Monthly Archives: January 2012

By John Hitchin

Following on from my earlier post on the London Policy conference, what was striking in all of the sessions that I described was the odd lack of a thread that ran through the whole conference. Each session was populated by experts: people who have worked in their fields or researched their subject matter over a number of years.  The exceptions to this were invariably the politicians, and for that reason they became all the more interesting (not often you hear that).

As Tim Harford has discussed so well in his book Adapt (read it, it’s excellent), there are many problems with our reliance on ‘experts’, and I think that came up again here.  They have a tendency to get things wrong in the long term, to encourage us to prioritise theory over practice, and to always be ‘just about to be useful to us’.  That’s not to say that the people weren’t interesting and informative, but if the place they were describing was London, then I’m a trapper’s hat. What they were describing, however, was some remnants of London. It’s residue in the mind, rather than the living and messy city.  They did their best to squeeze their thoughts into 5 minutes and then handed over the microphone.  But having lots of 5 minute chunks of knowledge, does not a city – with all its complexity and contradiction – make.  The audience was left to pull it together, and to do so in an environment where the dichotomy had become one of policy focus rather than political (small and big p) choices.  The contrast seemed to be between London the global city or London the city of poverty and inequality.  Because the speakers treated these issues so separately (as their expertise dictated), we weren’t able to see the debate about how London is both of these things. I’m sure others at the conference are able to imagine with me that they want London to be both globally competitive and more equal. The challenge is how to do it. And in a way, we didn’t get that. We got speakers advocating for what can perhaps be summed up as a prioritisation of focus.

In a way, this was a strong endorsement of Bruce Katz’s implicit point from his presentation. We need a new kind of leadership – policy and perhaps political too – and as much as I enjoyed and learned things from the London Policy Conference, I’m not convinced it is the vehicle for policy leadership in the capital in the future.  We need to be more discerning about complexity, more aware that the structures we create can often leave us discussing remnants of issues, rather than the issues themselves, and more dispersed in our understanding of leadership and change.

That problem with the structuring of expert opinion also manifested itself in the way in which the event itself was organised. The almost palpable ‘expertise’ in the room meant that I’ve never felt further from the speakers of a conference.  It was very clearly divided between those speaking and those there to listen. The opportunity to discuss anything was reduced to a few minutes of questions at the end, which the chair always apologised for being so short, but in reality even those sessions with a longer period for questions did little to break down the barriers surrounding the speakers. I very rarely go to paid-for conferences any more, and this is a strong reminder of why. The spirit of sessions with more informal structures and a co-produced agenda, which have been inspired by things such as barcamp, was a long way from the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the two days of the London Policy Conference.

And so whilst it was perhaps the most impressive conference I have been to, all that did was to further highlight the flaws of the concept.  It seemed further away, not closer to, the reality of London. The ideas, enterprise, poverty, diversity, wealth, change and dynamism of the capital were only ever partly there. If you have the chance to see Stewart Lee’s show at the Leicester Square Theatre, Carpet Remnant World, you should. It will likely make you laugh much more than this post, but he’s essentially making the same point.  In my view that desire to simplify, compartmentalise and reduce is both natural, and to be resisted as often as possible.

By John Hitchin

With apologies to Stewart Lee (from who I have stolen the title).  Although I will only explain the title in the second post, so you’ll have to hang on.

This post has been a couple of weeks in the making. This is partly due to Christmas, partly as a result of deadlines, but mainly because I’ve found it hard to think about everything that was discussed at the London Policy Conference, and to collect those thoughts in one post.  As a result, it’s become two separate posts. So bear with me.

The main strength of the London Policy Conference was the line-up.  The Centre for London and the ippr did a great job in bringing together a large number of highly credentialed experts (more on that word later) for the conference. I’ve not seen a line up quite like it, and they are to be commended for it. This also meant that there was a lot of ground covered, and the choice of topics felt both timely and long term, which was always going to be a challenge for a conference so specifically about ‘policy’.

There were those talking about cities theory and their future, such as Greg Clark, Dr Joan Clos and Bruce Katz; those talking about specific issues that will always affect London, such as Bill Bratton and Bernard Hogan-Howe on policing (this was an odd session were the two men were painfully keen to compliment each other at every moment, despite the fact that the audience was well aware of the ‘politics’ around the appointment of the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner), but also other ones on housing and employment; and there was the inevitable, but necessary, session on the riots in the summer.  The two primary candidates for mayor each got a keynote slot, and in the breaks there were short sessions for social enterprises and charities to promote and discuss what they are doing within the capital.

Within all of this, there were a number of fascinating questions pulled out of the discussions.  I’ve highlighted a few here, but also within the Prezi below (in which I’ve tried to give those questions some structure).
In a session on London’s place within the global economy, the four speakers were asked at the end what their measures of success for London would be for 2012.  When you combine three of them together, I think you might have quite a powerful metric for judging success:

• -What is the youth unemployment figure and is it coming down?
• -Are companies, which are sitting on cash, starting to invest it in London?
• -Is there an increased, and increasing, trade balance in London’s favour between the city and China?

The fourth, which came from the disappointingly myopic Willie Walsh, was that an important measure for London’s success was the volume of passengers using Premium Business Class. Of all the potential indicators one could use to judge success, chasing that one would, in my opinion, create a disturbingly ugly and unbalanced city.

There was a thoroughly enjoyable exchange between Andrew Adonis, Jenny Jones, Bruce Katz, Tony Travers, Liz Meek and Stephen Greenhalgh on London governance. It was essentially a debate about whether the Mayor should have more powers or whether the person in that post should just get on with it.  TT and JJ in the former, AA and SG in the latter – but all agreed that nobody had the stomach for governance change at the moment (and Andrew Adonis seriously overdid his use of the ‘deck-chairs on the Titanic’ metaphor in the process).  Bruce Katz was the most interesting (I’ve been a fan for a while, and would highly recommend signing up to the Metropolitan Programme email list from the Brookings Institute). He talked about the importance of the role of mayors in galvanising sectors in the US, and the ways in which this could be done.  A more proactive and involving model for City-wide leadership as opposed to a tax and spend style of leadership?

On housing, despite my fears that Campbell Robb of Shelter was going to take a microphone to Cllr Colin Barrow of Westminster Council as the debate about housing need raged, there was a sudden and surprising agreement about the key problem in all of this. If you all accept that the three things which could most rapidly change the housing situation in London are not going to change (income levels to pay more, capital to build more or shifting demographics to reduce demand), then the only policy levers left are land supply and rationing of affordable housing.  Therefore, who gets to choose how you pull those levers – boroughs, the Mayor or CLG?  At the moment, the power of allocation lies with boroughs, and land supply lies with a variety of bodies including boroughs and the GLA.  Newham and Westminster are very different administrations that are both looking at this.  Whether you like what they are doing or not, you can’t argue about the fact that they are trying to do something to change the status quo, and are of the belief that the choice of how to use the allocation levers sits with the boroughs.  Ken Livingston proposed some London wide ideas that could begin to shift those powers towards City Hall, as some in the audience who were discussing London wide need, seemed to believe was necessary.  This will be an interesting one to watch as housing is likely to become even more important in 2012.

Then in a very engaging debate on education and work, we had Lucy Heller talking with nuance and understanding about how education performance in the capital was improving in many ways, but also that there were ongoing structural issues, and that these structural issues were compounding the problems in the labour market. Dave Simmonds and the ever inspiring Emma Stewart continued this session with a look at who was losing in the labour market (women, those with few qualifications, the usual suspects really) and why: the fact that London has a very divided labour market between high and low skilled jobs and at the moment, many high skilled people are trading down.  It is four times more competitive at the bottom of the London labour market than it is for graduates (no reference I’m afraid, just a comment from Dave Simmonds which sounds believable), and London’s labour market is woefully inadequate at providing the part time positions many women want and need.  This situation is getting worse, and we are failing to get a rebalancing of the overworked/ underworked culture that has developed. All of these points chime with something we published recently on the labour market in East London, and how many young people are falling through the gaps of the system.

And so we have the start of a feeling of what the issues in London might be.  The below Prezi attempts to pull together the debates from the conference and the questions that they raised (if you think something is missing, let me know): http://prezi.com/d1dalyeq6epq/london-remnant-world/