Jules Pipe rose to prominence in London government when he became leader of the Hackney Council Labour group and then, from 2001, leader of the council, and set about rescuing the borough from the calamitous collapse of its finances, services and organisation at the back end of the 1990s. In October 2002, he became Hackney’s first directly elected Mayor and was re-elected to that position in 2006, 2010 and 2014 before resigning in 2016 to become Sadiq Khan’s Deputy Mayor for Planning and Regeneration.
As such, Pipe has been an enormously important figure at City Hall, central to drawing up the capital’s statutory spatial development strategy – better known as The London Plan – which defines what gets built where in Greater London and how, and working with boroughs, developers, national government and mayoral team colleagues to put the Mayor’s policies into effect on the ground, encompassing housing, transport, economic “good growth”, environmental priorities and more.
But although his role is pivotal, Pipe has quite a low public profile and his work, in a complex policy area with many moving parts that politicians alone do not control, is not widely understood. On London and The London Society were therefore delighted when he agreed to talk to us for the second edition of our Talk About London podcast series.
He talked to London Society chair Leanne Tritton and I about his job and how it has changed since Labour’s general election win, progress so far on the next London Plan, and City Hall’s hopes for the government’s spending review scheduled for June.
Among other things, he underlined that the last government’s anti-London attitude went well beyond rhetoric and he was upfront about City Hall’s hopes for funding for transport infrastructure that could lead to the creation within London of what might be termed a New Town.
The podcast can be watched via the On London YouTube channel below or listened to via the London Society website. That nice cardigan I’m wearing is by Paul Smith, by the way.
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