Boris: the verdict so far

Regeneration & Renewal, 25 May 2009

Much of the world will remember 2008 as the year when the ticking time bomb beneath the global economy finally detonated and shook the foundations of capitalism. For Londoners, it was also the year when another bombshell went off, this time a blond one, in the form of the capital's new mayor, Boris Johnson.

But rather than the pyrotechnics many people had been expecting, the recession coincided with the beginning of Johnson's term in office to render his impact on regeneration more slow burn than explosive. London regeneration commentators and practitioners agree that the downturn has left the new mayor with little room for manoeuvre, forcing to him to sit tight on any radical new regeneration policies he may have been planning until the market begins to pick up again.

Clearly, Johnson's first year in office has provided him with scant opportunity to show his true colours. As professor Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, says: "The world that existed through the whole eight years of (former mayor) Ken Livingstone has come to an abrupt halt. Making comparisons between Boris and Ken's economic policies is a bit as if London had been moved from Mars to Jupiter. We will have to wait for the economy to pick up and for property and land values to start to rise before we can get a real sense of what Johnson's London would look like compared to Ken's."

Nevertheless, the past year has offered some tantalising signs of what Boris's London may look like. Like any politician keen to flex his new executive muscles, Johnson has, where possible, set out to make his mark and distance himself from the former administration. Most notably, he wasted little time in fulfilling a manifesto pledge to scrap Livingstone's 50 per cent affordable housing target. Towards the end of his term, Livingstone's adherence to this policy, which seemed to be driven more by principle than political pragmatism, was the source of a number of high-profile feuds between the mayor and uncooperative boroughs such as Westminster.

It is no surprise then that Johnson took the earliest opportunity to announce that the target would be dropped and replaced by an overall goal of building 50,000 new affordable homes by 2011, with binding pledges to be negotiated with individual boroughs. The move prompted a mixed response. One well-placed developer said it came as a relief to boroughs: "Boris has a different attitude to Ken; Ken said, come and see me first, who cares what the borough says. Boris has said the opposite and believes that the boroughs should take the lead. He's made it clear that the borough, not the mayor, is the ultimate decision-maker."

But others see it differently. Michael Ward, chief executive of the British Urban Regeneration Association and a former chief executive of the London Development Agency (LDA), says that by scrapping the 50 per cent target, Johnson has weakened his position. "Governing London means taking the difficult decisions - where the transport links go, where the Olympics goes, where the housing goes," says Ward. "Any administration that submits to the vetoes of borough councils will live to regret it. At some stage, Boris has to stand back and say, well that's in the borough's interest, but there is in fact an interest for the whole city."

Indeed, for boroughs negotiating targets with the Greater London Authority (GLA), the new system is proving little better. "There's no difference between (the new system) and what Ken used to do," says Conor McAuley, Newham Council's Labour executive member for regeneration and a board member of the London Thames Gateway Development Corporation. "Ken, or his staff, used to think up numbers and we used to look at them and laugh and say, 'oh really!' It's like Soviet tractor numbers: here's a number, get to it..."

And it seems that not much has changed. When the GLA opened negotiations with the boroughs at the end of last year, it set Newham one of the highest targets: almost 6,000 new affordable homes by 2011; a figure at which, McAuley says, colleagues "fell about laughing". Unsurprisingly, the borough challenged the target, and Sir Simon Milton, Johnson's deputy mayor for policy and planning, has since conceded that in the light of the downturn, the 50,000-home target may be impossible to achieve. Indeed, with the deepening recession, the setting of affordable housing quotas with individual authorities has become something of an academic exercise anyway.

McAuley believes that because the increasingly influential Homes & Communities Agency (HCA) is now a key player in London, the setting of housing targets should no longer be the preserve of the mayor. He says: "Apart from the fact we're in the middle of a credit crunch and developers are walking off site as fast as they can, Boris is pushing housing targets when that's not his job - it's the HCA's job. So there's some confusion over what role he's playing here, issuing housing targets in the depth of a recession that are wholly unachievable and doing so without proper discussion with the boroughs."

Another area where Johnson has left his mark is transport. Since taking office last May, he has announced that the axe is to fall on five key pieces of planned infrastructure: the Thames Gateway Bridge between Newham and Greenwich; a Docklands Light Railway (DLR) extension to Dagenham Dock; the Croydon Tramlink extension; a cross-river tram between north and south London; and Greenwich Waterfront Transit, a bus-based rapid transport system linking Abbey Wood and Greenwich town centre via Woolwich and the former Millennium Dome.

However, it is questionable whether under Livingstone all these schemes would have gone ahead, given the triple whammy of the downturn, budgetary constraints at Transport for London and the fact that none of the schemes had full funding in place before he left office.

In fairness to the mayor, he has indicated a willingness to consider a Thames crossing elsewhere, and has not entirely ruled out the DLR extension. Yet the sum total of Johnson's decision to shelve or axe this infrastructure has left many regeneration plans in east London and the Thames Gateway in doubt. "It leaves a policy vacuum, and developers say it undermines the economics of certain areas," says Ros Dunn, chief executive of the Thames Gateway London Partnership. "We need to know what's happening quickly so we can start assessing what our development plans should be."

One major development threatened by the uncertainty is Barking Riverside. This has been earmarked for around 11,000 new homes, but with the dropping of the DLR extension, only a fraction of this target now looks achievable. "It can't be developed beyond 1,500 units without something happening on the DLR extension," says Dunn.

McAuley describes Johnson's decisions on transport as "panicked" and "haphazard". "No-one thought for a moment that Boris would have to find the funding for the Dagenham extension of the DLR during his first term as mayor; we all knew the process was about getting the powers to build it and the fundraising would follow," he says. "It was almost a panicked decision and one that hadn't been thought through particularly well, because even if you have a budget problem, you might talk to your partners about what can be done for less money. Instead he's cancelled it and it's a retreat in terms of what we are trying to do with planning the long-term regeneration of the Thames Gateway."

If the net effect of Johnson's regeneration efforts has been to provoke a sense of uncertainty, nowhere is this more the case than with the LDA. During the mayoral election campaign, the capital's economic development body provided his campaign team with rich pickings after the Evening Standard ran a series of stories alleging, among other things, that Livingstone's race adviser Lee Jasper had misused LDA cash to fund pet projects.

Upon entering office, Johnson commissioned former Sunday Telegraph editor Patience Wheatcroft to undertake a "forensic audit" of the LDA. When it reported back, the review recommended a root and branch overhaul of the LDA and a scaling back of its regeneration remit. Since then the agency has appointed both a new chair and chief executive - Harvey McGrath and Peter Rogers respectively - and has cut back its staff by approximately a third to 390. The LDA claims that the changes led to savings worth around £11 million in 20008-09. "The changes we've put in place allow the LDA to demonstrate greater strategic impact and better value for money," says Rogers. "We are now well place to create more for less."

According to a Greater London Authority spokesman, the agency has been given a clearer remit to support the capital's economy during the recession, focusing less on physical regeneration projects. "The main criticism before was that the LDA was not focused," he says. "Now it has a clear focus on providing skills and job opportunities to support London's economic regeneration through the downturn." An example of the new focus can be found in the announcement earlier this month that the LDA, in partnership with the European Social Fund, is making £23 million available to organisations dedicated to tackling worklessness in London. The mayor also recently appointed David Freud - who was chosen by former Prime Minister Tony Blair to carry out a review of Britain's welfare system in 2006 - to advise both the GLA and the LDA on their worklessness strategies.

Ward, who as the LDA's chief executive between 2000 and 2004 helped set up the agency, agrees that it still has an obvious role to play in supporting business. He also thinks it should continue to fund physical regeneration, as it did with prominent schemes such as the award-winning Laban dance centre in Deptford. Dunn, meanwhile, foresees a fruitful partnership between the LDA and the HCA in driving broader regeneration, not least because the LDA holds crucial pieces of land in strategic regeneration areas such as the docks. "I see enormous potential if you can get them working well together on regeneration outcomes," she says.

Privately, some insiders wonder whether Johnson's forensic audit has raised more questions about the agency's future than it answered. One senior source says: "The forensic audit has probably left a greater lack of clarity about what the LDA is there to do than existed before. It's very hard to get more than one person in the LDA to give the same answer to the same question."

But if the past 12 months of London regeneration headlines can at times read like an extended obituary for one-time mayoral initiatives, there are areas where Johnson has made some progress. He has overseen the setting up of an urban regeneration company to handle the legacy of the 2012 Olympics; he has launched a review of the London Plan, the 20-year strategic blueprint for the capital; and he has unveiled a housing strategy, in which he pledged to work with the HCA to plough £80 million into kick-starting estate regeneration programmes stalled by the credit crunch.

Some, notably Johnson's predecessor interviewed in this journal, have claimed that Johnson doesn't really have much of a plan for London and is more interested in using the London mayoralty as a stepping stone to higher office. The overwhelming view, though, is that the mayor's report card is mixed and that the state of the economy has left him with few options.

For the time being, events beyond Johnson's sphere of influence shield him from criticism, says Tony Travers. "The financial and economic meltdown liberates him from the accusation that post-Ken London is in decline. Well they can't say that, because if there is any decline, it will be nothing to do with Boris Johnson."

November 2008 Johnson announces that the planned bridge linking Beckton to Thamesmead is to be scrapped. He claims that the proposed bridge isn't environmentally sound and would cause congestion.

July 2008: The Johnson-commissioned Wheatcroft report on alleged mis-spending at the LDA is published.

July 2008: Johnson announces that the mayor's design advisory watchdog, Design for London, is to be incorporated into the LDA. Peter Bishop announces that he will continue as director.

November 2008: It is announced that the Dagenham extension to the Docklands Light Railway, the Croydon Tramlink and a cross-river tram linking north and south London are to be either cancelled or shelved.

November 2008: The mayor publishes his three-year housing strategy, honouring his pledge to drop the previous administration's 50 per cent affordable housing in all new developments target. The strategy replaces the target with a pledge to build 50,000 affordable homes by 2011.

December 2008: Johnson announces that the London Plan is to be fully reviewed. The announcement came after a period of consultation on some of the mayor's proposed changes to the plan. Respondents had called for a shorter, more concise plan with less supplementary planning guidance. The original London plan, prepared for previous mayor Ken Livingstone, was published in 2004.

January 2009: Johnson reveals that control over the vast majority of planning decisions is to handed back to London's 32 boroughs. Only decisions with pan-London signifance are to be made by City Hall.

May 2009: After the setting up of an urban regeneration company to look after the Olympics' legacy, LDA group director for Olympic legacy Tom Russell steps down after just a year in the job.

Biggest impact on regeneration: Boris or the recession?

ROS DUNN, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, THAMES GATEWAY LONDON PARTNERSHIP

We're living in a time when the market has tanked, and so it would be quite hard to disentangle the effects of the economic downturn from policy at this stage. What we are seeing is much, much more the effects of an economic downturn than any particular policy choices. It doesn't feel to me as though Boris's early priorities have been in this area; I feel his early priorities have centred much more around social policies, such as tackling knife crime, violence on the underground and so on.

STAN HORNAGOLD, BOARD MEMBER, LONDON THAMES GATEWAY DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

It is 95 per cent the economic situation and not the new mayor. When you think what's happened to the housing market, it has made a big difference; all the developers are shutting up shop as far as housing development is concerned because they can't make it stack up. We could all pick up on the odd decision and say that's not what Ken would have done or that's not what he would have liked, but I haven't seen anything dramatic in regeneration terms. I think the new mayor pales into insignificance compared with the economic climate.