Disease, Demolition and Developers

Typhoid grips a suburb, a prescient planner envisages the pedestrianised harbour we know today, and the Harbour Board's reclamations set the foundations for our commercial heart; fascinating nuggets revealed by some little-known maps from over a century ago.

Proposed Extension of the City of Wellington (1877)

In 1877 Danish architect Conrad Seidelin – working under the pseudonym of 'Mr Darnoc' – drew up plans to transform Wellington’s waterfront. His imagination was fueled by a big reclamation a year earlier, which created 190,000m2 around the northern end of Featherston Street – almost a third of all Wellington’s man-made land.

Seidelin’s credentials had been established by his masterplanning the redesign of Copenhagen, where his scheme to demolish the city's walls won Denmark's Medal of Merit two decades earlier. Wellington was an ambitious city, and the Danish architect didn’t hold back, with designs straight out of the Renaissance urban planning playbook. Heavy on symmetry (a challenge given our terrain), the city’s centrepiece was to be a curved waterfront basin where Te Papa is located today, with tree-lined avenues drawing people to the waterfront.

The plan was a rejection of the closely packed laneways and squalor that characterized Te Aro. Seidelin's map left the ghostly outline of the recently completed Queens Wharf in his layout as a reminder that his vision was of a modern city, rather than a colonial outpost; public facilities and major businesses would have to make way. Ornamental gardens at Herd Street would have required the demolition of the recently opened Te Aro Baths, and warehouses around the northern end of Taranaki Street were to be replaced by a large piazza – a concept that has never really worked in New Zealand.

Wellington's city councillors sensibly considered the design impractical and expensive: curved docks and enormous land reclamation were luxuries the capital could ill-afford. The proposal was rejected, and expansion into the harbour continued piecemeal for the next 50 years – a situation not too dissimilar to Copenhagen's remodeling, where many of the ramparts and lakes Seidelin wanted removed were retained and are popular parts of the Danish capital today.

Seidelin’s vision is intriguing because it merges radical urban form with the streets we know today. The map was drawn before the railway arrived in the city, but the Government Building (opened in the previous year) is clearly identifiable the end of Lambton Quay. 

The idea of an accessible waterfront would have seemed fantastical in the latter part of the 19th Century – yet 150 years on visiting cafes at the water’s edge as envisaged is central to the Wellington experience.

Typhoid Area (1892)

Wellington’s emergence as a shipping hub facilitated the spread of diseases, with SS England bringing smallpox to the city in 1872. Surges in measles occurred every five years, and Pertussis (whooping cough) killed 24 people in 1891 alone. Typhoid first appeared in New Zealand as an epidemic disease in 1860, and the period between 1886 and 1891 became known as the ‘typhoid years’ with 548 Wellingtonians dying from bacterial infections (including cholera). 

Meanwhile the city grew from around 15,000 in 1875 to 49,344 in 1901. Densely packed Te Aro was particularly vulnerable, with infrastructure hopelessly unable to keep up. It was hardly surprising that many Wellington families fled to settlements like Karori, including the Beauchamps with their young daughter Kathleen (writer Katherine Mansfield), following the death of their baby Gwen from cholera in 1891.

William Chapple, a 28-year-old doctor fresh from his previous practice in Motueka, set about mapping the deaths in the tradition of English physician John Snow, who Chapple would have learned about as a student at King’s College London. Snow (one of the fathers of modern epidemiology) had pinpointed the source of a major cholera outbreak in London four decades previously by plotting the location of cases, and traced them eventually to a contaminated water pump at Broad Street.

Chapple quickly identified Holland Street as the centre of the Wellington outbreak, where he found blocked pipes and lavatories causing excrement to flow under the cottages’ floorboards, sewers venting directly into the houses, and residents without plumbed lavatories emptying their ‘night soil’ onto the street. Unsurprisingly an inspection of the hospital’s admission records showed typhoid cases soaring after heavy rainfall, when excrement sluiced into the harbour in rivulets around and under people’s homes.

None of this squalor is obvious in Chapple’s deceptively simple map. The colour of the dots reflect cholera’s ‘blue death’ nickname, with the victim’s skin turning bluish-grey from loss of fluids, their distribution reflecting the slums that lined Te Aro’s laneways.

Chapple recommended ‘a complete system of sewerage on modern principles’ to empty the city’s waste into Cook Strait, rather than Lambton Harbour, via a sewer tunnel under Mount Victoria. The cost was controversial (£165,000 – $35m today), but the incidence of sewage-related diseases treated at Wellington Hospital fell dramatically once the infrastructure was completed in 1899.

Chapple later became a prominent eugenics advocate (‘habitual drunkards and nocturnal house-breakers’ were included on his list of undesirables). He holds the unusual distinction of being elected to parliament in both New Zealand and the UK, and retained his New Zealand medical registration throughout, returning to work at Wellington Hospital as the Resident Casualty Officer in the 1930s – perhaps he regaled the junior doctors with accounts of the city as he recalled it four decades.

Plan of 12 Building Sections on the Te Aro Reclamation (1906)

Established in 1880, Wellington Harbour Board was tasked with operating and expanding the city’s port. Starting work three years after Seidelin’s master plan was rejected, the Harbour Board embarked on a programme of reclamations driven by Chief Engineer William Ferguson that laid the foundation for the inner city waterfront of today.

Ferguson aligned the new wharves so that the prevailing winds would help ships manoeuvre, and reduce the requirement for tugs to help vessels berth; he also drove investment in hydraulic cranes. The port was recognised as one of the best equipped in the Southern Hemisphere. Ferguson created a partnership with the government and City Council to deliver a series of new wharves and land reclamations – including the Taranaki Street Wharf development, completed in 1905.

The reclaimed land was ‘a magnificent block’, according to auctioneers George Thomas & Co. ahead of its sale in February 1906 – and for once the real estate hyperbole was justified. A flurry of investment had transformed the surrounding area since the turn of the century, with a new fire station (reassuring for commercial building owners) on Lower Cuba Street, opposite the City Council’s impressive new Town Hall which opened on December 7th 1904. Concert-goers arrived on the electric trams that had commenced service in the preceding months, and in the summer rowers in the Star Boating Club’s boathouse enjoyed music from a new bandstand on the Cuba Street side of Jervois Quay.

It was all remarkably modern. The map reassured buyers that the land on offer was anything but the Te Aro of the typhoid years; it even shows the Polhill Gully Watercourse (described by the Evening Post as ‘exceedingly offensive’ a decade earlier) now buried in a long culvert under the city’s streets. The map omitted the city’s waste incinerator at Chaffers Park; it was expanded shortly after the Taranaki Street reclamation was auctioned off – caveat emptor.

The sale was well attended and two buyers bought all but one of the allotments; the State Coal Department purchased the land south of Cable Street (a new road named after the Harbour Board’s outgoing Chairman William Cable). The modernist John Chambers Building was completed in 1918, and the smaller Inglis Brothers bicycle workshop occupied the Taranaki Street end of the block – the Wakefield Market food stalls was the building's final incarnation prior to its demolition in 2007.

The land to the north was purchased by timber merchants C & A Odlin’s. The company completed its eponymous building within 19 months of acquiring the site, with Shed 22 built as a wool store by the Harbour Board when Odlin’s moved its timber yard to Petone in the 1920s. In the mid-1990s there were plans to raze the empty buildings and replace them with a reviled casino-hotel, but resource consent was withheld when the extent of the public opposition became clear.

Aside from those replaced by the One Market Lane development, the buildings that sprang up from the 1906 auction remain in situ, historic waterfront buildings that are fully renovated, earthquake strengthened, and home to blue-chip businesses like the Stock Exchange and architects Warren and Mahoney. A magnificent block – just as the auctioneer promised 115 years ago.

First published in Capital (Issue 81).

Concrete dreams

The rise of private car ownership, the baby-boom and post-war reconstruction were catalysts for drastic urban planning interventions around the world, a fashion that inevitably reached New Zealand. Metropolitan Wellington’s population increased by 63% in the space of two decades from 1945 – and was projected to reach 398,000 in 1981 (wildly inaccurate – this did not happen until 2014).

This growth, largely concentrated in the Hutt Valley and Porirua, was a headache for planners, but it also gave the civic leadership confidence to invest. It stimulated a decade of radical proposals for the capital, and came close to destroying much of what Wellingtonians now love about the city.

Comprehensive Transport Plan for Wellington (1963 / 1966)

By the late 1950s rapidly increasing traffic volumes on the Hutt Road (comparable to Adelaide Road today) caused a fear of gridlock, and work on the first part of the Urban Motorway from Ngauranga to Aotea Quay started in 1959.

There was bitter debate about the next phase of the road, between a ‘foothills motorway’ route through Thorndon, and one along the waterfront – the latter preferred by the City Engineer and the Ministry of Works. In 1960 American transport consultant De Leuw, Cather & Company was commissioned by the Wellington Regional Planning Authority (a predecessor of the Regional Council) to resolve the matter and create Wellington’s first Transportation Master Plan.

Despite its being the cheaper option (at £13,000,000 cost – close to $570 million today) the initial report in 1963 made the waterfront route look as unpalatable as possible. Projected traffic volumes would require ‘a double-decked structure approximately 40 feet [four storeys] in height with three lanes in each direction’. This would have run from Bunny Street to Cable Street, with offramps required at Kings Wharf, Post Office Square and Mercer Street. The report warned of conflict between the motorway and what was still a working inner harbour, and the impact on the amenity of the waterfront, pointing out how quickly San Francisco’s officials had come to regret building their new freeway above the Embarcadero.

The foothills route was duly recommended, even though it was projected to cost almost 50% more and need streets of houses demolished, with the Mount Victoria tunnel to be duplicated during the first phase of works. The time required to dig the Terrace Tunnel meant Te Aro would need a one-way system to speed up traffic (half a century later the Council has voted to slow traffic down), with southbound vehicles routed up Cuba Street.

Public transport was also considered, with a recommendation that once the motorway was completed the railway should be extended in a 3km subway to the end of Courtenay Place – with underground stations at Parliament, Lambton (located under Boulcott Street), Cuba Street and Courtenay Place – all for £11,000,000 ($480 million in 2020).

As proposed the complete the motorway would have buried half the Basin Reserve under motorway offramps, a deep trench cut across the top of Te Aro and a ‘full-diamond interchange’ at Taranaki Street – designs familiar to Wellingtonians who successfully defeated the Tunnel Link proposals a quarter of a century later.

The focus on roads alarmed Wellington’s retailers. They feared that greater mobility would send shoppers to more convenient destinations outside the city, and commissioned a rival proposal from architects Gabites and Beard. ‘Precinct Planning for Wellington’ (released in 1965) had some bold predictions, with ‘public transport vehicles running on air cushions rather than rails’ and ‘combined air and ground vehicles in general use’ by the year 2000. But the pedestrianisation of large parts of the CBD, rather than a focus on cars, proved popular with Wellingtonians, and this influenced the final version of the Comprehensive Transport Plan in 1966, including retaining the Basin Reserve.

Draft Town Plan (1965)

With the transport masterplan complete the City Council was free to focus on transforming the CBD. In 1957 Robert (‘Terry’) Kennedy arrived at University of Auckland to take the first Chair of Town Planning. He was retained as a consultant by Wellington City Council from 1965-75, and the 1965 Draft Town Plan clearly reflected his previous job remodelling Britain’s blitzed cities.

Some ideas were developed from the De Leuw report and ‘Precinct Planning’, including Cuba Mall, and the Farish Street Extension which pushed Victoria Street through to the top of Te Aro – to feed a future Western Suburbs motorway running through a tunnel from the top of Aro Street to Karori.

The plan was also critical of central Wellington’s small commercial plots and streets laid out for the era of deliveries by horse-drawn vehicles, now resulting in increasing conflict between vehicles and pedestrians. European cities were able to ‘take advantage of’ extensive bomb damage to unleash ambitious redevelopments – and Wellington was to follow suit with the ‘Willis Street redevelopment area’, a three tier ‘superblock’ similar to London’s Barbican, to tackle ‘the bottleneck between Stewart Dawson’s corner and the sea’.

The development would have been enormous, stretching between the top of Plimmer Steps and the waterfront. The existing street layout was to be maintained but built over, with garaging and warehouses at ground level, and car parking above them, accessed via ramps from Jervois Quay and a Willis Street flyover connecting Victoria and Boulcott streets. Above that to be a pedestrian deck, with shops, offices and hotels.

The sheer chutzpah of the Town Planning Committee’s report was admirable: the Willis Street superblock was ‘economically feasible’ and would ‘rehabilitate the centre of Wellington’ in combination with the proposed Civic Centre and new Cuba Mall. The City Engineer pointed out to doubters ‘this sort of integrated development is already taking place in larger cities overseas’.

The project stumbled at the first hurdle: the population growth projection was criticised as overly optimistic (a failing among Council officials), and the indicative £50,000,000 cost ($2.1bn in 2020) was seen as wildly unaffordable. Councillor Turk called the proposal ‘a Utopian flight of fantasy’ – and by the mid-1970s Kennedy’s departure from WCC’s payroll and the city’s stagnation meant the idea mercifully faded into the long list of municipal what ifs.

Report and Development Plan for the Wellington City Council Civic Centre (1974)

The idea of a municipal precinct dates back to the 1942 Wairarapa Earthquake, which led to the demolition of the old city library building and technical college buildings on Wakefield Street – now the site of the Council’s closed Civic Administration Building and empty Municipal Office Building (or MOB). Work started on MOB in 1946, and the popular lawn in front of the building was referred to as the Civic Centre.

The Council had gradually acquired land at the harbour end of Cuba Street from the 1960s, and the section of Mercer Street between the Town Hall and Central Library was often closed for civic festivities, so it was a small leap of imagination to pedestrianize the space. Terry Kennedy and Ken Clarke (the council’s City Planner) embarked on a scheme to banish vehicles and create a ‘true and pleasant centre of the City of Wellington’.

The masterplan that emerged had all the hallmarks of European post-war design. The demolition of the seismically prone Town Hall would clear the way for a decidedly Soviet looking 10,000m² office building; a conference facility was to be built on the corner of Harris Street and Jervois Quay; and pedestrian subways would give access to the waterfront and the new shopping arcade that was to be built over Mercer Street through to Willis Street. Kennedy realised changes in opinion and finances would alter the plan, but he suggested a 15 year development programme – the new library and conference centre were to have been completed by 1986.

Instead Mayor Michael Fowler championed the construction of the new concert hall: it was commissioned in 1975, but the challenging ground conditions delayed work. The building was opened in 1983, by which time campaigns to promote the heritage and acoustic value of the old Town Hall had made its removal untenantable, leaving the two buildings uncomfortably close to each other. The waterfront had been transformed from potential motorway route to an increasingly popular open public space – and a rethink for the precinct was required.

While the development Kennedy proposed would have been built at the height of Brutalism in New Zealand, some of the core ideas from the 1974 masterplan shaped today’s Civic Square, including turning the 1937 library building into a ‘City Gallery’. This stimulated the council in 1980 to create exhibition space at 65 Victoria Street, before demolishing the building and using the site for the new Central Library (another Kennedy recommendation). Interconnected elevated walkways linked the library and council buildings – until they were deemed seismic risks earlier this decade – and the space enjoys good sunlight.

Kennedy died in 1997, with his superblock vision for Wellington’s civic precinct largely realised, and especially the underground parking and wide pedestrian expanses. With the Civic Administration Building likely to be demolished, perhaps the lawn in front of the municipal offices which coined the precinct’s name could be restored – bringing the Civic Centre concept full-circle?

First published in the Summer 2021 issue of Capital.

Does Wellington need a 12,000 seat indoor arena?

It's the start of city council election season in Wellington, and I thought I'd look at the detail behind some of the big campaign ideas doing the rounds.

First up: beware any politician who pledges to build a new 10,000-12,000 seat indoor stadium in Wellington in the run up to the City Council elections this October. It sounds like a great idea, until you ask some difficult questions. For example: 

Q: Has Wellington City Council finished paying off debt for building the Westpac Stadium?
A: WCC hasn't started paying back the $15 million debt incurred in 1998 – it was added to the City Council’s general debt, which currently sits around the $500 million mark. The interest payments for WCC’s stadium debt are now around $1 million a year. The Regional Council's $25 million stadium loan will be paid off in 2018.

Q: What happens to the Westpac Stadium if we move the Wellington Lions and Phoenix to the new 10,000 stadium?
A: The Westpac becomes a white elephant, with only half a dozen Super Rugby games and an All Blacks test match if we're lucky. Plus the occasional extravaganza like the Edinburgh Tattoo. Less use doesn't equate to lower maintenance – the grass still has to be mown and the building still has to be looked after. 

Q: Okay, so let's leave the sports at the Westpac. But a covered 10,000-12,000 seat arena would be a great asset for big gigs. Let's build it!
A: Not so fast. The TSB Arena (another WCC asset) has a capacity of 5,655. I agree it's not the greatest venue in the world, but how many events is Wellington going to host where the TSB Arena isn't big enough, and that need to be under cover? How many times a year do the likes of Guns’n’Roses come to town – maybe half a dozen? Are we seriously talking about building a venue that will get such limited use? Even band promoters think it's a bad idea. 

Q: But it'd be cool to have an awesome indoor arena for big music acts, and we'd miss out if we don't build one!
A: Yes it would be great, and yes we might miss out. But while there are many advantages with living in a small city, there are also some downsides. This is one of them.

Marge vs the Monorail (1993)

Q: Aren't ratepayers already already spending quite a bit to upgrade the Basin Reserve?
A: Correct. The City Council has just signed off $21.2 million over the next decade for the Basin's redevelopment. Did I mention we haven't started paying off our late 1990s debt on the stadium? 

Q: Any idea of how much the new arena would cost
A: Figures haven't been worked up yet, but as a comparison the ASB Centre in Kilbirnie cost $47.5 million back in 2007, and the Westpac Stadium cost $130 million in the mid-1990s. A rough ball park figure would put the cost of a new 10,000-12,000 arena at around $60-85 million - around half the cost of the $134.4 million for the new convention centre and film museum.

Q: Could we have a monorail running between the railway station and the new mini-stadium?
A: That's an excellent idea – already covered in The Simpsons. Because there are definitely no similarities between Wellington and Springfield when it comes to wasteful spending.

–––

The City Council's overriding objective for sports venues should be to work with our regional partners across government, sport and the to ensure we have a stadium with the capacity to host the major events we're likely to get in Wellington. 

Yes it'd be lovely to have a dedicated mini-stadium for the Phoenix and Lions, with the ability to host large events for artists like Madonna, but as a city of 200,000 (and a region of 500,000) the reality is it'd be a financial millstone round every Wellingtonian's neck. We need to develop other tourist infrastructure first: major Wellington events see our existing accommodation stretched to the limits, and friends working in Wellington's tourism sector say the city needs two more large hotels if we're serious about economic growth from tourism. Besides, shouldn't we make some progress on getting our outstanding Town Hall back into operation before we chase after the next hare-brained idea?

So I think we're better to start thinking long term about what the eventual replacement for the Westpac Stadium will look like. That might seem like a long way off, but in the competitive world of hosting major sporting events a lack of roof and inflexible capacity will make the Westpac less attractive as other stadia across Australasia are upgraded: the New South Wales Government has just signed off a major refurbishment of Sydney’s Olympic stadium (with demolition of the 17 year old building seriously considered). Athletic Park hosted our major sporting events for a century – no-one seriously believes the same will be true for the Westpac.

Cardiff's Millennium Stadium – configured for concerts

So the eventual replacement will probably be built for a rectangular pitch. Everyone prefers watching cricket at the Basin, and there have only been barely a dozen games where attendance has been higher than the Basin’s 13,000 capacity. Building a multipurpose stadium round an oval pitch is a huge design compromise – so we’re much better to cement the Basin’s reputation as one of the world’s great cricket venues with an extra 5,000 seats.

And a new stadium in Wellington will have a roof. The total capacity will be a little higher than Athletic Park's 39,000 (and definitely more than the Westpac's 35,000 seats), with a layout that avoids the notorious 'sea of yellow' evident for less attended events – perhaps with tiers that can be blocked off for smaller fixtures, or by using drapes. The Welsh have done this successfully with Cardiff's Millennium Stadium – and scaled down version of this would work well in Wellington. 

But this is a conversation to be had in the 2020s. We get one chance every generation to build a major sports facility that adds to the city. Until then we need to make the most of what we've got – and avoid pouring money into 'great Wellington assets' that'll be operational and financial disasters from the outset. 

In the meantime, here's the NBR's Tim Hunter discussing the latest outbreak of the 'stadium virus' in New Zealand. And do try and track down the Monorail episode of the Simpsons, as it didn’t end happily for Springfield. You’ve been warned, Wellington.

First published by Scoop on April 28th, 2016

Electoral reform means change for our local associations

Boundary reforms don’t normally make for gripping political news: they’re the stuff of the Conservative Association stalwart or eagle-eyed agent, and definitely not for people with healthy social lives. But whether we like it or not, the Boundary Commission’s regular redrawing of the electoral landscape from 2018 onwards will revolutionise the culture of our local associations.

Many constituencies have retained the same basic shape for decades. Tooting – my patch – has been essentially been the same since it replaced Wandsworth Central in 1974. Yet the reforms likely to be in place for 2020 will require the number of electors in constituencies to adhere to a much tighter variation from the national average, and for this to be reviewed every five years. The difference in the two proposals for Tooting during the 2013 Sixth Periodic Review shows the level of change that is likely to be in store for constituencies across the country under the new rules.

First proposal for the Tooting area
in the Sixth Periodic Review (2013)

Second proposal for the Tooting area
in the Sixth Periodic Review (2013)

Throw in the renaissance of our cities, and you can see how the electoral map will need to be drawn from scratch with each review. London’s expected growth of 100,000 people a year up to 2030 is the equivalent of seven new constituencies between each general election. Manchester will expand by an extra 100,000 people by 2025 – considerably faster than projections for the surrounding urban area, which are also expected to grow. On the other hand, Birmingham’s forecast growth of 12.2 per cent by 2032 is forecast to be below the national average of 13.5 per cent.

Our electoral boundaries will behave like an electoral isobar map, with areas of high population growth seeing constituencies created at the expense of places where the population increase is slower, or in decline – and Individual Electoral Registration will finally give the Boundary Commissions accurate data, cleansed of ghost voters who have moved elsewhere years previously.

The post-2018 landscape will see constituency associations with five year lifespans, thrown together across municipal boundaries, with the aim of winning the next general election. And after the returning officer’s declaration the focus will be on preparing the ground for the following election – although no-one will have any idea what cards the Boundary Commission for England will deal!

As a result, our traditional constituency identities will be much more fluid. Indeed, referring to constituency associations as ‘Tooting’ and so on will soon be archaic. Geographic identities are less easily accommodated by the new reforms (remember the outcry over the proposed Devonwall constituency when the Prime Minister pointed out that “It’s the Tamar, not the Amazon, for Heaven’s sake,”?), and our local leadership will be shaken up between every election, with association officers, star volunteers and local party bores suddenly finding themselves in different patches, with new relationships to forge.

Stable geographic identities are important for building teams of activists. The need to organise campaigns for county, borough and PCC elections on well-established boundaries will remain, and bringing associations together is sensible, since constituencies will change radically with every boundary review. Andrew Kennedy is a tireless advocate for groupings such as West Kent, which has demonstrated many of the benefits of campaigning as a larger unit.

We in Wandsworth have operated as a group for many years, and consequently the Wandsworth Conservatives brand is very strong in our community. Our office supports local associations in five constituencies across Wandsworth and Merton, and it is perhaps time for us to bring neighbouring Lambeth into the fold, since ‘Tooting’ is highly likely to include parts of Lambeth in the coming years.

Some association officers will take the view that forming groupings is a long term objective. I believe that this is misguided. The Boundary Commission’s consultation timelines will see the 2020 electoral map finalised in late 2018, leaving a year and a half to select candidates for all 600 seats and build campaign momentum – a sprint compared to the two-and-a-half years that many of our 40/40 candidates enjoyed (or suffered). This shorter campaign period will also help reduce the costs of standing for parliament – an unintentional positive – but the creation of new boundaries from scratch will make reselection of sitting MPs more competitive, as many of Labour’s Blairite wing are all too aware.

The combination of major changes to a constituency and relatively little time to execute a campaign will put a huge emphasis on best practice in both modern campaign techniques and old-fashioned organisation. Working together as a larger group of Conservatives means having the resources to deploy up-to-date campaign tools: professionally designed literature for council campaigns, digital campaigning (such as the Crossrail 2 campaign we’ve run in Tooting this autumn) and modern membership engagement. And active ward teams will be even more important, as a safe ward in a safe seat might become a safe ward in a battleground seat within the space of five years.

We are about to enter a dynamic electoral landscape where incumbency counts for less, and finally rid of the bias towards Labour and the Liberal Democrats that made majority government seem impossible before May 7th. Our party has pushed for these reforms – now we need to make sure we’re ready for the challenge in 2020, and beyond.

First published by Conservative Home on January 3rd, 2016

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. I was encouraged to see the company's new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space.

The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube travel and packed conditions. So Crown knows that letting its buildings means accommodating the rocketing numbers of people who ride to work.

But, as we discussed the Haymarket redevelopment over coffee, I realised that the challenge facing Crown is that while car use is falling, budget freezes mean parking revenue has become much more important to the balance sheets of London’s inner city authorities. This is problematic for new cycling infrastructure, as installing bike lanes comes at the expense of income-generating street parking.

Catering for cars might superficially help local authorities’ coffers, but a string of studies have shown that bike lanes, locking points, etc. give huge boosts to local businesses: New York City’s recent flagship bike lane on 8th and 9th Avenues led to local shops enjoying a 49% increase in sales. Saving the £1,216 cost of a Zone 2 annual travelcard frees up money to spend in the local economy, and gets people off our overcrowded tubes and trains during rush hour.

None of this washes with Westminster City Council (Crown’s local authority counterpart). The council would be hauled in front of the Competition Commission if its parking business model was the product of anything other than geography – incidentally only a third of Westminster’s households have access to a car. Sadly, as things stand, it’s difficult enough trying to find somewhere to lock up a bike before going shopping in the West End, wasting valuable time that could be spent in the shops and cafes that pay the council’s rates.

The recent spate of cyclist deaths on London’s roads is, obviously, terrible news. But I fear that the cycle lobby’s focus on fixing the Mayor’s flagship Cycle Superhighways misses a deeper problem: how we get the various tiers of local government to confront the sustained change in our transport use. The private sector manifestly gets where the market is at, as was clear when I saw Crown’s magnificent cycling facilities. Unfortunately, our politicians are stuck making rational decisions based on the perverse incentives of the city’s disjointed government structure. With London’s population gaining an extra 600,000 by 2020, this muddled approach is clearly unsustainable. Bold decisions are required.

First published by Coffee House on November 19th, 2013

In praise of red tape

Two small stories made the news last month. The first was a report by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Institute of British Architects, which found that many of the UK’s new-build homes are poorly designed, with chaotic living spaces for the families that the large housebuilders seduced into buying them. Complaints abounded of homes without internal storage for everyday things like vacuum cleaners, and rooms fitted with the legal minimum number of power sockets, despite this being the age of the iPad and countless other electronic gadgets. Ipsos MORI’s Ben Page was damning about the quality of the homes being built in the UK, stating that the report ‘shows just how cramped and poorly planned much of our housing is today, and the extraordinary lengths people go to cope with it.’ RIBA rightly pointed out that our building regulations are in desperate need of modernisation.

The second story concerned the latest in the Coalition’s ongoing efforts to address the UK’s housing shortage. You can debate whether this is because of the banks’ lending policies, the Labour government’s immigration policy, raw material costs, etc. ad finitum: the simple reality is that we need more homes. The government announced that a new body has been tasked with looking at how housing standards could be simplified, and aims to tackle what (then Housing Minister) Grant Shapps dubbed the ‘alphabet soup’ that is the building code. Which sounds like the positive action we want from politicians, until you realise that it isn’t a bonfire of regulations that is needed, but the somewhat more painstaking job of tightening and fine-tuning our minimum standards for the new wave of homebuilding that the Government wants to unleash.

None of this is news to our leaders. Back in 2007 the Shadow Cabinet was presented with the far-sighted 'Blueprint for a Green Economy', which recognised that ‘building control and planning systems should be more closely integrated as they are in fact two sides of the same coin’. The demands we place on our living spaces haven’t changed much since then, and it is worth considering that the current offering from the building industry isn’t exactly popular. Currently only one in four home buyers would consider a new-build property, so clearly something isn’t right, as consumers generally prefer new things. If the government merely decides to axe energy efficiency requirements and other quality of life regulations in an effort to get house building going at the lowest possible price, they will be making a bad situation a whole lot worse. Why should the striving classes who will have to live in these new properties face needlessly high heating bills and cowboy home design? I prefer to be optimistic though: there is now a golden opportunity to ensure that new homes are built with sustainable systems like rainwater harvesting, which offers a return on investment well before the halfway point in a 25 year mortgage and reduces the need for costly utilities infrastructure in years to come.

I mention this episode merely because the War On Red Tape™ is back in full swing this week, with the announcement that the planning appeals process is to be streamlined. The PM is 'getting a grip' on the issue, and the government’s narrative sets the frustrated developers who wish to drive the nation’s growth forward against the Nimbyism and regulatory fat that is clogging up the economy. Cutting regulations makes for a good sound bite, and shows politicians as battling the morass of building paperwork that stands in the way of the slow march to economic recovery.

Except this simply isn’t true. Ignore the fallacy that home-building delivers economic growth (it does, but only in the very short term, with the main beneficiaries being the shareholders of the large housebuilding companies, the farmers keen to cash in and flog their productive lands, and the migrant EU workforce needed to deliver the boom in construction). Appealing planning decisions is incredibly important to sustainable, harmonious communities.

For example, Conservative Wandsworth (my local authority) is an exemplar council: its reputation for competence regularly sees wards that vote Labour at general elections returning a full complement of Tory councillors at the local elections. Wandsworth has campaigned tirelessly against a 1,200 home development located well beyond reasonable walking distance to our local railway stations, with the local road network already desperately congested, as anyone who has battled their way down Trinity Road knows only too well. The appeals process has allowed Wandsworth Council to whittle down the ambitions of the developer to less disastrous levels, and highlights the importance of letting communities put their case and balancing the steamroller effect of the big developers’ deep pockets. Often projects are improved as designs are scrutinised, with the final blueprints gaining far greater acceptance from all sections of society – and surely this is a good thing?

There is also a broader, more philosophical point. We Conservatives believe in the power of the individual and society, not the blunt tools wielded by the big state, which is fortunate as the number of applications for judicial review in planning cases has dropped since 2006 – the rocketing 11,000 applications figure mentioned by the PM in his speech driven by immigration, that other political bête noire. Cherrypicking statistics belies the reality, and writing in Monday’s Guardian, Sir Jeffrey Jowell QC hailed the evolution of British administrative law since 1945 as a major achievement, and one that is in fine health today. Compare this to the confidence in our political system, which many of the public feel increasingly estranged from.

So here lies the danger. How much more alienated will the ‘little people’ far removed from Westminster or even just their local town hall feel when the government has lengthened the odds in their fight against the ruthless calculations of the circling developers? Regulation might feel like a brake on our economy, but it is the price we pay for people believing that they are part of an inclusive society. The general public’s simmering fury over the fast tax practices of Amazon, Starbucks, and other big businesses is a warning that politicians can ill afford to ignore.

First published by Platform 10 on November 22nd, 2012