“London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.”
Peter Ackroyd, “London: The Biography” (Chatto and Windus, 2000)
Representing the infinities of London within a finite set of statutory processes, debates and documents is obviously impossible. But – equally obviously – we have to try.
The idea of London may be illimitable, but its stock of land, its energy grid, its transport networks all have physical and political limits. Strategic planning is our attempt to navigate the resulting tensions and trade-offs: to align disparate public and private efforts to create, change and connect London’s places, and direct these efforts towards building a shared imagined future for the capital.
To make sense of this vast task, we often break down ‘London’ into smaller parts. Most obviously, we can work at the level of the 33 local authorities, which each has its own local plan. But the London Plan also differentiates between the ‘Central Activities Zone’, ‘inner London’ and ‘outer London’. It defines and sets policy for smaller locations such as ‘town centres’, ‘Opportunity Areas’ and ‘Strategic Industrial Locations’. And it even sets parameters (though perhaps too cursorily, as Catriona Riddell hints here) for London’s relationship with the ‘Wider South East’.
This proliferation of spatial definitions reflects a recognition amongst policymakers that different parts of a place have different characters, assets, challenges, opportunities and economic functions. Crucially, it recognises that the success of particular investments, interventions, incentives or interdictions will depend, in large part, on their being applied at the right scale, backed by the right institutions.
In this light, it is perhaps curious that London’s sub-regional partnerships are not among the geographies and groups invoked in the London Plan. Every borough is now part of one of the four sub-regional partnerships (SRPs), of which the West London Alliance is the longest established, followed by Central London Forward and the South London Partnership and then by Local London.
Were they located outside London, any one of the sub-regions could easily form its own Combined Authority: West London alone equals or surpasses any of England’s devolved city-regions in terms of economic output. Within the constraints of London’s unique devolved governance, local authorities have instead developed the SRPs as pragmatic, voluntary vehicles for working together on strategic economic and social issues. While the SRPs have no formal planning levers, they have each sought to articulate and implement a strategic economic vision for their respective parts of the capital, and to do this in a way which reflects – imperfectly but valuably – the scale and nature of much of London’s economic activity.
Though the SRPs are all different, a look at the joint programmes of the West London Alliance illustrates the range and nature of activity being undertaken at London’s sub-regional level. For example, steered by our seven member boroughs, the WLA collaborates across further and higher education institutions, skills providers and employer bodies to better join up the skills system and equip individuals for London’s future jobs, including delivering programmes for the GLA and DfE. We provide some of the best-performing employment support services in the country for individuals with significant barriers to employment, in partnership with DWP and Shaw Trust and with the NHS. We coordinate collective action to address strategic infrastructure needs – as with the Local Area Energy Plan we are developing with the GLA, and the proposed West London Orbital rail scheme we are taking forward with TfL. We exploit economies of scale and work with large and small firms and research institutions to support the rollout of digital infrastructure and the adoption of new technologies. And we drive collective efforts to support vulnerable people and meet the mounting crises in social care funding and temporary accommodation.
The SRPs in their different ways fill a geographical and institutional niche, working with economic drivers and actors which rove freely across borough boundaries, but nevertheless have a more specific locus than simply ‘London’. This is not to claim that the SRPs’ memberships make up perfect economic geographies – but then that notion itself has long been more problematic for London than elsewhere, given the gravitational pull which the capital exerts on much of the rest of England and beyond.
Recognising London’s sub-regions explicitly, in the London Plan process and the ‘London Plan’ product, would provide policymakers with an additional, invaluable spatial lens through which to view this complex landscape, anchored in established governance and collaborative relationships. The SRPs can help to triage infrastructure needs and solutions; take a strategic view of employment trends; identify emerging industrial clusters; and use these insights to help London make the right trade-offs between commercial, residential and civic land uses. And, while cross-border collaboration has proven difficult when working at the ‘London’ and ‘South East’ scales, SRPs can engage meaningfully with London’s neighbouring authorities and their key economic actors, based on a genuine intersection of interests. In West London, for example, our recent discussions with neighbouring authorities outside the capital have highlighted the opportunity to work together to attract investment to the burgeoning M4 tech corridor; the growth potential within the wider footprint of Heathrow Airport; and the interplay between data centre developments in the wider area and the growing constraints on energy capacity in the capital.
So, as we move into a new Mayoral term and a new London Plan process, let’s bring sub-regions into the conversation. The resulting possibilities might not quite be infinite – but they certainly give us enough to be getting on with.
