned authorities removed a whole load of rubbish receptacles from the capital. This seems a little like chucking the baby out with the bathwater – surely we can allow bins, but ban bombs?
More bins will cost a little money, sure. But less walking around in search of a refuse station can only lead to increased productivity. C’est logique. After all, this is vital time we could be working or contributing to the economy. Instead we’re wandering around the city clutching empty crisp packets, becoming increasingly agitated.
A particularly awesome solution would be solar compactor bins which shoot trash down to a pit in the ground, taking up little supraterra ground space bar some panels which power the device. Harvesting solar power, the waste is compacted and real-time status communicated to the authorities. Sunderland has implemented them to great success, apparently catapulting the northern city into the ‘space age’.
Build more houses
This is so obvious it’s almost boring. But has it been solved? No. So let’s go through it again: more than 300,000 Londoners are currently on the waiting list for a council home, according to the Centre for London, which explains that demand for homes in the capital is far higher than existing supply. Fixing the supply problem would reduce sky-high rents, give more people the security of a home and create jobs. The average rent in London is around 40 per cent of the average household income, compared to 26 per cent across England. No wonder, then, that a quarter of Londoners live in poverty after paying their housing costs. For the remaining three quarters, it funnels excess money to landlords that could be spent in the economy as a whole.
Since 2014, there has been a 50 per cent rise in the number of people in London sleeping rough. Let that sink in: it is a devastating, totally incriminating statistic. There is no reason that anybody should be homeless. Except for the obvious – there aren’t enough homes.
Smash the tourist tax!!
A no brainer. Britain’s retail sector was pummelled by the pandemic first and is now being brutalised by sky high interest rates and rampant inflation. With British shoppers more squeezed than ever, retailers are in dire need of custom.
And the government’s response is to… Remove a tax break used by wealthy international tourists when taking luxury shopping trips to Bicester Village, the West End and the like encouraging them to flock to Paris and Milan instead? Make it make sense. We should scrap this tax and scrap business rates while we’re at it.
Improve the Tube
As City A.M. has already noted, the Bakerloo and Central Lines are creaking, with ageing rolling stock contributing to delays and cancellations. The trains are often over 50 years old, 10 years beyond their sell by date. The route could face “critical failure” without urgent funding, which won’t be news to anyone who’s taken a ride on the dirt-brown line. On the Central Line often not even half of the 78 trains needed to run a peak service have been functioning. On both, the temperature and decibel levels are nearing dangerous. It’s time for a revamp.
Reduce the price of Uber boats
Hardly anyone uses them. But I’d be willing to make the wild bet that they would be a whole lot keener to do so if the price didn’t stretch to over £10 per one-way journey.
No more tokenistic trees
Londoners, you live in the world’s largest urban forest. Yes, according to the Greater London Authority’s tree cover map the capital is 40 per cent covered in a ‘tree canopy’. This may not be visible to the naked human eye, but a fact is a fact. And who can argue with a statistic arrived at using “high-resolution aerial imagery of the whole of London to analyse tree cover using machine-learning techniques”?
But are we missing the point? Perhaps it’s time to focus on blue space rather than green space which is – according to the Environment Agency – equally impactful on mental health. A few more canals wouldn’t go amiss – and could be life saving. An alternative route could divert traffic, preventing East London hipsters from dying of suffocation as the density of weekend walkers alongside Regent’s Canal in search of an overpriced bagel and latte continues to rocket.
Knock down the Monument
Sorry, a huge block of cement with gold on top? It’s hideous. Plus, only one person died in the Great Fire of London (except the Catholics whose deaths were erased from history). Watch the full video here.
More public toilets!
As covered by this paper, our public toilets are in mortal peril. Not investing in WCs is economically illiterate policymaking – yes it costs money to run them, but it also costs money to clean up the torrents of **** and **** from Londinium’s streets.
Also, with one in five Brits being officially choked by the loo leash (that’s the official term) which keeps them locked to their homes out of fear of not being able to make it to the lavatory whilst exercising their consumer duty, we’re losing out on a heck of a lot of business.
“Can a toilet make its own money? Can a toilet make a profit?” Adverts on the back of loo doors could help prop up a public toilet supply, as Raymond Martin of the British Toilet Association told me earlier this year. If nothing changes, Lewisham and Merton will become barren for loo-seekers by 2039.
It comes down to the Magna Carta, Martin says. For that Great Charter of 1215, a cornerstone of British democracy, dictates that the health and wellbeing of the populus far outweighs that of the state or the crown. “And the people in this country are sick. They can’t urinate; there’s dirt and detritus everywhere. You go into these places, the sinks are broken, no wonder people are peeing in the streets.” Let’s give our capital city the power to change that.
Pedestrianise our roads
Infinitely popular during the pandemic, let’s return the tables and chairs to the streets of Soho. People took over the roads and spent money in droves.
Anyway, it’s official: most of us want cars banned from the city centre. So perhaps we should bite the bullet and ramp up the so-called War on Motorists by banning cars altogether. There’s nothing like a good fight to pull people together.
More public squares
The ones we have are ghastly. The first step could be to give them a scrub, but the second should be to roll out a few more. And these ones could be a little more relax-by-the-fountain Piazza Navona and a little less mind-the-needle-and-toxic-vape Leicester Square.
Let’s be honest: despite the prestigious National Gallery presiding over it, no self-respecting Londoner would seriously consider “chilling in Trafalgar Square”. But if we had a few better options, we could boost our flailing cafe culture (and spark a few more intellectual discussions).
If we’re looking for areas to desecrate, I suggest Camden Market.
Reopen closed pubs
3,000 pubs have closed in London since the pandemic started. That is a disgrace. Not only is our heritage slipping away from us, but in the Square Mile for sure, the remaining beer-flogging establishments are stubbornly five people thick at the bar every goddamn Thursday. More options will diversify the offering for beer drinkers, improving the offering through competition.
We’ve been through a rough patch (Covid, the energy crisis). A little money spent on restoring historic locales will not seem wasted in the long run. It would be to everyone’s detriment if we suddenly found that only Sam Smith’s and Wetherspoon had survived the hurricane. For what is England without an independent (or faux-independent) pub on every corner?
Read more
Wetherspoon’s pubs are more than drinking dens – they’re cultural glue in a world without much of it
And on that theme…
Paint London black!
It’s time to reclaim the night. Londoners shouldn’t be sleeping, they should be shopping or grafting. Extend the Tube hours. Make the Night Tube on the Northern line stop at all stations. All this will stimulate an economy that is currently unnecessarily hampered due to our sheep-like acceptance of arbitrarily-decided work hours. We invented the electric light in 1802, people. Time to use it!
(This will help the aforementioned revived pubs and generally improve economic activity – as well as vibe and the scientific measure of ‘coolness’).
Time to make some money
How, you may be asking, are we to fund this? Well, how about a 95 per cent VAT on cigarettes? And a 200 per cent VAT on quarter zips? And while we’re at it, a 40 per cent VAT on port.
Jargon. We must end this scourge. That’s why we’re proposing a Jargon Tax ‘escalator’ – which will slowly phase jargon out with the cost to offenders increasing every year until it is eventually eliminated.
If you offend verbally (rather than electronically), you can expect to be slapped with a fixed penalty notice (FPN) within minutes. A citizen’s arrest-style power means your colleagues can hit you with a FPN as soon as the word “synergy” has escaped your lips.
Plus, the jargon tax triple lock means that the fine will increase in line with the average price of a high-end gilet, inflation or 2.5 per cent (whichever is highest).
Bike thefts – reverse guilt must end
The police should investigate all bike thefts. No more victim blaming. If your saddle gets stolen, it shouldn’t be your fault for not chaining the seat to the frame. Sure, the police may have given up investigating criminal gangs (free pass for committing a bank robbery, anyone?) but perhaps that could unlock free time for them to chase bike thieves and fine ‘em (prisons are now officially full).
Clean tap water 🙁
Let’s be honest, it’s a scandal that this has to be on any list. But here we are… City A.M. would like to propose that all London’s tap water be clean, disease-free and not taste like rusty Victorian pipes.
Free chickens
This pledge went down well in Yorkshire (when the Yorkshire Party candidate for this year’s mayoral election promised three chickens apiece for 2,000 lucky residents). Why not in London?
Ok – not that well, he wasn’t elected to become the new North Yorkshire mayor. But if Londoners had a few more experiences with animals we may find ourselves less the victim of nasty jokes about how half of us have never seen a cow, etc, etc. It would also save 100 tonnes of food waste each month and improve the health of the chicken-gifted population (if limited to just 2,000 recipients). As long as they don’t become snacks for foxes.
Undo the labyrinth of Bank Station
Why does it take 20 minutes and cost an eighth of your soul to get from the District to the Central Line platform at Bank station? The underground tunnels seem to be arranged in the least convenient imaginable manner, possibly as a practical joke on bankers. We pledge to simplify them. Or install moving walkways. Or another entrance. We’ll save you from your nightmares of a Minotaur chasing you down the veritable Labyrinth of the Monument-Central line ticket hall hell passage.
A more viable option might be proffering orienteering guides for every passenger to help them find their way. Either way, you can be sure we’ll sort this mess right out!
A new bridge!
Look east of Tower Bridge and you’ll see… er… nothing. Why is that? Well, historical reasons (the river widens, East London was poorer than West and more sparsely populated).
But nowadays, East London is densely populated and Tower Bridge is a nightmare to cross. The only other option is cable car or ferry (I’ve taken the Woolwich ferry – it’s great, and free, but a fire engine should not be waiting 30 minutes for a ride across the river). We need a Deptford-Wapping bridge, and we need it now.
Bulldoze the M&M shop
Self explanatory.
Have we missed anything? Email lucy.kenningham@cityam.com to comment or help form the City A.M.’s London Manifesto v2.0