19 November 2015
On Yer Bikes
by J R Thomas
The reign of King Boris is coming to a close; the age of the comedians may be over. For sixteen years London’s Mayors have been rebels, men outside the mainstream, cheeky chappies popular with the public, if less so with their party leaders. It looks like the next Mayor will be either Zac Goldsmith for the Tories or Sadiq Khan for Labour: whichever, they will be more serious, dryer, duller politicians than the previous two Punch-like characters.
The contest is still six months away. Too soon to engender much activity yet; but not too soon to start to look at the departing Mayor; at this point, not at what Boris did next, but at what he has done over the last eight years running the largest Mayoralty in the UK; not as a review of a closing career or life spent, but because this might be the beginning of the next, and greater game. How Boris has run London might show how he might run a ministry, or even a government.
Being Mayor of London looks like a big powerful job, but the reality is anything but. Mrs Thatcher, irritated by the eccentricities and annoyances of the Ken Livingstone-led Greater London Council, dealt with it in her inimitable style – by abolishing it. The functions of the council were spun out to the various London boroughs. If the GLC had had a grave, Mrs T would have jumped up and down on it.
And yet, somehow, it managed to creep back. Some functions were just too difficult to run without some form of London-wide authority. The new Blair Labour government held a referendum in 1998 to ask Londoners if they wanted a central authority; they overwhelmingly did, but what they got was a fairly emasculated body, which would not challenge either central government or the London boroughs who had grown much stronger and politically powerful since the GLC had gone.
So the Greater London Assembly was born, a fairly powerless talking-shop to manage (“challenge” was the concept) the popularly elected Mayor. The first Mayor was Ken Livingstone, the perpetual Labour rebel (at least until Mr Corbyn took on that job) who managed to cock a snook at Labour by getting elected as an independent. It seemed to set the Mayoral tone, the witty and independent outsider. Livingstone won again, as official Labour nominee, then on his third outing was beaten by Boris, and again in 2012.
But for all these national politicos’ ambitions to get the job, there actually is not a lot they can really do when they get to City Hall. Indeed, it could well be argued that this should not be a full time job at all, but could be usefully combined with, say, that of being a London M.P., as Boris did at the beginning of his first term and has done since the election in May this year. The Mayor is responsible primarily for two semi-executive functions, that of overall planning for Greater London, and secondly for London’s transport systems, acting mainly through Transport for London (“TfL”). He also is a roving ambassador for London, causing endless confusion in foreign parts who always seem to be expecting the Lord Mayor of London in red ermine-trimmed coat, tricorn hat and pumpkin carriage, not the blond-haired blue-suited one (or when the tricorn-hatted one does turn up, wishing it had been the mad blond one). Ken took that part of the job fairly seriously, as long as he was off to left wing regimes, but Boris has not travelled much – his recent visit to Israel, for obscure reasons, causing great upset among Palestinians.
Planning was made into what one might be rudely inclined to call a dog’s breakfast by Ken. The Mayor approves district plans – or at least tries to encourage the local planning authorities, the London borough councils, to have such objects. As they are very jealous of their planning powers, their main objective is not to allow the Mayor to dictate planning policy, and what the Mayor is largely left with is the power to call in major planning decisions and reverse them if he does not agree. Boris, as one might imagine for a Conservative Mayor, and one pro enterprise and development, tends to call in rejected schemes and grant them permission. This has become increasingly controversial, and has added to the spotty proliferation of towers right across London. Ken’s policies were simply to encourage tall buildings on the grounds that it would help relieve London’s shortage of offices, and much more housing.
This policy is undoubtedly helping mitigate those very problems, but aesthetically it is changing London’s skyline in a way that most town planners (who generally prefer clusters of towers) – and increasingly, the Londoner in the street – are not very happy about. As there are around another one hundred and fifty in planning or early construction, they ain’t seen anything yet. This policy does not sit well with green principles either, towers being notoriously expensive to build and run in both cash and carbon. There has never been much long-term thinking here and Boris has simply run with his predecessor’s policy. That may turn out to be a regretted legacy and missed opportunity that lingers much longer than he will.
One legacy he was hoping for was Boris Airport, London’s new international airport megahub, sitting in the Thames estuary. This had long been his particular enthusiasm, solving the noise, constraints on expansion, over-flying risks and pollution problems of Heathrow (and maybe Gatwick as well). But it never seriously sounded like a viable plan; quite apart from the issues of an airport among the winter fogs and bird life of the east coast, Heathrow is a massive employer of low-wage earners who all live the wrong side of London; the airport would need a whole new transport infrastructure – and still be in the wrong place because the rest of the UK, which it did not seem to occur to Boris, lies to the west and north of London. He spent a lot of taxpayer’s money and quite some political capital promoting this, and then quietly dropped it.
Why was the Mayor promoting airports? Because it is part of his transport portfolio. This is one area that has really grown under Boris. The Boris buses have been a reasonable success, most Londoners being very happy to see the end of Ken’s great white elephants of bendy buses, hopeless in London streets. And the new buses, though expensive – £800m or so to date – and prone to getting very hot in summer, seem to work well with the public. (At a million pounds a bus, though, might it not be cheaper to buy each passenger a car?)
The Underground is a bit of a disaster zone, with arrears of maintenance, weak management, hugely expensive cost base (mainly through the militancy of the tube drivers who know, as Boris does, that London cannot function without the tube). But Boris should have tackled this problem early, even at the cost of a jammed-up London, and it is a problem that the next Mayor will at some stage have to take on – and all night running, also seemingly quietly dropped.
Boris bikes and the rise of the cycle economy might be how Mr Johnson would like to be remembered, and may well be so. Not just free bikes for the well-heeled, fit and young either, though that has been a very visible success for our blond hero. Bike lanes and Bike Super Highways have all blossomed on the tarmac of London, and huge efforts have been put into cycling safety to cut the number of serious injuries and deaths to cyclists in London. That must be counted as one of the Mayor’s big successes – increasing lorries’, buses’ and cyclists’ awareness of each other has meant that although the number of bikes on the streets is increasing fast, the number of casualties has gone down. Though it might be argued that a lot of the cyclists are only on the rush hour streets because of the expensive and grossly congested Underground…
And certainly a lot of road users are not so happy with what is being done to create bike safety and segregation. The deep-kerbed bike tracks are taking away precious space on London’s roads, and yet at key pinch points tend to vanish when most needed. Neither bikers nor motor users are very happy with much of this. All this is costing a great deal of money, taking a long time to carry through and causing huge congestion whilst being built.
In a way the cycle lanes are a good proxy for the wider Boris Mayoralty. Boris has, it seems, taken very little notice of how things are done – he ordains what must be done, and leaves his ever-growing TfL team to get on with it (slowly and without much strategic thinking). A lot of money is being spent with very uncertain value out-turns. It is a legacy that his successor may struggle with, and it is a worrying indicator as to Boris’s skills in managing a ministry. It is certainly not going to be a high-spending approach that will go down well with his great rival, George Osborne, weaving schemes of his own, if Boris ends up sitting at the same table in Downing Street with him.
