It’s annoying when a news story has no obvious villains, isn’t it? Really stops your gallop. There you are, braced to denounce one side or the other as evil, incompetent or both, and then you realise: oh no, wait – it’s the system that’s the problem. As you were.
That’s how I felt when I read about the students at University College London who are withholding their rent in protest at rising costs. A room in Ramsey Halls costs between £159 and £262 a week, according to the students, and rents have risen by 56% since 2009.
At first, I tried casting the students as the baddies – ho-ho, I bet they have enough money to spend on cider, casual sex and tearing down statues of Victorian racists! (The three staples of student life, if the news is to be believed.) But that didn’t really work, because I read the numbers involved again. Over 200 quid a week in rent? Many workers in London would struggle to afford that. And yes, they could have chosen to study somewhere else, but do we really want to end up with universities that are open only to the well-off, those who can live at home, and rich foreigners? That doesn’t seem very fair.
So maybe it’s the university that’s at fault? Greedy, gouging bastards, depriving students of their last few pennies in a relentless quest for profit. Oh yes, this will segue neatly into a pre-prepared rant I have brewing about the disgraceful commercialisation of higher education.
But again, that’s too simple: UCL says it does not make a profit on its accommodation, and it keeps rents lower than in the private sector. (As I’ve written before, that’s the fundamental problem of “affordable” housing in London: it’s only “affordable” compared with the madness that is the open market – 40% of astronomical is still bloody high.)
Fundamentally, a central London university needs to house its students in central London, and that means competing with a vast number of rich Britons who want to live there too, as well as with members of the global elite who have decided a £20m crashpad in zone 1 or 2 is a must-have accessory on a par with a Hermès Birkin bag or the number of a great plastic surgeon.
So the problem here is not spendthrift students or a greedy university, but London itself: big, ugly, beautiful, rich, poor London. As Neil O’Brien – then a humble thinktanker, now an adviser to George Osborne – once observed, Britain has conspired to designate the same city as its political, financial and cultural capital. London is New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, all rolled into one.
For decades, politicians have talked about the challenge of governing cities in terms of their failures: congested roads, sink estates, hollowed-out high streets. It seems deeply counter-intuitive to complain that a city is too successful: that too many graduates move there, that too many migrants find work there, that too many people want to live there and get their own chance to moan about it being overcrowded.
Ben Judah’s new book, This is London, captures this paradox. He talks to Filipina maids in Knightsbridge, Roma Gypsies in Victoria coach station and eastern European sex workers on “Punters’ Lane” in Ilford. The book is full of complaints – mostly from recent migrants themselves – about the way London has changed so rapidly.
As a Polish builder who came to Britain in 2009 tells Judah: “Those Romanian … they are like cowboy. Romanians making Polish wages go down.” Then he adds: “The Romanian, he not the worst. The worst, he is the Albanian … They are thief.”
The counter-narrative to these attitudes is, of course, the very presence of the immigrants themselves, which is a testament to the city’s attractiveness to outsiders. There is a similar story in the number of British-born graduates who gravitate to London only to leave 10 years later claiming to have been forced out by house prices. White British people are now a minority in the capital (45%), while the Financial Times discovered last year that in Plaistow, in east London, a third of the electoral roll changes every year.
But as things currently stand, it is hard to contest the idea that London’s dominance is damaging the rest of Britain, and is ultimately bad for many Londoners too, such as the students at UCL. There appears to be a zero-sum game at work: London is prospering at the expense of the rest of Britain.
Take the intriguing theory of “assortative mating”, which has been used to explain why London’s state schools are so good even in poor areas. Basically, graduates tend to marry graduates, and so teachers find a bigger pool of potential partners in London and end up settling there; in turn, schools find it easier to recruit talented staff. As the BBC’s Chris Cook wrote: “Romance makes it hard to run good public services in areas where the private sector offers few job opportunities.” I recently heard about a northern company where more than a dozen workers commute daily from London because its male-dominated workforce can’t get their wives to move to the town where it’s based.
The problem with the capital is that its growth has been uncontrolled, and there is an extreme political reluctance to interfere with what seems, on the surface, like a success story. But London does need a plan, just as much as we need to hear what the Northern Powerhouse actually entails, beyond high-speed rail and a few photos of George Osborne looking at bricks. There is no point boosting other regions of Britain if we don’t get to grips with the “dark star” itself.
Here are a few recommendations, as outlined by Danny Dorling, a professor of human geography at Oxford University and a member of the London Fairness Commission, to start the discussion: more high-density, affordable housing; rent regulation; looking again at the green belt to see what’s ecologically important and what isn’t (an area the size of Kensington & Chelsea is given over to golf courses). We could also consider a ban on central London dwellings of fewer than five storeys, which is the density needed to sustain street life – central Barcelona is four times as dense as London, and still a lovely place to have a pastry in a pavement cafe. We could ask our politicians, when they vacate the Houses of Parliament for their essential repairs in the near future, to head to Coventry or Hull.
All of this is eminently achievable, given sufficient political will. And – joy of joys – there’s a mayoral election in the city this summer, meaning that Zac Goldsmith and Sadiq Khan have to at least pretend to care what we think about for another three months. There is no denying that London is a giant. But does it also have to be a monster?