Not everyone is overjoyed about City Hall allowing the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTA) to go ahead with enlarging its Wimbledon operation. But let us all rejoice that – to draw a metaphor from a different sport – the scheme is not to be misused as a political football by a higher government power.
In theory, Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, could intervene. She could go over the head of Jules Pipe, Sadiq Khan’s deputy for planning, who on Friday gave the AELTA a green light, and determine the matter herself. She could issue a “holding direction”, meaning nothing at all would happen while she had a nice long think about it.
However, Rayner has rejected taking such paths. Instead, she has allowed London’s strategic layer of government to make strategic planning decisions for London, which – clue in job description – is what it is there for.
Here is an answer for Londoners (and others) impatiently questioning what the point of electing a Labour government has been, for the difference in such matters between Rayner’s hands-off stance and that of her Conservative predecessor is stark.
Michael Gove, soon to bring his famous civility and infamous chicanery to the helm of The Spectator magazine, expended considerable energy on poking his nose into the planning policy business of London’s Mayor and in a manner suggesting that seeking electoral advantage was a larger motivation than were discernment and consistency.
Gove, you will recall, pulled rank on both Khan and Westminster Council to block Marks & Spencer’s desire to knock down its store at the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street and build a new one. That was nearly two years after Westminster, then Conservative-run, approved the scheme, but with the ensuing blessing of Khan.
Many more months passed before M&S won a High Court appeal against Gove. The judge very strikingly remarked that he had “relied on a meaning of the national planning policy framework which is simply not open to him”.
The case of the Marble Arch store is seen as a finely-balanced study of the respective climate change merits of, on the one hand, demolition followed by sustainable replacement and, on the other, retrofit. But some suspect that Gove placed questionably heavy weight on heritage considerations, recruiting these to the service of the never-ending, ever-failing Tory culture war on the always-winning Labour Mayor.
Compare and contrast with Gove’s parallel interest in the MSG Sphere, an illuminated bulbous music venue of a thoroughly un-traditional kind proposed for a site next to the Olympic Park. Khan turned down the flashing globe. But Gove called it in even after the US company had got the hump and bailed. After all, they’d criticised the Mayor.
In February, having appropriated it in April 2022, Gove gave a thumbs up to the 72 Upper Ground scheme, replacing the old London Weekend Television studios on the South Bank, after Southwark and Khan had already done so. He had previously done much the same with a Berkeley Homes development in Hounslow, though on that occasion he ended up over-ruling his own planning inspector
In short, most of Gove’s planning incursions produced precious little but avoidable delay and confected opportunities to take vote-seeking pops at Khan, these serving the same purpose as his grandstanding pronouncements about housing.
What, though, should we make of Rayner’s letter to Khan rescinding Gove’s dying administration orders while also informing him that his upcoming review of the London Plan, master blueprint for the city’s development, should encompass the issues about Opportunity Areas, industrial land and designations deemed “too inflexible” Gove had raised, rather than dealing with them in isolation?
The missive is couched in the language of partnership, but also informs Khan that “the government does expect London to take steps to boost its output”. Is this ultimately just a friendlier kind of top-down browbeating?
Perhaps pause before before rushing to that conclusion. At a London Property Alliance event held in Victoria just five days after the general election, Lisa Fairmaner, City Hall’s Head of London Plan and Growth Strategies, anticipated that a “more streamlined” London Plan would result from the new government’s already forthcoming revised national planning framework. Khan, Rayner and their respective officials have been having conversations. Whatever Rayner’s letter says about relations between the minister and the Mayor, it hasn’t come to the latter out of the blue.
There are always going to be processes of negotiation between the Mayor of London – whoever that Mayor is – and the UK government, with outcomes shaped by alignments of purpose, distributions of power, the state of the public purse, the personalities involved and perspectives on how best to help London help the rest of the country.
The importance of the West End’s economy does not evaporate north of Enfield, a national reality that has thankfully not escaped the notice of Keir Starmer’s administration. Regarded in that light, Khan securing Rayner’s blessing to bring Oxford Street under his control seems justified and sensible, not least because even a modest portion of national investment somewhere along the line would probably help. Perhaps a similar dynamic will go for housing.
Of course, the matter of who in London should be in charge of what does not end there. As only anchorites won’t have noticed, Westminster Council has been displeased by the Mayor’s Oxford Street initiative, which has highlighted questions about balances of power between the boroughs and City Hall – the local and regional planning tiers. Just as Rayner’s department is allowed to muscle Mayors out of the way, Mayors can do the same to boroughs.
With Wimbledon, City Hall assumed command in the context of a site that straddles two boroughs, both of them Labour-run, one of which, Merton, approved the (larger) section of the scheme that fell into its domain, the other of which, Wandsworth, did the reverse. In a sense, then, City Hall took on a tie-breaker role in the tennis deadlock. Local campaigners are unhappy with the result, but it was a proper use of mayoral prerogative – one which should also help secure the long-term future of Wimbledon as a grand slam tennis tournament that does the nation’s finances no harm. Rayner is right have left well alone.
In the end, it’s all as much about attitude as anything. With Gove gone, that has already improved.
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